MAD FOR IT!
GB snatch silver in Madison, but Hayter reveals: ‘I thought I was going for bronze’
ETHAN HAYTER thought he was sprinting for cycling bronze as Team GB snatched a dramatic silver medal in the men’s Madison madhouse.
In a chaotic finale to 200 laps of the Izu Velodrome, Hayter and Matt Walls added to Great Britain’s medal haul 24 hours after Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald had romped home in the women’s race.
While Denmark’s world champions Lasse Norman Hansen and Michael Morkov took gold, Hayter and omnium gold medallist Walls finished only three points back – but did not realise they had pipped
France to second place.
Hayter, 22, said: “We were a lot closer to winning than
I thought we would be.
“I was looking up at the board, I was coming in with two laps to go to do the last sprint and I saw a four-point gap to the Belgians.
“I thought we had to beat them to get the bronze, but sometimes it’s so hard to keep track of what’s happening.”
Although Hayter and Walls have been regular Madison allies at Under-23 level, illness and injury hampered the Manchester housemates’ preparations for Tokyo.
A horror crash on the road at GentWevelgem last October kept Hayter on the sidelines, then Walls was forced to quarantine in a Belgian hotel after testing positive for Covid. Hayter said: “There’s been so little track racing during the pandemic I didn’t know what to expect – I had a crash, broke my leg and a tendon and I missed the Euros.
“Then Matt had coronavirus, so we’ve been a bit unlucky in that sense. But Matt thoroughly deserves the two medals he’s got this week – he’s had a bit of a tough time.”
Walls and Hayter (below) will be racing against each other in 11 days when their professional road teams, Bora-Hansgrohe and Ineos Grenadiers, go head-to-head on the Tour of Norway. But they forged a brilliant alliance to keep Team GB’s medal count ticking over at Tokyo 2020.
Although Walls, 23, said he was “cooked at halfway”, the pair dug deep, hung on grimly in the middle third of the race, and found a second wind in the closing stages.
Although they finished level on points with France, they burgled silver by winning the final sprint of the 200-lap marathon.
“We found a bit of gas at the end to finish it off,” said Walls, who has become the sentry of Britain’s endurance squad almost overnight.
“We haven’t raced a Madison in a long time, so there were going to be mistakes, but we rode well and came away with silver. I’m pretty happy with that.”