YOUNG GUNS: Team 3GX’s juniors Garry Tay (left) with teammate Apollo Ann.
KUCHING: The Sarawak leg of the Malaysian GP circuit this weekend will see a new Kuching club team bidding to grab a share of the limelight.
Team 3GX, formed just months ago, are self-funded club. Despite the innocous moniker, they are a race-oriented team, committed to racing – be it on asphalt or dirt.
“Basically, 3GX refer to three generations of cyclists as we have teenagers, 20 and 30-somethings and older riders like myself,” said Francis Ho, a 55-year-old architect and one of the city’s more well-known sporting personalities.
Their oldest rider is 62-year-old Ng Tet Leong.
The team also have some of Kuching’s top racers like Glory Chai and Chen Chung Mang in addition to talented juniors like Garry Tay.
Chai is arguably Kuching’s most successful privateer ever with wins in mountain bike races and top 10 finishes in road races.
Earlier in the season, he won Sibu’s Men Blue Mountain bike race in very trying, wet conditions.
In the Sarawak CycleFest, the six-footer placed sixth overall in the 120km Open event which made him the top Sarawakian finisher. He has also won a downhill mountain bike event.
Chen is a past winner of the Masja criterium. This GP race will be 3GX’s second competition, the first being the recent Lundu Mountain Bike Challenge.
They had a very respectable showing in that competition with teenager Tay placing ninth in the Sarawak Closed event, despite flatting thrice.
Teammate Chai sacrificed his own chances when he gave his wheel to Tay.
“What happened was Glory had a rear puncture while Garry had a front puncture. So Glory decided it was best to just give the wheel to Garry so that at least one of them had a good finish,” team manager Johhny Chi recalled.
Their Masters riders also had a good outing with top five placings by the evergreen Ho and former 1980’s Team Elite rider Teo San Kui.
Rider to watch
For the GP weekend, 3GX will race in the Sarawak Closed and the Open event, opting to skip the time trial. They will only be making a token representation in the Closed championship with Teo, Ho and Tay Kok Fook, the owner of the newly-opened Kuching Bicycle Hub shop at Pending, where the team is based.
The Sarawak Closed will be three laps of the 23km FAC course. And they will have to contend with teams like the Supian Nor-led Corbusier and Viking.
One rider to watch out for should be former Viking rider Shamsul Ali Hamdan with Supian acknowledging the challenge posed by Shamsul to his team’s ambitions.
3GX will have their full 12-men team in the 180km Open event — eight laps of the punishing FAC course which has a three km climb. They will also have two juniors in the U-18 category with Garry Tay and Apollo Ann.
Tay was the surprise winner of the February junior event also held at FAC while Ann DNF’ed when he suffered a cramp. It was their first ever race and they were private entrants as there was no Team 3GX back then.
The duo is in the Form Three exam year which means more study time but both are determined not to let that affect their training.
So far, Tay is a model student-athlete with top grades. He is also lucky to have parents who are supportive of his racing.
“They even bought him a new bike after he won the February race,” said manager Chi, adding that he is optimistic the Kuching Town Secondary student will do well this weekend despite being a marked rider.
“I think we should have a good shot at a top-five finish,” he added.
The calibre of the racing in the Open event will be very high with Corbusier fielding SEA Games riders like Razif Salleh and Ng Yong Li with support from KL riders Adrian Chua and Mohd Shafari.
There will also be racers from Indonesia and Brunei in addition to state teams from the peninsula.
In the Open event, the team are realistic that a podium finish is not possible, so they will basically race for top Sarawak placings.
Hub owner Tay was blunter about the team’s chances.
“The course is really challenging, so I consider it a success if we manage to finish the race as a team,” he said, noting that only Shamsul managed to complete the race in 2010.
The team have been planning a training programme laid out by Glory Chai who is also doubling as team coach.
“Glory may not have a coaching cert but he really knows how to put together a schedule,” Chi said.