With three gold medals and one silver was the balance of the performance of the Colombian team on the first day of the Pan American Track Championships, youth category, which is being held until June 25 at the Legado Videna Velodrome in Lima, Peru.
The first event that handed out titles in the afternoon was the team sprint, in which the Colombians Julián Felipe Lugo, Nicolás Andrés Olivera and Juan Diego Bautista clocked 45.626 seconds and left the triads of Trinidad and Tobago (46.144) and Mexico (47.150) for second and third place, respectively.
In the same event, but in the women’s section, Colombia also dominated thanks to Nicolle Elena García, Mariana Pérez and Stefany Lorena Cuadrado, who stopped the clocks in 50.290 seconds, much lower than the 53.744 of their Mexican rivals (silver) and the 53.890 of the Chilean girls (bronze).
The other crowns awarded on this inaugural day corresponded to the team pursuit. The Colombian quartet Jerónimo Calderón, Miguel Ángel Marín, Juan Diego Quintero and Juan Manuel Zapata narrowly beat their Chilean counterparts by just one second. For third place, Argentina defeated Mexico and won its first medal in the competition.
Finally, the only gold medal that escaped Colombia went to the Chilean women’s quartet (Maite Ibarra, Javiera Mansilla, Naharai Neira and Marlen Rojas), who beat them by two seconds at the end of the day. Mexico finished with the bronze medal.
Eleven nations are participating in the Pan American Junior Track Championship: Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Ecuador, Venezuela and Peru. The event will conclude on Sunday, June 23.