Team GB’s Elinor Barker and Neah Evans rallied to claim a last-gasp silver medal in the women’s Madison race in the Olympic Velodrome, while Jack Carlin took a hard-fought and fractious bronze medal in the men’s individual sprint.
Evans and Barker were still in the bronze medal position with six laps to go before an inspired acceleration from Barker took the final sprint, which was worth double points, and secured Team GB the silver medal.
“Every single medal is a huge achievement,” Barker said. “This means that every single rider across our squad has got a medal, which is awesome.”
Carlin’s progress to the bronze medal was nerve-racking after he had been given a warning for “irregular movement to prevent the opponent from passing” after some feisty confrontations with Kaiya Ota on Thursday, which left the Japanese rider in tears.
In the final race-off for bronze Carlin switched his front wheel across the track into that of his opponent, Jeffrey Hoogland of the Netherlands, causing the British rider to fear the worst.
“I leaned into him,” Carlin said. “It was my fault. I should have known better than to turn up that quick. He took it really well.”
Carlin, who broke his ankle three months before the Olympics, said that the two days of sprint competition had been “the most mentally challenging” of his career.
“That’s my opportunity,” he said. “I may not get that opportunity in the keirin. That last sprint was the quickest I have done in the whole competition.”
But Carlin’s racing style brought some criticism from the Dutch coach, Mehdi Kordi. “I’d spoken to them [the race jury] about what happened with Carlin yesterday, the rugby on wheels,” Kordi said.
“There was head-butting and elbows yesterday. Jack is a worthy medal winner, but with the incidents that happened today, I was surprised nothing was done. It was quite bizarre.”
After coming together with Hoogland Carlin took his time to re-focus, helped by supportive words from the sprint coach Jason Kenny.
“Jason’s cool as a cucumber,” Carlin said. “He just said, ‘Brush it off, it’s happened now, you’re going to have to deal with it. Let’s get focused.’ It was an emotional day.”
Carlin’s success was greeted with a brief flurry of boos. “Listen, it’s nothing new,” he said. “Not after Tokyo. That’s part of the Olympics. You put yourself in the light to be challenged like that.”
Evans, whose mother, Ros, competed in the 1984 Winter Olympics, also endured a far from perfect buildup to the Olympics.
“The past 18 months have been pretty shit for me,” the Scot said. “There have been several times where I’ve sat there and thought ‘I’m not going to make it.’ I had a crash and ripped my hip flexor, and I had a crash and did my back.
“At the end of April, I ended up with a bacterial infection that properly floored me. If at that point someone said, ‘You will go to the Olympics and get a silver medal,’ I’d have been like, ‘Not a chance.’”
She added: “I remember trying to walk up a flight of stairs and getting halfway up and thinking, ‘I can’t get up these stairs.’ I’m delighted to come away with silver. We have worked so hard for this. We had a really great Worlds and have built so well from that.”
Barker learned that she was pregnant on the day she won her silver medal in the women’s team pursuit in Tokyo. After taking maternity leave in 2022, she came back to partner Evans to the world title in Glasgow a year ago.
“We came in as world champions which obviously meant we put that pressure on ourselves,” Barker said. “We had a target on our back potentially.
“We said it wouldn’t change the way that we raced but it was hard not to feel like we needed to take responsibility for things at times and perhaps that’s what we’ll pick up in our analysis.”
In the women’s sprint qualifying, Emma Finucane and Sophie Capewell, already gold medallists in the team sprint, qualified for the final eight, as a series of record times were broken in the oppressive heat of the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Velodrome.
As a spate of new Olympic records were set in the 200m qualifying rounds, the world record, set in 2019, stood firm until the keirin gold medallist, Ellesse Andrews of New Zealand, set a new mark.
Finucane set the second fastest qualifying time with 10.067secs –fast enough to beat the longstanding previous world record – but was just short of Lea Friedrich’s new world record of 10.029secs.
Capewell, racing fifth from last, finished as the fourth-fastest qualifier. In the next round, Finucane took on Poland’s Marlena Karwacka while Capewell raced Malaysia’s Nurul Mohd Asri. The British riders qualified comfortably for Saturday’s last eight.
Three years ago, Team GB took six gold, four silver and two bronze medals in the cycling events. With only two days of racing remaining and four Olympic titles still on offer, it is clear that the six golds won in Tokyo will not be replicated in Paris.
