Team Bermuda will send 15 cyclists to race in the 2010 Tour of Battenkill later this year – the largest contingent of local riders to ever compete in an overseas event.

The Tour of the Battenkill in Cambridge, New York, has for the first time received a place on the International Cycling Union (UCI) calendar and has expanded to two weekends.

Local cyclists Grant Goudge, Chris Faria, Brian Drea, Martin Bolton, Padraig Brown, Greg Reid, Ian Port, Clifford Robert, Chris Harkness, Phillip Trussell, Peter Dunne, Adam Harbutt, Charles Dunstan, Steve Tomlinson and Sarah Bonnett make up Team Bermuda.

The Tour of the Battenkill, a five-year-old race, is labelled 'America's Queen of the Classics'. It features 25 percent dirt roads as it passes through the small villages, rolling countryside and covered bridges of upstate New York's Washington County.

There will be pro/am and amateur races on Saturday, April 10 and a UCI 1.2-sanctioned professional men's invitational the following weekend on Sunday, April 18.

The April 10 race will see the amateurs compete over 100 kilometres and the pro/am field race over 130 kilometres. The event on April 18 will consist of two loops of a 100-kilometre circuit for a race distance of 200 kilometres.

Goudge said the cyclists had started a 13-week training programme in the build-up to April 10 race.

"The riders (Team Bermuda) are 14 men and one woman ranging in age from the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties," said Goudge. "Made up of several local team riders, the group will race together in one category as a representative team.

"The race is 62-miles in length which is not long as road races go, but what makes this so tough is the terrain . . . this is an effort to replicate the spring classics in Europe such as the tour of Flanders and Paris Roubaix.

"The weather will also play a large part with upstate New York in April hardly tropical.

"We will be riding a minimum of five days a week and the intensity of the training will peak a couple of weeks before the event before tapering in the days leading up to the race so the body can recover and be ready for the race itself."

For more information visit www.tourofthebattenkill.com.