By Keiran Gorsky
Carter de Veer had won his first-ever European race at the Grand Prix West Bohemia in Prague the day before. He was powering through a hill-filled stretch of the competition’s second half when he felt a slight weight on his front wheel. The next moment, he was down on the ground.
“I guess I wasn’t paying enough attention to my surroundings,” de Veer reflects.
Another competitor had clipped him from the front. His father Craig de Veer, himself an avid cyclist and a past soigneur with the Canadian Olympic cycling team, arrived next to Carter’s fallen bicycle with a pair of spare wheels. He fixed the chain back onto its rings and helped his son back on.
Carter refused to lose his cool.
“Carter’s fallen before in races,” Craig notes. “He’s been frustrated and he’s learned it doesn’t work.”
“I was just mostly filled with adrenaline,” Carter agrees. “My main focus was just to [get] back on and not dwell on it that much.”
In bicycle racing, everything doesn’t always go according to plan. De Veer ultimately didn’t finish that second race.
It was something of a discrepant result for the young talent, who seems to win every competition he graces. In April, it was seven gold medals at the Canadian under-17 track championships in Milton.
Read More: Cyclist Carter de Veer strikes gold 7 times at Canadian U17 track championships
Most recently, at the 2025 Canadian Road Cycling Championships from June 27-30 in Quebec’s Beauce region, he won two more medals in U17 boys’ races. De Veer also won a national cyclocross championship last fall. The Merivale High School student even won a silver medal and a team title as a cross-country runner at the 2024 city championships. Through it all, his father has been by his side.
Craig was never intent on forcing his son onto a bicycle seat despite his own passion for the sport. Rather, when his children were born, Craig found himself thinking back to his cherished memories growing up, playing hockey out on the street with his brother.
“My philosophy has always been, as long as they’re doing something active, and they’re having fun and it’s a positive environment, then I’m happy,” Craig explains.
De Veer struggles to recall his earliest memories in racing, but Craig remembers it well. He took a four-year-old Carter and his brother Cooper to their local BMX track behind Gloucester High School where other kids were racing around. It was immediately clear that they wanted to be part of it.
“Both of my kids were jumping at the fence and wondering why their bikes weren’t there,” Craig remembers.
Carter’s only memory of the visit is a picture that still sits in the de Veer kitchen. Luckily, he had the opportunity to accumulate many more in a variety of different environments. Craig would take Carter and Cooper on hours-long treks on bicycle trails through the woods and mountains. One of their first adventures was through scenic but relatively beginner-friendly Kingdom Trails in Vermont.
Perhaps that exposure to a diversity of conditions has fuelled his present success. As his coach at Toronto-based Ignite Junior Cycling Chris Reid describes, technical skills in one event have a way of feeding into others. The ability to turn and swerve in tight spaces in cyclocross races, where conditions are nothing if not unpredictable, serve to make de Veer a more complete athlete. Similarly, the blistering speed in track races prepare him for the pace of competitive European circuits.
Training in those track races at the Mattamy National Cycling Centre in Milton make for regular and tedious four-hour car rides. Craig and Carter crash on couches and in the basements of whichever friends are willing to accommodate them that week. De Veer is infinitely appreciative for how willing his father is to drop everything and make the journey.
“I don’t even have to ask him,” highlights the Ottawa Bicycle Club product. “He’ll just say, ‘I’ll take you there.’”
Trips away from home have a way of maturing young athletes, Reid notes. When travelling with team members, it’s usually de Veer who assumes the bulk of cleaning and cooking duties, he adds. Reid suggests that skill might also be inherited from his father, a talented chef in his own right. In turn, when the de Veers hosted other teammates at their home, Carter was on pizza-making duty, stationed outside by the wood oven.
Back on the bike, the small setback in Prague is already fading into the past. After finishing third in the elite men’s race just a hair behind Matteo Dal-Cin and Olivier Brisebois at the Preston Street criterium on Father’s Day in Ottawa, De Veer’s most recent success came at the Canadian Road Cycling Championships in Saint-Georges, PQ when he captured the gold medal in his 28-kilometre individual trial and a silver in the road race.
In road races, cyclists typically like to study their routes in advance so they might know when to pace themselves and when to turn on the afterburners.
A quirk of the Saint-Georges route, though, is that wind speeds tend to fluctuate dramatically from day to day. De Veer, then, came to the race with a plan — to create a large enough gap early on to cancel out any unfortunate changes in climate. He stuck carefully to that plan to land on the podium.
Surely, there will be more peaks and valleys to come. De Veer’s fall in Czechia won’t be his last. But at 16 years old, Reid maintains, he’s already demonstrated a fortitude and craftiness that make his prospects just that much more promising.
“You can say he’s talented and stuff,” Craig echoes, “but he works really hard… he says that I push him and I help him along. But a lot of it is coming from within.”
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