Zachary Bell, the Yukon’s own Olympian cyclist, returned to his home nation this week to reflect on his future and on Canada’s performance at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow over the past two weeks.

“I think the team made pretty good progress,” he said in an interview yesterday. Canada placed fourth in the 4,000-metre team pursuit, behind top finisher Australia, England and New Zealand.

“I think the stuff on the road I wasn’t quite as happy with, but ... we spent quite a lot of time working on those track events,” he said.

Bell also finished 10th in the men’s 20-kilometre scratch race.

A Team Canada member for nearly a decade, Bell finally earned a national road title in June 2013. The Watson Lake native won the Canadian Road Championships Men’s Elite road race in St. Georges, Que., more than a dozen years after taking up the sport.

That crown bestowed the right to wear the Canadian National Champion jersey at every race for 12 months.

“(A)t first, I felt almost unworthy of the weight of it,” Bell wrote on his blog last month. “Athletes in this sport dream of what wearing the jersey for a year will be like. Personally, I was first and foremost proud.”

Bell, a two-time Olympian — London in 2012, Beijing in 2008 — and five-time Canadian Road Championships medalist, actually found the laurels of the jersey a let- down, at least in some ways.

“I didn’t reap huge financial rewards,” he wrote. “... My jersey turned into little more (than) the extra bag of peanuts on the plane. They are nice to have but no one picks an airline because of them.”

Then again, he admitted, the national title did help secure his place on a new, top-tier Canadian pro-cycling crew, Team SmartStop. “That home, SmartStop, seemed like a small shack with modest beginnings when I first arrived, but it has proven to be a band of brothers,” he wrote.

At age 31, Bell is also taking stock of his situation in life.

“I’m playing it year to year right now, and I’ll know when it isn’t feeling right for me,” he told the Star from Vancouver, where he’s made his home on the North Shore for the past seven years.

“I think as long as I can continue to make progress on the road and make some positive contributions to my team, I’ll keep on rolling.”

Coaching is one hat Bell could see himself wearing in the years ahead.

“I think it would be wrong to turn my back on the experience I have in the sport, and there’s a chance that I’ll remain in it completely, but I definitely want to have a bit more of a dynamic lifestyle after.”

Part of that dynamism may include expanding on the charitable efforts he’s made over the past couple years.

Bell recently founded Paxton’s Lights for Hope, a fund for the BC Women’s Hospital neonatal intensive care unit.

The initiative emerged out of a profound tragedy. In October 2012, he and his wife Rebecca lost their infant son Paxton to an acute, severe brain event suffered in utero. “Rebecca and I love him with all our hearts after only a short time,” Bell wrote on his blog.

“Even though he never had a chance with us here we got to know him and his personality over the last nine months. He has forever changed things for us. “Cycling and its challenges seem small compared to what he fought against,” he wrote. “We will miss him.'”

Bell is also working on a second project, the Zach Bell Rural Youth Sport Initiative. “We have some backers for it, we just have to figure out the logistics,” he said.

Bell has been in touch with Sport Yukon, a non-profit, to establish funds for teams and individual youths in the communities, money that could also be put toward camps and coaches in remote areas.

“It would be for those athletes that are talented enough to be able to do it, but for whatever reason haven’t been identified or haven’t had the chance to do it,” he said. Beyond athletics, Bell is considering going back to school for a graduate degree in architecture, “or something a bit more hands-on like the trades.”

He has a general studies degree with an architecture minor, having studied at the University of Calgary and Queen’s University.

For now, though, Bell is already in Colorado gearing up for the week-long USA Pro Challenge, which will take riders through 11 cities on a gruelling seven-stage affair of mountains, wind and energy bars. It begins in less than two weeks.

In early September, he will take on the Alberta Pro Cycling Event, another 11- community race with six stages that kicks off Sept. 4.