Why cycling world has gone up a gear
STEPHEN PARK, the performance director of British Cycling, has warned that Great Britain could return from this summer’s Olympics with its lowest medal haul since 2004. ‘We should temper our expectations,’ said Park, after Elinor Barker was Britain’s sole gold medallist at the Track Cycling World Championships in Berlin. ‘The days of any nation winning 10-plus medals have probably gone. That is a result of worldwide competition increasing and the difference in terms of equipment and technology decreasing.’ In other words: they’ve rumbled us. Britain’s sudden eminence at cycling was not just about a handful of brilliant individuals coming together. It was a well-honed medal-winning strategy born of the realisation that cycling provided big opportunities and small fields. Not a lot of countries were good at it, but there were a great many medals available. And it was a technological sport, so responded to money. Invest significantly in cycling and, with the right athletes, you could reap rewards. Now the rest of the world knows. They see how ruthlessly Team GB targets its low-hanging fruit, which is why it will spend big on modern pentathlon and skeleton but ignore basketball and volleyball. Cycling finds its home in central Europe so it is no surprise to now see Holland, Germany, Denmark, France and Italy above Britain in the Track Cycling World Championship medal table. Now everybody has worked out how it is done, expect everybody to start doing it.