After earning four titles at the 2014 Juniors Track National Championship, former Fountain Hills resident and cyclist Dominic Suozzi is ready to head to Seoul, Korea, to compete on the world stage.

Suozzi has kept pretty busy this year, culminating most recently at the National Championship hosted out of the VELO Sports Center in Carson, Calif.

Racing for Team Winded Development, he earned the men’s 17-18 sprint and time trial gold medals, as well as the 16-18 Keirin National Championship after winning his heat, semifinal and final competitions.

Last year, this was about the time Suozzi’s season came to a close. This year, however, he said things are just getting started.

“This year’s been even more busy than last year,” Suozzi said. His parents run the local Peaks’ Athletic Club and, for one brief week in July, he’s returned home for a visit.

“Training has been awesome. This year, we took a different approach. As soon as school was over, like the next day, I moved out to California with my old coach,” the teen added.

Without the proper cycling training facilities in Arizona, Suozzi has spent the past couple of years making frequent trips to California to train.

With competition starting to heat up for this young athlete (17), he decided it was time high time he moved to a location where he could focus more on his riding.

“I was able to train for a whole month and a half before Nationals and have continued training at the facilities there,” he said.

Suozzi’s trip to Fountain Hills was short-lived, as his next adventure takes him to Colorado Springs to take part in yet another big race.

“I’ve taken part in about 10 events this year, so far, but Nationals was my first really big event of the year,” he continued.

“Usually Nationals is my final event and it ends my season. This year it’s the start of my big season races.”

Suozzi’s Colorado race is actually primarily being utilized to prepare for the world race in South Korea later this summer.

“It’s a UCI event, which is basically one step under a World Cup,” he continued.

“And the track is actually a lot more like the track I’ll race on in Korea, so it’ll be good practice for that. Also, there’s the benefit of high altitude training.”

His chances are looking pretty good, though, as Suozzi swept his events at Nationals.

“Going into Nationals, I was as apprehensive and nervous as everybody else, because you don’t really know how it’s going to go down,” Suozzi said.

“I know about my competition in California and Arizona because I see them all of the time at the races, but I had no idea about, like, my competition on the East Coast.”

Suozzi said he expected to do well, but he had no idea he would do as well as he did.

“It’s one of those things where you just have to wait until race day and see,” he continued.

“I put so much work into it, and I knew I had the talent to win, but I didn’t expect to win everything I took part in. It was awesome.”

Suozzi will only have a couple of weeks to keep training for Worlds after Colorado, with the big event set to take place in early August. This will be his first race outside of the United States, as well as his first run at Worlds, since you must be at least 17 to compete.

“It’s going to be a big experience, definitely,” Suozzi said.

“It will be very nerve-wracking, very different, but we’ll see how things go.”