The Trinidad and To­ba­go Cy­cling Fed­er­a­tion has dropped Njisane Phillip and Ker­ron Bram­ble from the T&T team for the up­com­ing UCI World Cup in Cana­da (Jan­u­ary 24-25) and Cy­cling World Cham­pi­onship in Ger­many next month.

Nicholas Paul and Kwe­si Browne re­tained their places on the team and they will be now joined by Quin­cy Alexan­der as Team T&T re­sumes ef­forts to qual­i­fy for the Olympic Games in the team sprint, keirin and in­di­vid­ual sprints in Tokyo, Japan.

Apart from the three cy­clists, the con­tin­gent will in­clude man­ag­er David Fran­cis, coach Erin Hartwell and phys­io­ther­a­pist Derek Ash­by.

The de­ci­sion comes even as the team is con­test­ing Pan Am Sports’ re­cent de­ci­sion to strip them of two medals won at last year’s Pan Am Games in Li­ma, Pe­ru, fol­low­ing a pos­i­tive dop­ing test dur­ing the Ju­ly/Au­gust event. The de­ci­sion saw the team of Phillip, Browne, Paul and Ker­ron Bram­ble los­ing their team sprint gold and Phillip los­ing his in­di­vid­ual match sprint sil­ver medal, while Paul kept his gold medal in the in­di­vid­ual ride.

How­ev­er, yes­ter­day, the TTCF of­fi­cials re­fused to dis­close whether the Pan Am dop­ing mat­ter had any bear­ing on the the de­ci­sion to leave Phillip and Bram­ble off the team. Ef­forts to con­tact both Phillip and Bram­ble were al­so un­suc­cess­ful as calls to their cell­phones went unan­swered.

Yes­ter­day, Alexan­der, who faced a chal­lenge to se­cure a place on the team months ago, said he was hap­py to be back in the T&T set-up.

“I am just grate­ful and thank­ful for the op­por­tu­ni­ty be­cause I have been there, day-in and day-out in the pro­gramme. This is some­thing I’ve been look­ing for­ward to and I am thank­ful that I can suit up and go race,” Alexan­der said.

“What is hap­pen­ing with the sport of cy­cling over the past few weeks is not my busi­ness. It does not con­cern me, I am con­tin­u­ing with this mind­set, I am not go­ing to let any­thing that does not con­cern me af­fect me.”

Alexan­der, who chal­lenged coach Erin Hartwell’s se­lec­tion process ear­ly last year and at one time had threat­ened to take le­gal ac­tion via a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter against the cy­cling fed­er­a­tion, said he just wants to achieve his tar­gets and get the job done in 2020.

“I re­al­ly want to fo­cus on my per­for­mance rather than just the re­sult, and fo­cus on just try­ing to hit my per­son­al tar­gets. Every­one wants to do well, in­clud­ing me, I want to do well. But my mind­set is get­ting there, feel­ing the at­mos­phere and get­ting the job done. The re­ward will come at the end, if you medal or so,” Alexan­der told Guardian Me­dia.

How­ev­er, Alexan­der ad­mit­ted he be­lieves the re­cent de­vel­op­ments in the sport will make qual­i­fi­ca­tion to the Olympics more dif­fi­cult in the team sprint.

On­ly Paul, who broke a world record in the fly­ing 200 me­tres sprint at the Elite Pan Amer­i­can Track Cy­cling Cham­pi­onships in Cochabam­ba, Bo­livia, last year, is close to seal­ing an Olympic berth. T&T’s fe­male cy­clist Te­niel Camp­bell has al­ready se­cured her spot in Tokyo.

The T&T team will fly out to Cana­da on Jan­u­ary 18.