SportsScope : Olympians Spice Cycling Grand Prix Today at Velodrome

The final step in the Sundance Grand Prix Cycling Series and a last pre-Olympic tuneup featuring several Olympic qualifiers begins this morning in the Olympic Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez Hills.

The finals open with preliminary events at 9 a.m., including men’s and women’s qualifying rounds in pursuit and match sprints.

Tonight’s 7:30 session will include the kilometer finals, some pursuit finals and sprint semifinals, as well as heats in the motorcycle-paced Keirin, a women’s lap-points race and men’s and women’s miss-and-out contests.

The finals will begin at 1 p.m. Saturday, starting with pursuit finals and a men’s points race. The highlight of the competition, the sprint and Keirin finals, will be televised live on ESPN starting at 3 p.m.

Riders will compete for $25,000 in prize money, the largest purse of the series. Previous competitions were held in Atlanta; Trexlertown, Pa.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Indianapolis, and Redmond, Wash. Several of the contests were held in sweltering 100-degree heat. So even if this weekend stays sultry by Los Angeles standards, a race spokesman said, “the weather here will be the coolest of the series. It will be nice to get down into the 90s.”

Competitors include the hottest woman sprinter in the world, Connie Paraskevin Young, who won the Olympic Trials to qualify for Seoul and set an unofficial world sprint record in the Grand Prix at Colorado Springs, covering the final 200 yards in 11.289 seconds. Young was also world sprint champion in 1982, ’83 and ’84. Women’s velodrome events were added to the Olympics for 1988.

Another competitor in Carson will be Curt Harnett, a powerful Canadian who qualified for Seoul in kilometer and sprints. Lately, he has been beating America’s top veterans, Ken Carpenter and Mark Gorski. He’ll get another shot this weekend at Gorski, the 1984 Olympic gold medalist in sprints.

Tickets per session are $5 for adults and $3 for children younger than 12 and seniors 65 and older.

The sixth annual Norris Foundation Wheelchair Tennis Classic will be played Saturday at the South End Health & Racquet Club, 2800 Skypark Drive, Torrance. Events include men’s doubles finals at 11 a.m., a luncheon and silent auction at noon, women’s singles finals at 1:15 and men’s singles finals at 3:15, followed by an awards program, dinner and live auction.

Matches featuring the top 20 men and women wheelchair players are sanctioned by the National Wheelchair Tennis Assn. Proceeds benefit the Casa Colina Rehabilitation Centers. General admission is $3.

The Manhattan Beach Track Club trains several days a week and is looking for runners of all levels. The club does interval training on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at various locations, and training runs from 7 to 20 miles out of Malaga Cove on Saturday mornings. Club meetings are held the second Thursday of each month. Ed Avol is coach. For information call 545-1949.