Paralympics 2008

MANCHESTER: As someone who has a pathological fear of cycling, stemming from an almost complete inability to ride a bike, I have the utmost respect for cyclists everywhere.

My knees bear the scars of too many falls around the streets near my home and I made sure that the last time I was tempted onto two wheels, there were no cars to be found anywhere around.

That's why the Manchester Velodrome fills me with both terror and admiration in equal measures.

The steep banking at either end is somewhere I wouldn't like to find myself - and it seems I am not the only one.

Great Britain swimmer turned cyclist Jody Cundy set a new world best in the LC2 kilo event at Thursday's cycling events at the Paralympic World Cup - the second time he had broken his own mark at the track in recent weeks - but it could have been all so different.

"A few weeks after I started cycling, I was up on the balcony in the Velodrome and looked down the banking onto the track," he told me after his latest record-breaking achievement.

"It was incredibly intimidating and I think that if I had if I stood there and looked down before I had actually started training, I don't know if I would have done it."

According to the competition factsheet, the venue has "steep 42 degree banking" and is "one of the world's finest and fastest board tracks", and with cyclists reaching speeds of up to 30mph, it is not for the faint-hearted (especially me).

Where Cundy set a new world best on the track and won gold, local rider Rik Waddon was probably the unluckiest cyclist of the day.

The Manchester-based man, who can see the Velodrome from his living room window, set a new world best in the CP3 kilo race, beating team-mate and Paralympic champion Darren Kenny's mark.

But Waddon had no time to celebrate before Kenny, the next rider on the track, came out and reclaimed it back again.

However Waddon, whose partner Natalie Jones clinched her place on the GB Paralympic swimming team last week, refused to be too downhearted.

"That's what competition is all about," he said afterwards. "Darren is a world-class rider and to do what I did pushes him along as well.

"I've learned so much from watching him and that's what's helped me so much."