Not since 2019 had Katie Archibald competed at the National Track Championships, and in typical fashion, she marked her return with a resounding victory, dominating the points race on the final day.
The double Olympic champion claimed five of the eight sprints in the 80-lap event and gained a lap on the field, roared on by the Manchester Velodrome crowd. Her final tally saw her win by a staggering margin of 37 points ahead of Danielle Watkinson and Cat Ferguson, the silver and bronze medallists.
Speaking afterwards, Archibald said she was “very happy about a plan well executed”.
“I wanted to score early, because I thought the points spread might be clustered across a few riders,” she said. “I thought, ‘If I attack in the final 30 [laps], then at least if I’m up the road, someone can join me, which is better then them being up the road and me having to join them. Then I completely blew my doors.
“My brother [John Archibald] won the national points race in 2018, and similarly was up the road by himself. When someone you love is in agony, you don’t enjoy watching it. I thought, ‘The boy needs his bed.’ That felt very similar.”
As Archibald came off the track after the race, the speakers inside the velodrome blasted ‘She’s a Belter’, a tune by Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Cinnamon.
Her victory came two days after she won silver in the scratch race, and six years after her previous title – the individual pursuit – on her last appearance at the championships. Returning, Archibald said, has felt like a “nice reset”.
“It’s a re-grounding, a rebuild from what, at some point in your career, has been the grassroots of it,” she said. “When I’m not racing, it’s been hard to motivate myself, but that feels like a very distant feeling right now, because the weekend’s gone so well."
Also on the final day of the championships, Matthew Richardson and Lauren Bell sealed clean sweeps of the sprint events, the former winning the keirin, and the latter prevailing in the individual sprint.
Noah Hobbs won the men's scratch race, while the trio of Samuel Davies, Rebecca Newark and Jacob Smith took the para-cycling team sprint title.
There were smiles around the velodrome at the start of the session, when the tandem team sprint squad ‘Jean-Claude Tan Damme’ was announced over the tannoy. The quartet – made up of James Ball, Steffan Lloyd, Jenny Holl and Sophie Unwin – went on to win the event.
