Team GB’s sprinters took a hard-fought silver medal in the Olympic Velodrome, but were unable to prevent Harrie Lavreysen leading the Netherlands to the men’s team sprint title, with a world-record time.
In a one-sided final, Great Britain’s sprint trio of Jack Carlin, Hamish Turnbull and Ed Lowe, were valiant but powerless, as Lavreysen and teammates, Jeffrey Hoogland and Roy van den Berg led almost from the first bend.
As the Dutch, having already broken the world record earlier in the competition, sped to a world-record time of 40.949sec, Carlin, Turnbull and Lowe could only look on as Lavreysen and his two teammates raised their arms in celebration.
“We had a choice,” the Team GB sprint coach, Jason Kenny, said of the final. “We could put massive gears on and throw everything at it and hope for the best, but in all likelihood the gears we were on, we believed, were the quickest. So we sat down and thought: ‘Let’s just do our ride and go as fast as we can.’
“Obviously, the Dutch are quicker but, if they crack, we’ve got to be close to pick up the pieces. They didn’t, they executed perfectly themselves, and they’re in a different league at the minute.”
There was no gap in the armour of the team on the other side of the track and Carlin was first to recognise the scale of Team GB’s achievement, against the world’s best sprint team.
“As a team, we came and delivered,” he said, before adding that silver was “probably the best we could have done on the day.”
Carlin said: “That Dutch team is in a league of their own. I think we’ve executed three really solid races there and can be proud of that as a team. We knew that we would be up against it coming into it, but we stuck to our process and stuck to what we wanted from each race.
“Two boys came in without any experience really at this kind of level,” Carlin said of his two teammates. “They’ve really stepped up and I’m proud of them.”
Turnbull said: “We weren’t expecting to fight for gold. We were chasing the bronze really, so to get into that gold final, all the stress was off.”
Taking silver, though, did not tell the whole story. Carlin’s presence in Paris had been threatened by injury as recently as April. The 27-year-old broke his ankle when one of the cranks on his bike snapped, and was left with a race against time to get fit enough for Paris.
The ankle injury, occurring just three months before the Paris Games, left him reeling. “I didn’t really have time to even think about it,” he said. “Straight away I had a rehab plan and I just got stuck into that.”
Once again, records tumbled in the sauna-like conditions of the world’s widest velodrome in Saint-Quentin‑en-Yvelines, but this time, at least in terms of sprinting, it was the Dutch that led the way. Britain performed at a high level throughout the sprints, beating Germany in the first round, with Carlin’s flying last lap taking them through to the gold medal race-off. But the scale of their task was quickly evident as the Dutch, spearheaded by Lavreysen, broke the world record for the first time, beating Canada with a time of 41.191.
Carlin, who won silver and bronze in Tokyo, has acknowledged in the past that Lavreysen, gold medallist in the individual and team sprint in Tokyo, may well be the greatest track sprinter in the sport’s history.
In the women’s team pursuit qualifiers New Zealand – eyeing yet another world record with a time of 4:04.679 – plus Italy and Australia led the way. A mere 48 hours after winning gold in the women’s road race, Kristen Faulkner rolled away with USA teammates Chloé Dygert, Lily Williams and Jennifer Valente, to set the second fastest time.
Team GB’s quartet of Elinor Barker, Josie Knight, Anna Morris and Jessica Roberts fell behind New Zealand’s fastest pace to finish third-best qualifier, which, in Katie Archibald’s absence, was a solid performance. Eight teams will go through to the finals on Wednesday.
The men’s pursuit team were shuffled for their first-round match with Denmark, with Charlie Tanfield coming in alongside Ethan Hayter, Ollie Wood and Ethan Vernon, for Dan Bigham, who revealed that he had crashed in training last Saturday.
With the winners going through to race for gold, the British quartet initially led but by halfway had slipped behind the Danes. In the final kilometre, though, Team GB narrowed the gap and went on to win with a time of 3:42.151, a hair’s breadth short of the world record of 3:42.032.
Australia’s four were even faster and had the reigning Olympic champions Italy on the ropes from the off in their first-round heat, setting a world record of 3:40.730. In the final on Wednesday, Team GB will face the Australians in the race for the gold medal. It seems almost certain that it will require yet another world record time to secure the gold medal.
