Italy's Chiara Consonni and Vittoria Guazzini claimed the gold medal in the women's Madison after a poised and confident performance in the Paris Olympics. Great Britain's Elinor Barker and Neah Evans claimed silver while the surprise young team from the Netherlands, Maike van der Duin and Lisa van Belle stole a lap and won the bronze medal.
Consonni and Guazzini won three of the 12 sprints in the 120-lap race, then used a late attack to lap the field, earning 20 points for that feat. Although they were down at the halfway point, their move brought the duo's tally to 37 points, six more than their nearest rivals, defending Olympic Madison champions Great Britain.
"It's really hard to find the words in this moment," Guazzini said. "We don't believe it. We were motivated, really disappointed after the fourth place in the team pursuit, and we showed that we are a great team. All the girls believed in us. We fought until the end.
"At first we were a bit lost, but I didn't want to panic," Guazzini added. "The Madison is long, I thought we shouldn’t kill ourselves and then finish fifth. It was do or die. It went well and we won the Olympic gold medal. We won it with our legs and heart. We were the strongest."
Consonni was a late replacement for Elisa Balsamo, and said, "I cannot understand what has happened. I only knew I was going to race yesterday and now I find myself with an Olympic title."
Evans and Barker, taking the torch from Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald who won the inaugural Olympic Madison in Tokyo, missed the winning move but amassed 31 points with a consistent performance that they capped off with a late attack to take home the most lucrative sprint at the finish to win the silver medal.
They said they didn't think anyone would take a lap at the Olympics and stuck to their strategy of going for points instead.
"We're world champions, we really hoped for gold but the Madison is so chaotic, it's such a mad race anything could happen," Barker said. "We stuck to our plan and performed really well but ultimately, Italy were just amazing today. Unbeatable from where we were standing. I'm super happy we managed to get ourselves back into the silver medal position."
The British team just managed to get ahead of the Van der Duin and Van Belle - two young newcomers to the Olympics, who stole a lap with 48 laps to go to move into the lead but only scored eight points in sprints for a total of 28.
Britain were in the lead at the midpoint of the race with 14 points on the US pair, but slipped to second after the Dutch team lapped the field before sprint number eight. The Brits took the eighth sprint but Italy attacked straight away afterward and powered clear ahead of a field full of tired legs.
The Italians stayed away to take the maximum points on sprint nine to move into the lead, and then controlled the race from then on, marking the Dutch duo when they tried to go clear with 16 laps remaining.
From there, it was a fight for bronze with the British team getting the better of the Netherlands in the dying moments of the race and staying clear to deny them the silver.
"It took a really big effort," Evans said of the British pair's late move. "It's that part of the race that it really is biting and we're watching the lap board coming down and we know we have to act, we have to start scoring again. We managed to do it. We're delighted we pulled it off in the end."
The Dutch duo were thrilled to come away with a bronze medal that nobody expected.
"We only did two races before this. We are quite a young team and Lisa did not a lot of races on this level," Van der Duin said. "We started in the beginning of this year after the first Nations Cup this project together and I think we were really open minded coming into this race - no expectations because why would we have expectations?
"But we had a plan to go for the laps because we knew it would be really chaotic and in the sprints it's really hard to get the points, and we trained really hard for it. We knew it could be possible and we gave everything on the track today."
