Paralimni · since 2014
Youth cycling in Paralimni
Sessions in Paralimni since 2014, for children who want to ride, swim or move well. The aim is not to find the next professional. It is that your child still wants to do this in five years.
Enjoyment is the training plan
Children who enjoy a sport keep doing it, and children who keep doing it get good at it. That order matters, because the reverse (drilling a young athlete hard early to produce results quickly) is the most reliable way to produce a fifteen-year-old who has quit.
So the early years are spent on the things that transfer to everything: balance, coordination, handling a bike properly, moving well, and being comfortable in the water. Specialisation, if it comes at all, comes later.
- Bike handling and road sense: braking, cornering, looking behind, riding beside someone without touching wheels. Useful whether or not they ever race.
- Physical literacy: the coordination and body control that make every later sport easier to learn.
- Swimming: the same order adults learn it in, with more games along the way. See swimming coaching.
- The parts that are not sport: turning up on time, looking after equipment, losing gracefully, and helping the rider who is behind.
If your child turns out to be serious
Some do. At that point the coaching changes shape rather than simply getting harder, and the things that decide whether a talented fourteen-year-old becomes a competitive adult are mostly not physical.
- Managing school and training together. This is the one that ends most junior careers, and it is a timetable problem before it is anything else.
- Load that grows slowly. Young bodies are still growing; training volume is added carefully and deliberately later than a keen teenager would like.
- Racing as education. Races are where tactics, nerves and pacing are learned. Results at that age are feedback, not a verdict.
- Someone who has been there. Ramo rode at national-team level and has coached for twenty-five years, which mostly means he has seen what happens to juniors who are pushed too hard, too early.
Practical questions parents ask
- Do we need to buy a bike first? No. Come and talk to us before spending anything. Children outgrow bikes at a rate that makes an expensive first purchase a poor idea.
- Does my child need to be sporty already? No. A good proportion arrive having done nothing in particular.
- What if they hate it? Then they stop, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome. Nobody is signed up for a season on the first day.
- Can we look after the bike here? Yes. The workshop is the same building, and a child’s bike that brakes properly is not a small thing.
Session days, group ages and what it costs are on the coaching page, or ring the shop, which for anything to do with a child is usually quicker than a form.
Join a club
The clubs are being rebuilt and are not taking bookings at the moment. When they reopen the season runs April to the end of November, a group needs a minimum of six riders, and fees are monthly with no notice period.
Coming soon
Put your child on the list and Ramo will tell you the moment places open.
Send their age and what they ride, swim or want to try.
Come and watch a session
Bring them along and see
Most parents decide in twenty minutes of standing at the side, which is a far better basis than anything written on a website.