This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 11 September 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
Matthew Richardson was the last person in the velodrome to realise he had broken a world record. Barrelling at 80kph (50mph), dizzy-eyed, and with his legs still spinning wildly, the small timing board at the top of the banking was a haze of red and blue. The roars from his skeleton support crew, had he been able to hear them, might have given him a hint of his triumph. But Richardson had gone deep, and his bike wasn’t slowing down. “The wind was travelling past my head so fast it blurred a lot of the cheering out,” he remembers. “It wasn’t until probably half a lap later that I actually saw the number 8.9 that I realised I’d done it.”
