Britain’s sprinters continued their flying start to life in the Paris velodrome with men’s team silver, but were powerless to stop an awesome Netherlands trio retaining their Olympic title.
After Emma Finucane, Sophie Capewell and Katy Marchant had taken a dazzling gold in the women’s event on opening night, the men’s trio of Ed Lowe, Hamish Turnbull and Jack Carlin guaranteed themselves a shot at gold with victory over Germany in the previous round, but always faced a tall order against the Dutch.
Roy van den Berg, Harrie Lavreysen and Jeffrey Hoogland had already broken the world record en route to the final and did so again on the biggest stage, a ride of 40.949 making them the first team ever to break the 41-second barrier, and delivering gold almost a second clear of the Brits.
Still, Britain’s performance with a new-look team for these Olympic Games will go down as hugely encouraging. Remarkably, this is the first time since the event was introduced at Sydney 2000 that Britain have gone into an Olympics without at least one of Sir Jason Kenny and Sir Chris Hoy in the team, but Carlin - the sole survivor from the outfit that one silver in Tokyo - appears to be in superb form ahead of bids for medals in both the individual sprint and Keirin.
"We came here expecting to fight for third, so as soon as we got into that gold final all stress was off and we could just try to express what we could do and enjoy it," said Turnbull.
"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," Carlin explained.
"We executed it as a three brilliantly even when little things were going on throughout the day, we really focused and knuckled down. It's obviously these two's first Olympics and both of them stepped up to the occasion and have a medal to show for it."
Britain’s medal tally is guaranteed to grow on Wednesday night, with the men’s team pursuit outfit certain of silver at least after setting up a clash with new world record holders Australia in the final.
Britain, who won the gold medal at three Games on the bounce between Beijing and Rio, finished off the podium in Tokyo after a dramatic first round exit that ended in a nasty crash with Denmark.
The two nations met again at the same stage here, and for much of the race the Danes again seemed set to emerge on top. However, the British quartet of Ethan Hayter, Oliver Wood, Charlie Tanfield and Ethan Vernon - who at one stage trailed by more than a second - closed superbly to triumph in a time of 3:42.151.
That was more than a second faster than Monday’s ride in qualifying but was soon blown out of the water by Australia, who took more than a second off the world record with a staggering ride of 3:40.730.
Earlier, the women’s team pursuit squad of Elinor Barker, Josie Knight, Anna Morris and Jessica Roberts qualified third fastest for the first round of their competition.
Britain won gold in the event at last summer’s World Championships in Glasgow, but were forced to rejig their team on the eve of the Games after star rider Katie Archibald broke her leg in a freak garden accident.
