Welcome to the podcast. It's dedicated to making you a faster cyclist to ask a cycling coach podcast presented by trainer road and coach Jonathan Lee with a special episode here with you today. We have a two members of the cliff protein with us tuning in from Fayette, Villarcan saw we have Sophia Gomez, Vigiafania. How are you doing Sophia?

Good. Thanks for having me on Jonathan.

Good to have you back. It's been a while since we've seen you in person pandemic times and whatnot, but it's happy that there's good to have you back. And then we also have a first a new guest for us on the podcast Russell Finsterwald. What's up Russ?

Not much. How are you this today, Jonathan?

Good man. It's exciting to have you. So both of you.

Yeah, happy to. To both of you have raised just this past weekend, you raised the pro XCT, the US Cup. I can't remember which they're called or even if it's one of the same.

There in Fayetteville this weekend, we're going to talk about that. We're also going to talk about Pan American games that you did recently. And this is an interesting thing because not a lot of people keep up with like the continental championships like this.

There's the European champion that we see often in like the roadside of things. They'll have that white kit with blue and then the yellow stars on there.

But we don't hear often about the Pan American games or any of the ones that occur on different continents all throughout the all throughout the world.

So we'll talk about that and also about Olympic qualification. I think this is an interesting topic. Sure. All of us listen to this or probably will not all of us. Maybe some of us are not going to the Olympics. But at the same time, I think it's really interesting to know what these athletes are going through how it works.

Then we're going to talk about some questions that some people have submitted as well. So excited to have both of you on here for this one.

If you're listening to this right now on a podcast, you can listen or you can obviously listen, you can share and you can rate the podcast. And also if you're watching on video, you can give us a thumbs up in this YouTube video.

And we're happy to have you. So let's just jump straight into things. First, Sophia, you are from Argentina and you race for Argentina.

And Russell, you're from the US and you're actually the current marathon, a cross country marathon mountain bike champion. And then Sophia, you're the current cross country Olympic champion from Argentina and short track as well. Is that correct?

So you wear two jerseys all at once, which is fantastic. So.

But let's get. So with that in context here, can we talk about how riders qualify for the Olympics? Like, how does it even work? How do you get selected? And I don't know who wants to take this first here. But maybe Sophia, you can lead from your perspective with Argentina, because I'm sure that it's different for how it works in the United States as well.

But how does Olympic qualification work? And how do you get there? Sophia?

Yeah, so there's two different parts to the whole program. You have part one that it's nation qualification and it's just the IOC says, this is how we're going to have countries allotted their quotas.

And then within each country, each country has their own selection criteria process. They might have auto qualification races. It might just all be a committee base.

It totally no rules on that one really. So how it works for the IOC, we have X amount of spots available.

Total. So I think it's it's equal men and equal women have the same amount of starting spots. And we go through a two year Olympic cycle that starts in June.

Or it's like a May June and it goes one year and that cycle one and then you have cycle two that would lead up into what was going to be May of 2020.

...