Olympic Games Paris 2024 – Track Cycling [DAY 5]

August 9, 2024

Olympic Games Paris 2024 🇫🇷 – Track Cycling – Day 5 – The Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Velodrome, Paris

Women’s sprint – Q
The women’s track sprint competition encompasses a qualifying round followed by a series of knockout and repechage rounds. The qualifying round consists of each rider completing three laps in turn with their time taken from their final lap. The top 24 riders progress to the 1/32 finals.

Lea Friedrich of Germany set the fastest time in the women’s sprint qualification round, as the world record was beaten four times during the flying 200m time trial.

Sophie Capewell (Great Britain) set a time of 10.132, Ellesse Andrews (New Zealand) set 10.108, Emma Finucane (Great Britain) went even faster in 10.067 but Friedrich proved to be fastest and took the new world record in a time of 10.029.

Canada’s Kelsey Mitchell held the previous world record of 10.154 but was only tenth fastest in 10.285.

24 riders qualified for the next round of the women’s sprint, with Yuan of China and Belgium’s Nicky Degrendele not racing after their high-speed crash in the Keirin.

All the big-name favourites then won their single-sprint races to progress to the 1/16 round of the competition.

Canada’s Lauriane Genest, the Netherlands Steffie van der Peet and local hero Taky Kouame of France qualified by winning the repechage sprints.

The 1/16 finals are held on Friday evening, the 1/8 finals and 1/4 finals on Saturday and the finals to award the medals on Sunday, he final day of the 2024 Olympic Games.

Men’s sprint – 🥇
The sprint or match sprint is a track cycling event involving between two and four riders, though it is usually run as a one-on-one match race between opponents who, unlike in the individual pursuit, start next to each other.

Harrie Lavreysen (Netherlands) repeated with the gold medal in the men’s Sprint, sweeping the two races to distance Australian Matthew Richardson at the Paris Olympic Games.

It was the second gold medal in Paris for the Dutchman, and a career fourth gold medal across two Olympic Games appearances.

“I feel really, really good today, and it’s my best day ever,” Lavreysen said after ripping out a blistering sprint against Richardson in the second race to go under the 9.5-second mark for the lap.

“In the final riding around in a 9.4 – that’s insane. I didn’t think that was possible. The whole sprint tournament I always tried to save my strength and not do too much, but in the final I could finally go crazy and go all in. It’s amazing.”

Richardson, falling to one of the greatest track sprinters in the sport, gave credit to his rival.

“Harry is the greatest cyclist, probably, of all time. He’s a 13-time world champion. He doesn’t skip a beat. He wins like basically everything,” Richardson said

“To be close to someone like that, someone who does what Harry does, is amazing to me. It wasn’t that many years ago that I was looking at him or how fast he was and how big of a gap there was between him and myself. So to be anywhere close is an amazing feeling for me, and I still pitch myself.”

“I’m super proud of how I raced, I really put it all out the track and didn’t leave myself wondering ‘what could it be?’ So I’m proud of the silver for sure.”

Richardson lost out in the quarterfinal to Lavreysen at Worlds last year and didn’t make it to the medals and the Olympic silver was a big confirmation for the Australian.

“I knew I was capable of a result like this. Glasgow (2023 UCI Word Championships) was a little bit tricky for me, it actually knocked my confidence a little bit – could I get back to that sort of top finishing race? And I think I demonstrated here, that I am back.”

In the battle for the bronze, Jack Carlin (Great Britain) overpowered the reigning silver medallist Jeffrey Hoogland (Netherlands) in the decider. Carlin won the opener, then Hoogland knotted the competition to bring on the final three laps.

Carlin also earned the bronze at the Tokyo Olympic Games, while Hoogland, a three-time world champion in the Sprint, was overcome with emotion in missing the final medal after the pair clashed during the decider at slow speed and the Dutchman missed out after the restart.

Carlin noted that he had come into the Olympics with a focus on the Keirin but had to fight in every round of the sprint tournament.

“It’s not like the first couple of races, you kind of saunter in, and you know you’re going to get through. Every race was hard, and I can feel every one of them in my legs right now,” Carlin said.

“My aim is the keirin, that was my aim when I came here. Sprint was a bonus if I got it, and it (keirin) starts tomorrow (Saturday), so I’m looking forward to it.”

Quarterfinal
There was drama in the Paris Olympics velodrome as Britain’s Jack Carlin and Kaiya Ota (Japan) clashed in the men’s sprint quarterfinal. Ota had the speed on Carlin and won the opening match, but was relegated.

In the decider, Carlin managed to get past Ota to take the win and while there was some argy-bargy and warnings against both riders, Carlin was able to sail into the semifinal.

There, however, he will face defending Olympic champion Harrie Lavreysen (Netherlands) in the semifinal.

Matthew Richardson (Australia) and Jeffrey Hoogland (Netherlands) will face off in the semifinal to decide who will go onto the gold medal round.

Qualifying
Harrie Lavreysen (Netherlands) continued his domination in the men’s sprint events at the Olympic Games in Paris, setting a new world and Olympic record in the men’s sprint qualifying 200m flying lap.

The record, 9.1 seconds, set by Nicholas Paul (Trinidad & Tobago) in 2019, was broken first by Australia’s Matthew Richardson who sailed around the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome in a time of 9.091, but Lavreysen was soon eclipsed that mark.

Lavreysen’s 9.088-second flying lap carved yet another record on the fast track, which has seen records set in the men’s team pursuit and men’s team sprint and women’s team sprint.

Women’s Madison – 🥇
A madison race is a tag team points race that involves all 16 teams competing at once. One cyclist from each team competes at a time; the two team members can swap at any time by touching (including pushing and hand-slinging). The distance is 120 laps (30 km). Teams score points in two ways: lapping the field and sprints. A team that gains a lap on the field earns 20 points; one that loses a lap has 20 points deducted. Every 10th lap is a sprint, with the first to finish the lap earning 5 points, second 3 points, third 2 points, and fourth 1 point. The points values are doubled for the final sprint. There is only one round of competition.

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.”

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.”

Results Women’s sprint – Q :

QUALIFYING

1/32 FINAL

Results Men’s sprint – 🥇 :

1/8 FINAL

1/16 FINAL

1/32 FINAL

Results Women’s Madison – 🥇 :