Great Britain’s track cyclists secured Team GB’s 1,000th Olympic medal in sporting competition as Australia held on to a hair’s-breadth advantage to win gold in the men’s team pursuit.
In a final that was almost too close to call, Ethan Hayter, Dan Bigham, Charlie Tanfield and Ethan Vernon had to settle for silver after Hayter slipped off his saddle on the last lap.
As the British quartet made one final effort with the 4,000m race reaching its conclusion, Hayter, under intense pressure, slid too far forward and ended up almost crashing. “I just really gave too much,” he said. “My whole body went weak and I really struggled to hold myself on the bike.”
It was a final that could have gone either way as Australia entered the final kilometre with a narrow lead.
“This is the nature of team-pursuiting at this level,” Bigham said. “It’s on a knife-edge at the back end. You’re trying to get three guys over the line absolutely empty, completely cooked. The breaking point has to be somewhere and you saw it.
“It was one of the classic GB-Aussie fightouts that have been a staple of the Olympics. Hayter found the limit. That limit was the end of the saddle and that was the end of our run.
“It was always going to be a tight fight. It’s just frustrating to have it so close and then have it fall away from you in that moment.”
In another reshuffle to the British four, Ollie Wood stood down and Bigham returned after sitting out the Tuesday session to recover from a training crash. But it was Hayter whose strength was pivotal to the aspiration for a gold medal.
“We gave half a lap too much to Hayter and he found the limit and slipped off the saddle,” Bigham said. “We have him [doing] four and three-quarters [laps] and normally we give him four and a quarter and in qualifying rounds he’s not been full gas.”
Team GB have consistently performed well in this event and have won medals at six of the past seven Olympics. This silver medal marks a return to form and suggests there is more to come from a team that is edging back towards world‑beating status.
In the women’s team pursuit, Team GB took bronze as Elinor Barker, Josie Knight, Anna Morris and Jess Roberts maintained the women’s record of finishing on the podium in every Olympic Games since 2012, when the discipline was reintroduced.
In the first round, they had been unable to resist the in-form American quartet of Chloé Dygert, the time trial bronze medallist, Kristen Faulkner, winner of the women’s road race, Lily Williams and Jennifer Valente. But after a buildup fraught with setbacks, principally the injury that befell mainstay Katie Archibald when she broke a leg in her back garden to miss the Games, the bronze medal was deserved recognition of another strong performance.
“Six weeks ago, when I arrived back at my house and Katie wasn’t there because she was in A&E, it felt like the Olympic dream had gone down the drain,” said Knight, Archibald’s housemate. “It took me a week to refocus.
“Selection was up in the air, we didn’t know who the team was going to be, we didn’t know who was going to be riding or what we were going to do. It was a nervous week. We had to refocus and come up with a new strategy.”
The USA pursuiters have also been consistent podium finishers in the event, taking silver in 2012 and 2016 and winning a bronze medal in Tokyo. They set the fastest time of the morning sessions, 4min 4.629sec and went on to beat New Zealand in the race for gold.
Not everything has gone smoothly at the track, however, as serial issues with the last-lap bell ringer have led to confusion.
On Tuesday, the bell was rung a lap too late during Canada’s 16-lap pursuit qualifier, leading them to think they had got their lap count wrong.
“I was fairly confident that was the last one, and then they rang the bell as we were three across coming across the line,” Maggie Coles-Lyster said.
“We all had a moment of ‘go, go go!’ because that could be our race over. There was a little bit of panic, and a 17-lap pursuit isn’t ideal. It hurts a little bit.”
In the early session on Wednesday, during the keirin heats, it happened again. During the repechage heats, the bell was rung at the end of the final lap, causing some riders to race on.
Despite the ensuing chaos, the judges decided the mistake had not affected the race and the results stood.