KALLE SUCCESS ON U-21 WEEKEND

NEWS Monday 17th May 2010, 11:59am

by Mike Hunter

  Edinburgh Monarchs

Kalle Katajisto finished fifth in the World Under-21 qualifier at Gdansk last Saturday, scoring 10 points, and this takes him through to one of the semi-finals.

He started with a win from the young Aussie prospect Tyson Nelson, and King's Lynn's Joe Haines who is of course the British Under-21 Champion. He then finished behind German Eric Pudel and Somerset's Sam Masters in his next heat, but won heat 10 from the interesting teenage Swede Anton Rosen.

In heat 13 Kalle was beaten by eventual meeting winner Artur Mroczka, and an intriguing little-known Russian Vadim Tarasenko. There was still work to do and although beaten by Latvian Artem Laguta in his final heat, Kalle stayed ahead of rival Adrian Szewczykowski, and that was enough to finish fifth. Qualifiers were Mroczka, Laguta, Tarasenko, Haines, Katajisto and Rosen with Pudel the reserve.

The strength of these meetings is questionable, although finishing ahead of Sam Masters suggests it was not a foregone conclusion that he would get through.

There were two other rounds at the weekend, by far the strongest one being the Scandinavian round at Holsted which Kalle was fortunate to avoid. Qualifiers from this were Dennis Andersson (Sweden), Patrick Hougaard (Denmark), Linus Sundstrom (Sweden), Rene Bach (Denmark), Kim Nilsson and Simon Gustafsson (Sweden) with Dane Lasse Bjerre at reserve.

Amongst the non-qualifiers here were Workington's Peter Kildemand and the sensational Danish prospect Michael Jepsen Jensen, which shows the uneven quality of these qualifiers.

Finally there was the Gorican round which was held over until Sunday morning and then abandoned after 16 heats. The qualifiers from that one were Jurica Pavlic (Croatia, drawn on the track his dad owns!), Darcy Ward (Australia), Matej Kus (Czech Republic), Maciej Janowski (Poland), Justin Sedgmen (Australia) and Andrey Kudryashov (Russia) with a remarkable effort by Newport NL rider Kyle Newman who took the reserve place after a run-off.

This was clearly one of the easier meetings again, but from this point the heat will really be on.