News: Hayley Jones following in her Mum’s Wheelmarks

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HAYLEY Jones is hoping to move her cycling career up a gear in 2014 as she follows further in the footsteps of her mum Louise.

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Port Talbot-born Jones, 18, hit the headlines this year when she was part of the British Junior Team Pursuit quartet that won gold at the World Championships at the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in Glasgow.

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Hayley Jones (3rd from left) lines up at the Manchester World Cup with her mum Louise top of the track at the event as a UCI Commissaire. 

In doing so, the team of Jones, Amy Hill, Emily Nelson and Emily Kay broke the world record with a time of 4:35.085mins in the final where they beat their own time set a few weeks earlier at the European Championships.

2014 promises to be another year of landmark achievements. Jones has every chance of riding for Wales in the Commonwealth Games, where her mother was a track gold medalist in Auckland, New Zealand back in 1990, after following Louise as a road athlete and competing in the British Cycling National Road Championships in Monmouthshire on June 29.

Louise was runner-up in the national road race back in 1998 where she was beaten by Megan Hughes, later to become the wife of Tour de France stage winner Magnus Backstedt. The family went to Australia for the 2006 Melbourne Commonwealth Games, where Louise was a commissaire, and moved to Sydney the following year.

But Hayley returned to Wales, is back for the foreseeable future and ready to take the step up to ride in the senior Nationals around Monmouthshire in 2014. She said: “It will be the first senior Nationals I will be riding so I am excited and nervous because I’m not very good at hills!”

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“The Nationals is a big one so that you can try and prove your place with the road girls. It will be a tough race, especially with no under-23 race so we are straight in with the seniors but it will be great experience.”

She reviewed 2013 saying: “It has been great, particularly on the track with the worlds. This being our last year in the junior ranks (team pursuit squad), getting gold was good as it secured our places in the GB Academy Programme as well.”

Welsh women’s cycling has come on a pace in the past few years since the retirement of former Olympic champion Nicole Cooke. Jones added: “There are already five good Welsh girls who are fighting for places in the upcoming Commonwealth Games.

“Going to watch the Commonwealths (in Melbourne) back then, thinking how good it was and then getting to race in it eight years later will be an experience.” Before Glasgow, of course, will be that journey around Monmouthshire for the Nationals and riding with the UK’s top women in a race won in Glasgow this year by Lizzie Armistead.

It might be a bit early in her career to think Jones could win a race like the National Championships but whatever the outcome, mum Louise and her husband Phi (both organised the Five Valleys Premier Calendar RR for many years until emigrating) in Australia will be eagerly awaiting news once the race is over.

 

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