Sprint team shows it’s back on track
Eddie Dawkins didn’t even need to look up from his handlebars to know his team had secured New Zealand’s first gold medal at the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games.
The hulking track star was one third of the men’s sprint team which won their second consecutive Commonwealth crown at the Anna Meares Velodrome on Thursday night.
Alongside Ethan Mitchell and Saw Webster, they turned in a near-flawless display to beat England in their gold medal race by a comfortable margin - for track sprinters anyway - of 0.424 of a second.
Their winning time was 42.877, but Dawkins, who rode the final leg, said he knew even before looking up at the big screens around the velodrome that they had won.
‘‘I had no doubt in my mind when we went across the line we’d won. I didn’t even have to see the time.
‘‘I looked up at the time and thought ‘yeah, that’s what it should be’, then I was looking for the boys so we could celebrate together.’’
The trio now have both the Games title and record, after clocking 42.822 in qualifying.
Dawkins said winning consecutive titles with the same team was a massive achievement. ‘‘It’s huge. Going back-to-back with the boys was all we talked about for the last month.’’
The closeness of the two times was a testament to their consistency in execution. The times were up there with some of their quickest ever, only marginally slower than their efforts at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
Mitchell said the main joy he took from the win was to put behind them their sixth-placed finish at the world championships last month.
‘‘We took a big debrief process collectively, with our support staff, after the world champs and focused on how we needed to improve to come out here and perform the way we did. Individually we all did our job and the time was the time.’’
The New Zealand women’s sprint team of Natasha Hansen and Emma Cumming were earlier unable to match the pace of the high-powered Australian team of Kaarle McCulloch and Stephanie Morton in their gold medal race, going down by 0.627s.
But the silver-medal achievement of the relatively new team Cumming is just 20 - should not be diminished. Cumming said the result was a big leap forward for the women’s sprint team.
‘‘There wasn’t a huge amount of faith in us to start with, but I think we’ve shown we have somewhere to go in the future.’’
After their qualifying run to make the final, Cycling New Zealand high performance director Martin Barras said it was a very good performance.
‘‘For me, the highlight is the
women’s team sprint. This is a team that scraped itself into the world championship. They were 12 of 12 going into that a month ago and came out with fifth place over there.
‘‘We had hoped they could be in contention for a medal here and they’re going for gold. It’s difficult to be more pleased than that.’’