The UCI Track Cy­cling World Cup Leg II will ped­al off on Thurs­day in Aguas­calientes, Mex­i­co and first leg team man­ag­er Gre­go­ry D'An­drade says the coun­try can ex­pect more promis­ing per­for­mances from Njisane Phillip and Varun Ma­hara­jh.At the first leg of the World Cup in Man­ches­ter, Eng­land from No­vem­ber 1-3 both Phillip and Ma­hara­jh gave cred­itable show­ings against the best cy­clists in the world. In the Men's Sprint event, Phillip won T&T's first medal at a UCI World Cup, fin­ish­ing sec­ond be­hind Ger­man Robert Forste­mann. In the Kierin event, he nar­row­ly missed out on a medal, plac­ing fourth.

Ma­hara­jh, com­pet­ing in the Om­ni­um event, gave it his best, clock­ing two per­son­al bests (PB). In the 4k In­di­vid­ual pur­suit he stopped the clock in 4 min­utes 52.818 sec­onds and broke an­oth­er PB in the 1k time tri­al (1:07.807). Ma­hara­jh fin­ished 17th over­all.The city of Aguas­calientes is above sea lev­el, with an av­er­age height of 1800 me­tres, and D'An­drade be­lieves it may prove a chal­lenge for Ma­hara­jh but knows he will be com­pet­i­tive. "Varun may have some dif­fi­cul­ty with the el­e­va­tion, but he is look­ing for a new record in the In­di­vid­ual pur­suit that will show some kind of im­prove­ment," he stat­ed.

D' An­drade al­so says that Njisane is be­com­ing a house­hold name af­ter his show­ing at the 2012 Lon­don Olympics. He said the crowd at the first leg was be­hind him. "They were (crowd) sup­port­ing him, the crowd was for him." The for­mer T&T man­ag­er says that Njisane is the first sprint­er that the coun­try has had at such a high lev­el since Gene Samuel.D'An­drade stat­ed that the world is be­com­ing aware of T&T in the world of cy­cling, say­ing the cy­cling bod­ies in the coun­try are tak­ing the sport se­ri­ous­ly.

Join­ing Njisane and Ma­hara­jh on this trip will be Team DPS (Dri­ve Phase Sport), led by Quin­cy Alexan­der. Alexan­der will com­pete in the 1km time tri­al, while Jude Co­dring­ton and Justin Roberts will team up with Alexan­der in the Men's team sprint. D' An­drade be­lieves it will be dif­fi­cult for Team DPS, but knows it will be great ex­po­sure. Gary Acos­ta will serve as T&T's man­ag­er for the sec­ond leg, which ends on Sat­ur­day.