Cycling: Peter Latham in Olympics frame

Te Awamutu rider Peter Latham is doing everything possible to push his claims for international selection.

Latham won the men's 4000m individual pursuit title at the RaboDirect Track National Championships in Invercargill - beating off the challenge of fellow Beijing Olympic squad member Westley Gough (Waipukurau).

"Any national title is nice to win and I'm pretty satisfied to come through with a good ride," says Latham.

"We had a good campaign in Beijing at the World Cup a few weeks ago. I made the most of the opportunity to ride the team pursuit there and wanted to back that up tonight with a good ride.

"The event the whole team is targeting is the world championships in April in Melbourne. "Whether they take me to London in a few weeks or they send me home to train for a weeks, I will just go where I am told.

Latham is one eight team pursuit riders vying for the four Olympic team pursuit spots.

"There's a lot of hungry guys. It's a pretty good position for BikeNZ to be in. It makes the competition between all of the fellas pretty tight. We just want to make the team go faster."

Latham topped the qualifiers in 4:21.730, just ahead of Gough's 4.22.065, and repeated that effort with a 4:21.975 in the final, taking control in the second half of the 4000m battle.

The Te Awamutu Sports' dominated Waikato Bay of Plenty quartet of Sam Bewley, Scott Creighton, Peter Latham and Hayden McCormick blitzed the men's field in the team pursuit final.

After qualifying fastest, the team caught their Canterbury rivals with four laps to go.

Kaytee Boyd was the best of the women in the 3000m individual pursuit, taking the national title ahead of teammate Rushlee Buchanan.

Both Boyd and Buchanan have been part of the BikeNZ team pursuit squad at world championship level and are also battling for a spot going forward.

Boyd was top qualifier in 3.41.251 for the 3000m, with Buchanan nearly 1.5 seconds back. But in a massive battle of two international riders, Boyd pipped Buchanan by just 3/1000th of a second in a tremendous race.

Commonwealth Games medallist Joanne Kiesanowski (Canterbury) rode an exemplary points race to secure herself the national title.

The country's leading omnium rider featured in each sprint, winning by an 11 point margin ahead of Buchanan and Sequoia Cooper (Southland).

More Te Awamutu highlights from the national track championships in Thursday's Courier.