Peerless Gate rates as supreme Kiwi Commonwealth Games champion
The great Dame Yvette Williams – New Zealand’s first female Olympic champion – won two of her three gold medals on the same day in Vancouver at the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games.
That was a phenomenal feat, a tribute to her athleticism, focus and powers of concentration.
Williams also won in different disciplines – two field events, shot put and discus, and the long jump.
It remains, however, hard to go past Aaron Gates’ glut – gold in three track events (team pursuit, individual pursuit and the points race) and on the road.
He became the first rider in Empire and Commonwealth Games history to claim gold medals in both the track and road formats at Birmingham.
To win the road title Gate had to go out and beat the 2018 Tour de France champion and third-place getter in 2022, Geraint Thomas of Wales, and others who regularly ride on Europe’s pro tour.
To put it in perspective, Gate winning in both arenas would be like a champion 1500m runner going out and winning the marathon.
Renowned former New
Zealand track cycling coach Ron Cheatley doesn’t like the media’s predilection for comparing athletes from different eras. He prefers individuals to be judged on their own merits in their own time.
But he says Gate’s feat of winning on the road and track at the same Games was extraordinarily rare and the 31-year-old must ‘‘right up there’’ with New Zealand cycling’s greatest performers.
‘‘It used to be reasonably common to ride both on the track and the road,’’ says Cheatley, who coached New Zealand teams at four Olympic Games and several Commonwealth Games too.
‘‘But not these days, you have to specialise now.’’
Cheatley says the road race course in Birmingham suited Gate, ‘‘because there were no big climbs’’.
Yet, the Aucklander, who had bounced back from a broken collarbone that scuppered his Olympic team pursuit medal dream in Tokyo, showed his pluck when he found himself the lone Kiwi in a 15-strong lead bunch in the road race,
And Gate (New Zealand’s first Games road champion after Bruce Biddle in 1970, Graeme Miller in 1990 and Mark Rendell in 1994) left them all in his wake. South Africa’s Daryl Impey – a Tour de France stage winner – had to settle for silver. Thomas, the 2014 Commonwealth champion, finished out of the medals.
Gate later told Cycling Weekly he hoped his win in Warwickshire ‘‘will have shown that you can do both [road and track] pretty successfully’’.
Hayden Roulston – a Commonwealth Games cycling medallist on both road and track and a two-time Olympic track medallist – also wasn’t surprised that Gate was able to seamlessly switch between the two racing modes.
He says track endurance team coach Craig Palmer has made fitness the No 1 priority, ‘‘and you don’t get that from the track, that comes from riding massive volumes on the road. So now we’re seeing track riders doing well on the road, Corbin Strong and Campbell Stewart are riding Pro Tour, and the only reason Aaron Gate’s not Pro Tour as well is because he’s a little older, but it could still happen for him’’.
Gate set new Games records in the team pursuit and individual pursuit – no mean feat given that British, Australian and Canadian riders are no slouches on the Olympic and world championship stages.
It’s impossible, really, to compare Gate and Williams, two fantastic athletes competing 70 years apart.
In Williams’ heyday, female athletes tended to compete across multiple events. New Zealand’s 1952 Olympic long jump champion contested the hurdles, long jump, shot put and discus at Vancouver.
She won the shot put on July 1 in a Games record (13.96m) – although it was the first time the event had been on the women’s track and field programme.
Williams wasn’t often beaten, but she finished last in the 80m hurdles final on July 6.
Unfazed, she contested the long jump and discus the following day, winning both in spectacular fashion. Her winning leap was a Games record 6.08m and she set a new mark too in the discus, hurling it 45.01m, almost 5m further than the silver medallist and over 7.5m beyond the bronze medallist’s best biff.
Gate had little time to savour his track triumphs at the Lee Valley VeloPark near London and his road race in bucolic Warwickshire.
The Gate dance card reveals he won gold in the team pursuit on July 29.
A day later he lined up in the 4000m team pursuit – deemed the blue ribbon event of the men’s track cycling programme. Gate beat team-mate Tom Sexton in the final after earlier setting a Games record 4:07.129 in qualifying. Two days later Gate triumphed in the points race. Then, on August 4, he took part in the road time trial, finishing fourth.
Finally, on August 7, he smashed out 160km in 3hr 28min 29sec on his road bike.
New Zealand has had many other multiple Commonwealth Games medallists.
To name just a few, Cecil Matthews triumphed on the track in the three-mile and six-mile races at Sydney in 1938, the great Peter Snell set new Games records in the 880 yards and mile at Perth in 1962, and weightlifter Darren Liddel snatched and clean-andjerked his way to three gold medals at Kuala Lumpur in 1998.
Some of New Zealand sport’s all-time best have won Empire or Commonwealth gold, including track runners Jack Lovelock (1934) and Murray Halberg (1958 and 1962), Nick Willis (2006), Valerie Adams (2006, 2010, 2014). Another Valerie, Young, won the shot put and discus gold medals back-to-back in 1962 and 1966 to go with a shot put gold in 1958.
Other great Commonwealth Games performances that didn’t result in gold also spring to mind.
None more so than in the men’s 1500m where Dick Quax (at Edinburgh in 1970) and John Walker (Christchurch in 1974) got silver medals behind the great Kip Keino and Filbert Bayi, respectively.
Cycling has had multiple champions before.
Gary Anderson, a Cheatley charge and New Zealand’s first Olympic track medallist, got three golds in Auckland in 1990.
Sprinter Sam Webster snaffled a pair of golds in Glasgow in 2014, while sprinter Ellesse Andrews, 22, who bagged three golds in the velodrome in England to show her Tokyo Olympics silver medal in the keirin was no fluke.
But Gate is a tyre tread ahead due to the degree of difficulty of triumphing on both track and road.
And he’s not finished yet. Cheatley says Gate has been achieving for some time, and that the pursuit team ‘‘would have got a medal at Tokyo’’ in the Olympic Games, ‘‘had he not crashed’’.
He says despite some challenging times for New
Zealand Cycling in recent years, the results show ‘‘the riders and the coaches just get on with the job’’ and he can see Gate and the endurance team ‘‘leading our track programme into the Olympics’’ in two years’ time.
‘Gate winning in both arenas would be like a champion 1500m runner going out and winning the marathon.’