After rounds at Mudgee and Cowra, the Bathurst club is on track to achieve that goal and come Friday, the Wallabies can further boost their chances when hosting the third round.

“I’ve not seen the updated standings, but if we’re not on top, then we’d be very close to being on top of the inter-club standings,” Wallabies president James Kelly said.

“I don’t think we’ve ever won it in the past. The club has never really focused on it, we’ve been a part of it, but never tried to do much. This year one of our goals was to try and get more people to represent the club and get out more and do more as a club, as opposed to just doing our club races.

“We are really trying to push it, we’ve got support from Westfund, we wanted to get around and do more races. It’s always been a great series, it’s just unfortunate in the past a lot of Bathurst people haven’t travelled.

“They are all coming to us on Friday, it’s a the third year in a row we’ve done it on Australia Day, so it’s a bit of a tradition now.”

With Bathurst having talent throughout the age groups, Kelly is excited to see how Friday’s racing plays out.  Wallabies’ member Nick North took outright honours in the opening round, while at Cowra last Sunday, Bathurst’s Mark Windsor was runner-up to Mudgee’s Matt Webster.

“I think when it’s in Bathurst we do well, but the idea of inter-club is to get as many people competing as you can because it’s balanced out. Everybody scores at least a point for their club, and more if you place. The way the point score works, it’s about the number of members you have, the more the better.”

The Bathurst club has opted to change from the regular swim, bike, run format of its regular club competition days to something different on Friday. It will be a 2.5 kilometre run, 200 metres swim, 16km cycle, another 200m swim, then finally a 2.5km run to finish.

“It’s called a grand prix format, run, swim, bike, swim, run. I think it breaks it up a lot more, you get to change the sports more often and it certainly keeps it more interesting, you get a lot more space in the pool too when everyone goes for a run first rather than starting off with a swim together,” Kelly said.

“For those who can work transition out, who can get on and off the bike and get from their swimming gear onto the bike and back off the bike and into their swimming gear then off running, it certainly makes a difference. Elastic laces might be in demand in Bathurst this week.

“We are also doing a split start in the seniors between the male and females. The males will head off first and the females will follow a couple of minutes later, it will help because we are expecting well over 100 people to come.

“We are also doing what we call an enticer, that will be the usual run, swim, bike and finish after the bike … it counts for the interclub points too.”

Junior racing starts from 8am after a 7.45am briefing, while the senior action commences at 9.30am. Kelly encourages Bathurst residents to come along and watch.