Latvian cyclist Veronika Monika Stūriška won the gold medal at the world junior championship in BMX cycling.
Last weekend in Scotland, seventeen-year-old Veronika Monika Sturiška won a place at the top of the podium, becoming the world junior champion in BMX cycling. After the competition, the cyclist returned to Latvia and shares her feelings about what she experienced at the world championship. “It was the biggest competition ever held in cycling. The week certainly did not start easily, because it was windy, rainy, cold all the time. In training, I didn’t do everything I should have done from the beginning. But with every training and every day it got better, I started to shoot the track more, so to speak. I’ve won World Cups before in the U-23 group, which is with bigger girls, so the feeling is about the same. But of course I got this shirt for the first time. It is much more special. This is not an ordinary competition, a medal and a title. It’s definitely colossal, the more you think about it, the more good it feels.”
While preparing for the championship, the athlete spent almost every day in training in Valmiera, training even twice a day. The athlete is no stranger to an intense training regimen, newcomer Veronika has been training in cycling since she was six years old. “Then I broke my arm while playing football in the yard. That was the end of my BMX career. But then one day I was with my cousin who also rides BMX. He was driving and bragging all the time about how cool it was. I wasn’t allowed to ride that bike yet, then I wanted it even more. Then I wrote to my coach.”
Coach Đirts Kātiņš was also with Veronika at the competition in Scotland. He says that although everything went well, the competition week was full of challenges for the student from the very beginning. “The neck pain was exactly on Saturday, when qualifying, and on Sunday. I see – on Sunday she goes into the training warm-up lap, she can’t breathe. Tonsils are so swollen that it is difficult for a person to stand. But the internal motivation and the will to do so is so great that such obstacles must be overcome.”
Already on the first day after returning to Latvia, the athlete trained at the Silva BMX track in Smiltene district. At the moment, Veronika is preparing for the last stages of the World Cup, which will take place in Argentina.
