World Cycling Invitational : Italians Use Experience to Take First-Day Lead

With everyone shooting for bicycling’s top gun, the Soviet Union, Italy used its team experience to sneak into contention on the first day of the NEC World Cycling Invitational.

Friday’s events, mostly preliminaries, left the United States and Soviet Union battling for team points, with the Soviets taking a 37-29 edge. But without the big names of the superpowers, Italy placed 1-2 in two events to take the lead with 41 points.

The unusual eight-team format, with the top five placers receiving points in each event, found several of the world’s top track riders trying some unfamiliar events on the Olympic Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

That was most evident when the Soviets were unsure of how to tackle the miss-and-out elimination race--a non-Olympic event in which the rear rider drops out after each lap--and dropped out without scoring any points.

Lack of an experienced kilometer rider also cost the United States in the evening’s only final. America’s Ken Carpenter, a sprint specialist who recorded the night’s best 200-meter sprint time of 10.86 seconds about an hour earlier, gave the three-lap kilometer a shot and faded in the last lap, losing to Canada’s Tony Ward.

The kilometer is normally run against the clock, but in this event’s format the competition was in two-man heats.

The race also provided the evening’s most dramatic finish. The final heat matched two of the world’s best, Australia’s Martin Vinnicombe, the 1987 world champion and No. 2 finisher in the recent World Championships, and the Soviet Union’s 1988 Olympic gold medalist, Alexander Kirichenko.

They were riding in a dead heat after two laps, then Vinnicombe edged Kirichenko at the finish line. Vinnicombe won in 1:06.40, beating Kirichenko by a quarter-second.

In other Friday highlights:

--The Soviets’ Erika Salumayae and America’s Connie Paraskevin-Young had the top times in the women’s sprint trials. They advanced to today’s semifinals along with Italy’s Sara Felloni and France’s Isabelle Gautheron.

--Italy’s Marco Villa and Giovanni Lombardi placed 1-2 in the miss-and-out and 1-2 in the scratch race to give Italy the team lead.

Racing resumes today at 1 p.m.