How Do You Prepare for a Track World Championships When There Is Almost No International Calendar?

Australia has a number for almost everything.

For the 2026 UCI Para Cycling Track World Championships in Apeldoorn, an Australian male C5 rider can look at the selection document and find 1:05.69 beside the kilometre. A female C4 rider has 1:15.28. Scratch-race benchmarks are expressed as average speeds, flying-200 times help identify possible mixed team-sprint riders and the team sprint itself has a 51.54-second target, broken down further into standards for each position.

It is the sort of detail expected from a modern high-performance programme. Track cycling lends itself unusually well to measurement and, with the number of classifications involved in para cycling, there is obvious value in knowing what a World Championship performance should look like before selecting somebody to produce one.

Then the Australian document reaches the elimination.

There is no objective performance standard. AusCycling explains that the event is still too variable, with small fields, crashes and neutralisations leaving too little reliable World Championship data from which to establish one. Riders already selected for other events can instead be considered for the race.

That small section exposes the limit of trying to prepare for international para track racing largely through measurement.

Australia can establish what it believes a competitive C5 kilometre should look like. It can measure a flying 200, estimate the speed required for a scratch race and decide what each position in a team sprint needs to produce. With the elimination, knowing how fast somebody is does not necessarily tell a selector whether they can race it.

If riders were racing regularly, the missing information would come from competition. For many para track riders, it does not.

A national championship is not a racing calendar

Domestic para track racing is almost non-existent in many countries.

A rider might get a national championship covering the Paralympic or World Championship events, perhaps a para race incorporated into a larger track meeting, and little else that resembles a season against riders from the same classifications.

There are attempts to improve that. British Cycling’s 2026/27 National Track Series includes para competition at Newport and Derby, while Australia incorporates para racing into its national championships and some larger meetings. Those opportunities matter, but even the better-resourced systems offer nothing close to the volume of relevant racing available to an able-bodied endurance rider through leagues, national meetings, UCI events and international competition.

Classification makes the shortage more acute. Putting five para riders onto the same track does not necessarily create one useful race if those riders are spread across several classifications. A national championship can identify the best rider currently available within one country, but it says little about whether the international level has moved or how that rider will respond when several athletes capable of producing that level are together.

For the timed events, teams can work around much of this. A kilometre remains a kilometre whether anybody else is riding beside you or not. Power data, aerodynamics, track conditions and historical performances allow a federation to build a credible picture of what should be possible.

Bunch racing offers fewer shortcuts.

A scratch rider can reproduce the required average speed in training and still arrive at Worlds without knowing how expensive it will be to regain position when an international field compresses at speed. An elimination rider may be capable of every acceleration the race demands and still lose because they gave away half a wheel several laps before the decisive sprint.

Those are racing skills, and domestic racing currently gives many riders very few opportunities to acquire them.

Internationally, the problem simply becomes larger.

Denmark had to create the race it needed

Odense offered one of the clearest examples this summer. From 7–9 August, the Thorvald Ellegaard Arena hosted the Parasport Denmark Grand Prix, with UCI C2 racing on Friday and Saturday followed by a C1 meeting on Sunday. Riders from Denmark, the Netherlands, Germany, Estonia, Norway and India attended Denmark’s first UCI-approved international para track meeting.

The event was not created simply because Denmark fancied adding another race to the calendar.

Parasport Denmark described it as an important part of getting its own riders to Apeldoorn, while national coach Amalie Winther Olsen made clear how few alternatives were available for riders needing the required international competition and qualification opportunities.

Denmark’s answer was to organise the race it needed.

For the six nations that travelled to Odense, those three days therefore carried more importance than a normal C1/C2 meeting ought to need. Riders could gain points and satisfy qualification requirements, but they could also do something more basic: race unfamiliar people.

That should be an ordinary part of preparing for a World Championships.

Instead, the fact that Denmark created such an opportunity becomes notable precisely because there are so few of them.

Able-bodied track has spent years debating whether its international calendar contains enough meaningful racing. Para track starts from a much lower base.

The restored UCI Track World Cup gave able-bodied riders Perth, Hong Kong and Nilai before the 2026 World Championships in Shanghai. Those races did more than distribute ranking points. They showed which programmes had improved, which riders could reproduce training performances under pressure and which tactics or equipment still worked once the opposition arrived.

Para road has a recognisable World Cup structure as well.

Para track has continental championships, individual C1 and C2 meetings and the World Championships, but no equivalent point in the season where the strongest programmes know they are likely to encounter one another repeatedly.

A rider can therefore arrive in Apeldoorn having seen surprisingly little of the opposition.

What cannot be measured

The Australian standards make more sense once viewed against that calendar.

