What a double!

Pic courtesy of Azizulhasni Awang (left)
Rizal Tisin (right)


First thing I did when I got out of bed this morning was turn on the laptop to check my emails, then went onto Facebook. Rizal Tisin just happened to be online over in Beijing as well, while Azizulhasni Awang was busy at the Laoshan Velodrome where he'd breezed past the first round.
Rizal seemed bemused. Coach John Beasley and the rest of the squad had left their hotel and were at the velodrome. "John cakap kilo pukul 8.30. Nak kena check ni," Rizal began figuring out how to get his hands on the schedule.
"Dalam website UCI ada," I told him. But he couldn't find it, so I copied and emailed it to him. "Kilo event ke 10 sesi petang," I informed. "Mcmana ni? Betul ke?"
"Ah, pukul 4.30 la aku pegi," Rizal said after doing the calculations to the schedule via indications of durations of each event from the start of the evening sessions at Laoshan at 5.20pm yesterday.
As usual, we'd talk about matters 'close to both our hearts' over the chatline, before we adjourned. "Aku memang kayuh mati-mati dalam kilo tu nanti. Aku nak medal tu," simple and straight forward was Rizal's parting shot.
As the anxiety began to grip me at the desk, refreshing over and over again the results sheet from the UCI website awaiting updates, "You got a message," went my phone. "Zizul first, Bauge second, third Mulder," read Rizal's message. The second round results hadn't come in at that time. So, I was confused. Then at one go, the whole results were updated. It read: Final 1-6: 1 Azizulhasni Awang (Mas). "Gold!! Gold!!" I shouted out aloud, as my boss Vijesh Rai scrambled to my screen. "Okay, relax. This is the backpage. Go get it on the sms updates."
"But wait, Rizal's next. Another medal's coming," I told him. The whole desk seemed excited, but I looked around this time and I could sense nobody really shared the faith I had in Rizal. Azizul is the newsmaker, everybody knows that.
Getting the updates done, a few smokes and coffees later, I returned to the screen, frantically refreshing the page over and over again, hoping the 1km time trial results would be in. At almost 8pm, sandwiched in between my SMS exchange with a few others, came Rizal's glorious line:"Aku 1st.. 1:02.268, Pervis 2nd, Kuczynski 3rd. Gold medal."
Yeah, of course:"Rizal got the gold! Rizal fuckin got the gold!" I just stopped short of shedding tears.
The string of sms messages began flowing out: "Rizal got the gold! We got TWO! We got TWO!!"
For me, Azizul's success thus far is destined. He's a special kid. Very, very special. He has been from day one. But if you followed the careers of our cyclists as closely as I did, you'd know that Rizal's was a long hard road. He charted his own destiny and not only did he have to work extra hard to first prove himself, then achieve results. He's not a born champion. Rizal Tisin is a self-made champion. He'd taken his fair share of hard knocks throughout his career.
A few months ago he was on the verge of quitting the sport. He's had a tough time. But this is a guy who'd been knocked down, got up again, rode again and gone all the way to a UCI World Cup gold medal.
Just a month ago, he'd cracked the Asian 1km record with a time of 1:02.157s, that after a three month layoff, and joining the national squad's training camp in Melbourne three weeks late, as he had to sort out issues regarding the uncertainty in his future. He solved that by getting the help of the National Sports Council and being given a shot at recruitment into the police force.
He was determined to prove himself in the keirin at first. He did so by becoming Asian champion in 2006. But failure to even qualify for the final at the Asian Games that year, took its emotional toll on Rizal, who almost gave up due to unbearable disappointment.
Then came Azizul in 2007, so Rizal was moved into the 1km time trial after some soul searching of his own. One year on, he took home the 1km time trial Asian title in Nara, Japan, where Azizul did the keirin-200m sprint double.
Klangite Rizal was ranked fifth in the world at the end of last season.
Believe me, the journey has just begun. And what a fighter this kid is.