Walls adds silver to his track tally
THERE was no fairytale ending this time for Matt Walls to go with his omnium gold, but still a silver medal at the end of a hard-fought madison.
The newly minted Olympic champion teamed up with his housemate, Ethan Hayter, to produce a brilliant last sprint just as their chances looked to be slipping away.
With double points on offer, they pipped the French to second place.
‘I thought we were racing for bronze,’ admitted Hayter, aware of the attack from behind in the closing minutes of cycling’s frenetic relay race, in which one rider ‘hand-slings’ the other into the race before he then takes a breather.
‘I was looking up at the board with two laps (before) the last sprint. I saw a four-point lead over the Belgians and thought we have to beat them.
‘But it’s so hard to keep track of what’s happening. I thought it was bronze. Silver and bronze are both great, aren’t they? And we were actually closer to winning than I thought. We could have made up some points but I think the Danes would then have ridden differently. They were the stronger pair.’
If there is any nation the Brits would not have wanted to lose gold to it was the Danes — and vice versa — after the rancorous background of the last week.
It started with Team GB and others registering protests against Denmark for the use of kinesiology tape and aero-resistant undervests and escalated after a heavy crash between Dane Frederik Madsen and Britain’s Charlie Tanfield. The Danish rider fumed: ‘F*** them.’
Regardless of that subtext, Lasse Norman Hansen and Michael Morkov deserved this victory.
For Britain it was their 11th cycling medal at these Games, inside or outside the velodrome, with more plunder hopefully awaiting overnight, with Laura Kenny gunning for a sixth career gold medal in the women’s omnium and Jack Carlin due to fight for honours in the keirin. So early talk of the Izu track being a graveyard for Britain’s cycling legacy appears to have been premature.
Hayter’s first Olympic medal comes after a dark year of injuries — including a broken back almost a year ago. But the 22-year-old has so much potential that his former team-mate Ed Clancy described him as the ‘next Bradley Wiggins’.
Post-race, Hayter spoke of the pressure of a discipline in which there are so many moving pieces: ‘I’ve sworn in every interview since the race ended but I’ve cooled off now. You do a lot of team pursuit training and it’s a four-minute event. You get half an hour into a madison and think, “Jesus Christ”.’
South London-born Hayter and Oldham-born Walls, who live in Gatley, near Manchester, started with gusto, winning the first of the 20 sprints before falling behind to the Dutch after the 12th contest.
‘We played it quite clever in the middle,’ said Hayter. ‘With 100 laps to go I was suffering, and when one person starts to suffer they make it harder for the other person. Matt started to suffer, probably from me. We both went through a bit of a rough patch.
‘But when I saw 35 laps to go I said to Matt: “I’m actually starting to come around a bit here. We can go for these last few sprints and push for something”.’
It was nervy just watching the concluding action, fearing a Belgian raid, but Walls and Hayter pounced at the right time.
‘I waited, waited, waited and on the last straight fully committed,’ added Hayter, ‘knowing we’d get across the Belgians and win a medal if everything went right.’