If an athlete rides a kilometre inside the required time under controlled conditions, selectors have learned something useful. The stopwatch does not care whether the person on the other side of the track is Australian, British or Chinese.

In a scratch race, the opposition becomes part of the performance.

A rider has to decide when to move as well as whether they possess the power to move. They need to know whether they can regain position economically, which attacks are worth following and how quickly a gap that looked harmless domestically disappears against a stronger field.

The elimination makes those judgements more severe because a poor decision can finish the race before physical capacity becomes decisive. Riders who meet regularly also begin to recognise one another’s habits: who protects a wheel aggressively, who moves early, who accelerates rather than fights for position and which riders are likely to continue once they have committed to an attack.

Training can reproduce the speed and fatigue. It cannot reproduce twenty riders making decisions for their own reasons.

That is becoming more important because the Paralympic programme is moving further towards exactly this type of racing. Scratch and elimination form a significant part of the C-category programme for Los Angeles 2028 alongside the kilometre and mixed team sprint.

An athlete developing towards LA28 therefore needs more than evidence that their physiology falls within the required range. They need enough racing to develop the judgement that turns that physical ability into a result.

At present, the World Championships themselves are being asked to provide rather too much of that education.

The infrastructure already exists

It would be easy to present the absence of a Para Track World Cup entirely as a UCI problem.

International races still need somebody to host them. A velodrome, timing, officials, classification, medical cover, volunteers and funding have to come from somewhere, while other national federations have to consider the event important enough to send riders.

Para track also creates a difficult programme. C1 through C5 racing for men and women can fill large parts of a timetable before tandems and team events are added. Too many separate meetings could simply spread small fields even more thinly.

Those are legitimate constraints, but they do not fully explain how little use is made of infrastructure already operating for international track racing.

Perth illustrated the point earlier this year.

The SpeedDome hosted the opening round of the UCI Track World Cup in March. International teams were already in Western Australia, with the velodrome prepared, timing operating, commissaires in place and the infrastructure for a major event already being paid for.

Kane Perris was there too.

The reigning para world champion was given a Saturday morning slot to ride a 200-metre time-trial showcase. His appearance put para track in front of the World Cup audience, but it also demonstrated how close the sport had come to something competitively useful.

The host country had a world-class para rider. An international track event was already taking place around him. What Perris did not have was another para rider to race.

That becomes difficult to ignore when Australia is simultaneously having to construct detailed performance standards to estimate how its para riders compare internationally.

Perth should not be treated as an Australian failure. The same question applies wherever a federation capable of hosting international track racing also runs a para high-performance programme whose riders lack competition.

Odense approached the problem from the other direction and built a meeting because its riders needed one. Dublin has put para C2 racing alongside its elite international. Glasgow incorporated para events into the same Commonwealth Games track programme as able-bodied competition.

None provides a complete template for a Para Track World Cup, but together they make it difficult to argue that para racing has to sit on an entirely separate calendar with entirely separate infrastructure.

Somebody has to build the calendar

The UCI controls the international structure, rankings and qualification system. National federations operate the programmes and organise many of the events. Velodromes and promoters ultimately provide somewhere for the racing to happen.

At present, all of them can agree that para riders need more competition without any one of them necessarily being responsible for providing enough of it.

Denmark at least reached the point where that changed. Its riders needed international racing, so an international race was created in Odense and five other nations travelled to use it.

Repeating that independently in every country is unlikely to be the answer. A collection of isolated C1 events attended primarily by neighbouring nations could give the calendar more dates without giving riders much more meaningful comparison.

Para track needs concentration as much as it needs quantity.

One properly supported international meeting which the major programmes are expected to attend would probably provide more useful racing than several small events scattered across the season. Integrating one with an existing Track World Cup remains an obvious experiment because much of the costly event infrastructure would already be operating.

It would also give teams something the current calendar rarely provides: a known point in the year when the people they eventually need to beat are likely to be standing on the same start line.

That changes the usefulness of everything that happens around it. Australia could still use its C5 kilometre standard, but selectors would have a recent international race against which to judge it. A tandem pairing could discover whether its training numbers survive against world-class opposition. Scratch riders could learn which attacks are expensive at international speed, and elimination riders could begin accumulating the race experience that no selection document can manufacture.

When those riders arrived at Worlds, Apeldoorn would then test what they had learned rather than provide the first opportunity to learn it.

That is where the almost empty calendar becomes more than an inconvenience.

A kilometre rider can spend months preparing for Apeldoorn with a target time, power data and a reasonable understanding of whether the work has been successful. A scratch or elimination rider can arrive every bit as well prepared physically and still be missing something much harder to quantify: enough experience of how a world-class para field actually behaves once the racing begins.

The World Championships will give them that experience.

The problem is that by the time they have it, the race they were preparing for is already over.