PEDAL PAIN
Kennys settle for silver as track cycle teams are squeezed out
First the positives. Britain’s cyclists are now just one medal shy of their pre-games target of eight, with plenty more opportunities to come. Jason Kenny is now the joint-most decorated Olympian of all time in terms of medals won with eight (six of them gold) and still has two individual events to run. And it took a couple of staggering performances from Germany and Holland respectively to beat GB’S women’s pursuit and men’s sprint teams into second place. No shame in any of that.
Except, this was not how it was meant to go. A day of head-spinning twists and turns, with protests, cheating allegations, crashes and retirements, ended with three firsts. Britain’s men’s pursuit team lost a race at an Olympics for the first time since 2004. Britain’s men’s sprint team lost a race at an Olympics for the first time since 2004. And Britain’s women’s pursuit team lost a race for the first time ever.
Britain’s track hegemony was never going to last for ever. But still, when it happened it felt shocking somehow. In the space of an hour, all the old certainties fell away, the Jason and Laura Show buffering.
Laura Kenny had never lost at an Olympic event she had entered. The 29-year-old was four from four heading into yesterday’s women’s team pursuit.
But from the moment the day began with news that Ed Clancy, the three-time Olympic champion, was withdrawing from the competition with a back injury, it felt like the end of an era.
Although the GB quartet of Kenny, Katie Archibald, Neah Evans and Josie Knight qualified for the final with a world-record time of 4min 06.748sec, they stumbled slightly on the warm-down, Archibald crashing into Evans. They then had to watch as Germany, the surprise package of these track championships so far, lowered the world record again in their semifinal with a 4-06.159.
Could GB eke out a few more tenths? It proved irrelevant. Germany smashed the world record in the final by a full two seconds, posting 4-04.242 to win by a country mile as the British quartet got more and more ragged, finishing in 4-10.607.
Archibald denied that the crash after the first round had had an effect. “It was mainly my pride that was hurt,” she said. “I’m hopeful that a lot of people had a lie-in and only got up for the final, but I know it’s one of those clips that’s going to be played over and over again. I wanted the ground to swallow me up as I went sliding into her. I feel as much shame as you can imagine a person would feel.”
Archibald added that the decision to swap out Elinor Barker for Evans was tactical and denied it would have made a difference in the final.
Kenny, sitting next to her, agreed. Germany were just too good. “They were phenomenal, you can’t take anything away from them,” she said. “That is incredible, that’s going to be a record that stands for a long time, I think.”
An hour later, it was her husband, Jason, saying almost exactly the same thing about the Dutch. Again, the GB men had performed valiantly in their semi-final, posting an Olympic record and personal best of 41.829sec, it lasted minutes as the Dutch, who have really taken this event on in the past few years, set a 41.431. In sprinting terms, four tenths is an age.
The writing was on the wall. “We were out of it before we went in,” admitted man two, Jack Carlin. “Four tenths is huge. So, we gambled.” The GB team “geared up”, putting on even bigger gears in the hope of producing something seismic, but the gamble did not come off. The Dutch – who were able to swap men between the two rounds as they do not have a pursuit team and therefore brought an extra sprinter – were fresher and faster.
In the final, they lowered the Olympic record again to 41.369, whereas Britain fell apart, Carlin at man two losing contact with Ryan Owens, Kenny at man three losing contact with Carlin.
“They were better than us today, simple as that,” Kenny conceded, adding that he did not agree it was the end of an era. “I don’t think so. At the end of the day, we’ve always been on the right side of the few tenths it takes to win. This time, we were on the wrong side.”
Maybe, but it did not help the general feeling of discombobulation that Kenny followed that comment with a gloomy one looking ahead to his chances in the sprint and the keirin. “I think, personally, my best chance of being on the podium was probably in that event.”