Aaron Keith competes during the men's 15-kilometer scratch race MC1 at the 2022 UCI Para-cycling Track World Championships on Oct. 20, 2022 in Saint-Quentin, France.
Aaron Keith, who won a silver medal in his Paralympic Games road debut last year in Tokyo, struck for global silver again Thursday. This time, it came on a track.
Racing on the velodrome outside Paris that will host the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024, Keith finished second in the men’s 15-kilometer scratch race MC1 at the UCI Para-cycling Track World Championships.
The runner-up finish earned Keith his first global medal in a scratch race after winning a pair of silver medals earlier this year in the UCI Para-cycling Road World Championships.
“It was a good, fun race, and it was a clean race,” said Keith, who has won eight world medals combined in road and track. “I hope it gets the other guys on the team inspired. Hopefully there’s more of this to come this week, we still have a lot of racing as a team.”
Keith also finished third in the 200-meter flying start race, placing him in second place in the men’s omnium competition behind double winner Ricardo Ten Argiles of Spain. Still to come are the 1,000 time trial and individual pursuit. Keith won a bronze medal in the omnium two years ago.
While Keith’s performance captured the only U.S. medal on the opening day of the four-day competition, 2016 Paralympian and two-time 2022 road world champion Samantha Bosco had a second-place finish in the 200 flying start and a fifth-place finish in the 500 time trial in the first two events of the women’s omnium WC4. She is tied for second place in the omnium standings.
Shawn Morelli, a four-time Paralympic medalist and 16-time world medalist, was third in the 200 and seventh in the time trial to grab fourth place in the omnium WC4.
Clara Brown, a 2020 Paralympian and 2022 time trial world champion, was in fourth place in the omnium WC3 after a fourth-place finishes in the 200 flying start and a fifth-place finish in the 500 time trial.
Katie Walker, a two-time member of the world team in track and field, scored a fifth-place finish in the time trial in her world Para-cycling track debut.
Paul D. Bowker #
Paul D. Bowker has been writing about Olympic sports since 1996, when he was an assistant bureau chief in Atlanta. He is a freelance contributor to TeamUSA.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.