Pursuit is sports feature series highlighting athletes, coaches and staff and significant sporting events from North Bay and the surrounding area.
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For a second straight year, North Bay will be home to the Ontario Cycle Provincial Championships, taking place on the Civic Long weekend this week. The event will feature three types of races. The Individual Time Trial Championships are taking place in East Ferris with riders starting in Corbeil, heading south along Corbeil Road, and it will feature over 100 meters of climbing every 10 km, for roughly 11km until the turn-around point at the Wasi Cross Country Ski Club, making their way back along the same stretch.
The second event will be the Provincial Criterium Race which is a mix of sweeping and technical turns and high rates of speed and will take place around Canadore College and Nipissing University starting at 8 a.m. and is open to the public. The Bay Bistro at NUSU will be open to athletes and spectators from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The weekend wraps up with the Provincial Road Race, which is a 15 km circuit, starting at the East Ferris Municipal Office with the finishing line located on Champagne Road next to KRMT Wellness studio. This race will feature rolling hills with approximately 150 meters of elevation per lap.
This event will bring in some of the best riders from around the province, including two local riders who are excited to be competing in front of some hometown family and friends.
Twenty-two-year-old Brett Stoppa grew up in North Bay and has been cycling competitively since he was 13.
“My dad Kevin was a bike racer and he introduced me to the sport at a young age. We spent lots of time mountain biking up the escarpment,” says Stoppa.
The Chippewa high school graduate raced for Ottawa cycling teams and was competing all over eastern Canada and parts of the United States. After graduating from Canadore College’s Aircraft Maintenance Program, Stoppa says he wanted to pursue competitive cycling and now lives in Europe during the racing season from January to October.
“I race for X-Speed United Continental, a continental team based in Belgium,” he says. “This past January I lived in the south of Spain for two months training and getting ready for the race season. From February to May, I moved to my team house in Riemst, Belgium and during the season I raced in Belgium, Netherlands, France, Norway, Denmark, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and the United States of America at a high level. After I came home from Europe I was preparing for the Canadian National Championship in Edmonton, Alberta. Now I am doing my last prep before I head back to Belgium in early August for the rest of the season.”
Stoppa competes in races that are anywhere between 180 – 200 km which are called “Single day classics” but his team also competes in “Stage races” which are “three to seven days long with each day being a different stage of the race,” he says. “At the end of those seven days, the person with the lowest overall time from all the stages combined wins the overall stage race.”
Cycling is a huge sport in Europe and Stoppa says the atmosphere is something to behold. “At the start and finish lines there are beer tents, vendors, the whole community comes out to watch the races. The crowds, when you are leaving the towns, are three to four people deep of spectators making noise and cheering you on.”
Stoppa says the training for this season happens in blocks. “From the end of January to the beginning of April I was racing at least once a week if not more. When you’re racing your training gets sacrificed because you need to be fresh for the races. So, you have time periods where you’re racing 2-3 times per week and then you’ll take a month or two off where you’re putting in upwards of 20 hours a week on the bike.”
Stoppa says he competed at the provincials in North Bay last year and is once again looking forward to being here over the long weekend.
“I am using this upcoming race as a last-minute tune-up and am excited to race on local roads.”
Kevin McKenna is a local para-cyclist, and he will be competing in the time trial on Friday. McKenna has been racing competitively for just a few years.
“Just before the COVID-19 pandemic I was at home recovering from major surgery and I was just trying to get moving again. I got on the bike and started riding and immediately I had a little fire lit inside of me. The first thing I did was sign up for the ‘Great Cycle Challenge’ to raise money for kids' cancer research at Sick Kids Hospital.”
McKenna says in 2020 he rode 722 km and raised $4,484. He says it was the support that pushed him to do even more the following year.
“I’ve lived in northern Ontario and southern Ontario and so I leaned on my connections from all over. I had friends and friends of friends talk about what I was doing and my social media posts and local media attention certainly helped. I also did an interview through work that had a pretty far reach.”
McKenna, who has worked at the OPP Comms Centre for the last 20 years, says he raised over $7,000 in 2021 and rode 1,149 km.
“The messages and words of encouragement really went a long way and helps keep that fire lit inside of you,” he says.
McKenna was then contacted by the Team Ontario Para-Cycling Coach who asked if McKenna would like to come out to the team's training sessions.
“There were a couple of athletes who were about 10 years into their competitive career and they just blew my mind and made me want to compete like them and that’s what got this going.”
McKenna has been racing all over the province and across Canada and just recently competed at the 2023 Road Championships in Edmonton, Alberta, representing Team Ontario and ended up competing against athletes who compete at the Paralympic Games.
“My goal was to not get lapped,” McKenna says with a laugh. “That’s basically the gap we’re dealing with though when it comes to our sport. You have athletes that are some of the best in the world competing against people like me who are still relatively new to the sport. Para-cycling is a tough sport both physically and in terms of organizing races. We just don’t have the number of athletes to get events happening, so you really have to take advantage of the ones that you can go to.”
On the physical side of the sport, McKenna says, “Our arms just aren’t built the same way as legs are. We’re still using the same energy systems as able-bodied cyclists, but the biggest obstacle is in recovery. When I’m not on the bike, I’m still lifting myself in and out of my vehicle or into bed and propelling myself around. It’s not like I can say ‘I just did a hard run so I’m going to throw my legs up on the couch and relax. Not to say that those athletes don’t deserve it, but that’s the reality of being in this sport.”
McKenna says he’s proud of how far he has come considering he originally got on the bike to learn the sport and see how many kilometers he could go.
“I still haven’t grasped it all but I now have goals of racing for a provincial standard of 31 km/h average for a one-hour time trial. Above that, the national standard is 42 km/h for a one-hour time trial.”
McKenna says it’s also his goal to attract more people to the sport.
“It would be great to have more hand cyclists sign up, it would really make these events so much more fun. My best experiences to date are riding with other people in a peloton and drafting and working together, while also competing against each other, there’s an adrenaline to that. I’m always willing to take someone out to try out the bike.”
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