Aussies stun the track world
The British team pursuit quartet were sitting pretty in Apeldoorn this March. They were back wearing the rainbow bands for the first time since 2012, having ridden an impressive 3.53 on an average pursuiting track with a 19-year-old newcomer and a rider who wasn’t even on a British Cycling funded programme. The Aussies weren’t present and had barely turned up to the World Cups. Advantage Great Britain.
Four weeks later everything changed. Australians Leigh Howard, Sam Welsford, Alex Porter and Kelland O’brien, a quartet with an average age of 22, stunned the cycling world by riding a 3.49 at the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast — an exceptional ride and a world record time.
This was no fluke. The Aussies had purposely not travelled to the World Cups and the Worlds to avoid “being permanently at 80 per cent” according to new boss Simon Jones.
The British coach who joined Cycling Australia the year before had been vilified in the Aussie press for not going to the bigger competitions. But he’d had a plan and he’d stuck to it. The team that would regularly perform each year at the World Championships had instead set a laser focus on one goal and everyone — riders, coaches and backroom staff — had to sign up to it. That incredible ride got the reaction it deserved and justified Jones’s new approach.
Whether or not that can be bettered at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics when qualification demands a travel-heavy winter programme chasing qualification points, remains to be seen. Nevertheless, thanks to a British coach the Aussies were back on top, and by some distance.