When Anna Henderson took silver in the women’s time trial, and Tom Pidcock a spectacular gold in the men’s mountain biking, there was good reason to be optimistic about Team GB’s prospects in the Paris 2024 cycling programme.
But although it was bookended by medal success, this was an Olympic campaign that, unlike others, never really caught fire. Bad luck, illness, injury and losses of form or confidence combined too often to thwart the best laid plans.
It was a perspective with which the performance director, Stephen Park, didn’t disagree. “I think personally that’s a fair assessment,” Park said. “We won’t ever know what might have been but had some of our lineups been a little bit different, or crashes not happened, then we could have easily won one or two more gold medals.”
Key to the reduced medal hopes on the track was the freak injury that befell Katie Archibald, just weeks before the Games. That injury forced a crisis that was resolved only after a week of uncertainty.
“We’ve had a fantastic Games despite a number of pieces of adversity in the weeks leading up to the Games,” Park said. “One of those was Katie Archibald. Our women’s team endurance programme coming into the Games would have looked very different had she been here. Katie is a fantastic rider and was actually in the form of her life at the time. So that could well have made it look different.”
But there were other shortcomings. Too many medal opportunities that had been taken in past Olympics slipped away, from Josh Tarling’s unfortunate puncture in the men’s time trial to Beth Shriever’s shock collapse in the BMX finals, having won every preceding race leading to the final.
Creditable silvers and bronzes were deservedly celebrated, but in truth other nations – the Netherlands, France and the USA – have been higher achievers during these Olympics.
There was a degree of papering over the cracks in advance of the Games, but the reality was that absent or injured Olympians – Jason and Laura Kenny and particularly Archibald – were sorely missed.
That context, combined with the number of past medallists who came into the Games recovering from injury or illness – Lizzie Deignan, Jack Carlin, Neah Evans, Kye Whyte, Evie Richards – all influenced the outcome. Others, such as Ethan Hayter, who competed in the men’s omnium despite having been injured in the final lap of the men’s team pursuit, raced on.
Asked if allowing Hayter to continue was a mistake, Park again agreed. “With hindsight, would it have been better to have brought somebody else in for the omnium? Yes, it would.”
Layered on top of that has been British Cycling’s post “medal factory” narrative. An adjustment in culture has also led to new objectives that are not all connected with having a bigger sack of gold medals than anybody else.
While Dave Brailsford railed against the “plucky loser” mentality prior to his first Olympics in 2004, Park said, in mid-June this year, that “winning itself is not enough, it’s about the impact of winning and what impact it has on society”.
Cultural change has also changed ambitions and Park spoke of the impact that pressure of expectations, in the aftermath of success in Tokyo, had had on some athletes, including the BMX gold medallist, Charlotte Worthington.
“If you’ve got somebody like Charlotte, who comes in as a new sport gold medallist, on the front page of every newspaper, a superhero for lots of young kids, that comes with a huge amount of pressure,” he said. “I’m actually really proud of the support we’ve been able to give from a physical and wellbeing perspective, but also a mental wellbeing perspective, all the way through the cycle.”
Yet this was the lowest Olympic gold medal tally for Team GB since the Brailsford-led campaign in 2004. However, Park dismissed the suggestion that it was the end of an era.
“It could easily have been quite different,” he said. “If you look across all the British sports, it’s tougher to win gold medals now than it has ever been. The difference between first and fourth is smaller than it’s ever been.
“Performing in one discipline or another, your riders have more time to recover. Trying to be competitive in them all makes it incredibly difficult to do that. We’ve got riders who are capable of doing that, we’ll go back and analyse what we’ve done,” Park said, “and we’ll rebuild as we go to LA [in 2028].”
