Kaden Colling is a sixteen-year-old, grade 11 student at Cochrane High who just recently brought home four medals from the 2021 U17/Junior/Para Canadian Track Championships.

Colling has been riding bikes, competitively, for about three years now and only recently started to race around Canada in pursuit of what he says, "Trying to get good results and expand my knowledge of the sport.” He is a track and road racer but recently has been training for track nationals which take place in a velodrome. A track bike is a fixed gear bike, that you can’t stop pedaling, and there are no brakes. Colling says track racing is based around technical racing. Road bike racing in comparison uses a standard bike with gears and brakes.

Colling recently achieved very good results in Milton, Ontario where he competed in the Canadian National Track Championships for Juniors and U17 riders. Kaden went with team Alberta and won four medals including three bronze and one National Championship title in the points race.

The racing took place on an indoor, velodrome track (which is steeply banked oval tracks, consisting of two 180-degree circular bends connected by two straights). The competition includes scratch races which are several laps around the velodrome with the first one across the finish line winning.  The points race is a set number of laps and every ten laps they ring a bell and the first to cross the line on that lap collects points and the person with the most points, in the end, wins that race. The points race is what Kaden won the National Championship title for.

Colling will continue to pursue his cycling dreams in the new year.  February 2022 he will return to Ontario to try and qualify for Team Alberta and for the nationals again in April. Then in April, he hopes to make the national team that will compete at the Junior Track World Championships to be held in Tel Aviv, Israel. For the road season, he will try to qualify for Team Canada to compete in the nationals that will be held in Australia.

Kaden Colling is a busy fellow training with his coach Tanya Dubinicoff. She is a retired cyclist who won four gold medals at the Pan American Games and competed in three Summer Olympics.

In the spring and summer, Kaden trains outdoors but in the winter, he moves indoors mostly at home (due to the pandemic) on a stationary bike.

His latest medal haul is proof that all his hard work and training are paying off.

We will no doubt be hearing more about Kaden Colling’s cycling pursuits in the coming year.

Kaden Colling on the left