The Olympic track cycling has just started at the velodrome. It's a beautifully designed building and a fitting tribute to all the success that our cyclists have achieved since the state-of-the-art Manchester velodrome was built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games.
Great Britain won seven gold medals, three silvers and two bronzes on the track in Beijing, including three golds for Chris Hoy and two for Bradley Wiggins. To put that into perspective, we won seven of 10 events and 12 of 30 medals available. Of our entire track cycling team, only Mark Cavendish failed to win a medal, and (as most of you know) he's since become the most successful road cyclist in the world. That's an astonishingly dominant performance by any measure. Even more so when you consider that the prestigious men's 1000m race - at which Britain's Jason Queally and Chris Hoy had won the previous two Olympic golds - was surprisingly cut from the Olympic programme prior to Beijing.
Repeating that performance was always going to be a difficult task, especially with several other countries increasing investment in the sport to try to catch up. But changes introduced by the UCI (the sport's governing body) at the behest of the IOC have made it an impossible one.
Firstly, each country can now only enter one rider or team for each event. This immediately means that no country will ever emulate our Beijing feat of winning more medals than there were events. The main headache this created for the GB selectors was who to pick for the men's sprint, since Jason Kenny and Chris Hoy would both be favourites to win medals. The selectors have picked Kenny on the basis of his better recent form, so Chris Hoy cannot now defend one of his three Olympic titles. As mentioned above, this is now the second time that Hoy has been prevented from defending an Olympic title.
Secondly, several events have been cut from the Olympic programme. This is an unfortunate consequence of the admirable objective of enabling women to compete in just as many track cycling events as men. Rather than adding women's equivalents of the existing men's events, the UCI have been forced to remove some events to avoid increasing the total number and thereby diluting the value of a gold medal (as the IOC would see it). The men's madison has been cut, along with the men's and women's individual pursuit events (previously won for Britain by Chris Boardman, Bradley Wiggins and Rebecca Romero) and the men's and women's points races. These events have been replaced with the women's team sprint, the women's team pursuit, the women's keirin and the men's and women's omnium races. For those of you new to track cycling, the omnium is a hexathlon of disciplines aimed at rewarding all-round cycling skill where competitors tackle a short time trial, a flying lap race, a points race, elimination race, pursuit race and scratch race.
It's worth remembering that these changes are great news for some riders - Victoria Pendleton now has the chance to ride for three gold medals rather than one, and to translate the staggering dominance she's exhibited at recent World Championships into the Olympic arena in front of an adoring home crowd. But it's a real shame that administrators couldn't have found a way to retain traditional events such as the individual 1,000m and 4,000m races while also introducing long overdue equality. Even taking into account that there are also a few mountain bike, BMX and road cycling events at London 2012, it must be pretty devastating for track cyclists to see swimmers and track and field athletes competing in 34 and 48 events respectively. I'm certainly not arguing that any sport should be structured to ensure that Great Britain wins as many medals as possible. I'm arguing that the sport should be properly represented at the Olympic Games, and that we should be able to see athletes competing to become Olympic champions in the most prestigious track cycling races.
In short, don't blame Team GB's track cyclists when we fall short of our Beijing medal tally. Blame murky manoeuvrings behind the curtain of sporting politics.
With 7 gold, 1 silver and 1 bronze in 2012, and total dominance of the track cycling medal table again, I think we could legitimately say we at least equalled Beijing under the circumstances, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteIn my view our track cycling medal tally at London 2012 represents a far better team performance than Beijing in the sense that we won 9 medals from the only 10 chances that we were allowed by the UCI. A good few of those medals would also be regarded as upsets in the sense that the British winners were not defending world champions. I don't think anyone expected this level of success, including British Cycling.
ReplyDeleteThat doesn't contradict anything in my post. We were prevented from repeating the feat of collecting 12 (or more) track cycling medals by the new "one entry per event per nation" rule. Hopefully the UCI will change this rule and also introduce a wider range of events for Rio. The madison, 1km and individual pursuit should all be brought back.