TE AWAMUTU NEWS | 1
THURSDAY AUGUST 8, 2024
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AUGUST 8, 2024
Rebecca’s silver lining
Te Awamutu’s BMX club can take a slice of credit for Olympian Rebecca Petch’s Paris silver medal. Petch began riding for the club as a preschooler – and competed in the BMX event at the 2020 Olympics before switching to track cycling. She and Cambridge’s Ellesse Andrews and Tauranga born Shaane Fulton made up the women’s cycling sprint team which picked up silver in the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Velodrome in Paris this week. The three-women sprint relay was won by Great Britain. Te Awamutu BMX club president Rodney Prescott said the club was “super proud” and hoped to get her Petch back to the club track when she returned to Waipā. He said her experience in BMX gave her an advantage as lead cyclist in the sprint event when it came to pushing out of the gate. The daughter of Sonya and Barry Petch, who turned 26 a month ago, is a former Pekapekarau primary, Te Awamutu Intermediate and College student. She adds her silver to the gold
she won in the team sprint event with Andrews and Olivia King at the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. When she was named in the New Zealand team in May, Petch told The News journalist Steph Bell Jenkins how she was excited at the prospect of having family with her in Paris. When she competed in Tokyo family, fellow club members and friends gathered at a restaurant to watch “because no one was allowed to be in Tokyo at that point”. Petch had been commuting regularly from her home in Pirongia, where she lives with husband Jarrod Browning, to train at the Velodrome in Cambridge. For two years she ran a mobile barista operation out of the old Bunning’s car park in Cambridge. Little Petchy was a 1961 Gypsy caravan she bought in Ōtorohanga, gutted back to its bones and renovated to become a mobile coffee place. She switched from BMX in October 2022 and described the move after 21 years in the sport as one of the biggest decisions she had made. Pictured in May in Cambridge after the New Zealand cycling team was announced were, from left, coach Jon Andrews, Olivia Continued on page 1 King, Rebecca Petch, Shaane Fulton and Ellesse Andrews.
Photo: Steph Bell Jenkins.
Our new citizens The latest batch of new New Zealanders set a record for Waipā last week. They numbered 108 – the most for a single citizenship ceremony in the district. Waipā mayor Susan O’Regan was pictured with the group outside the Cambridge Town Hall. Read Mary Anne Gill’s story today on Page 5.
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