The omnium is a six-discipline event that is spread over two days. It is, for Mark Cavendish an extremely long job interview. If he is to be selected for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, he needs to prove his worth at the Track World Championships. If he thought it would be straightforward, he soon found out otherwise and as a cameraman moved in for a shot before the second event, he was visibly annoyed.
He was also left looking over his shoulder at the form of Jon Dibben, who won gold last night in the men’s points race, the one discipline that any omnium rider has to master.
It is Dibben, 22, who could yet snatch a place in Rio from under the nose of Cavendish. The pressure is on and the question is whether Cavendish will be as thrilling as Dibben in the omnium points race today.
Cavendish was, though, in his element for last night’s elimination race, the most captivating of all the omnium disciplines and in which he needed all his physical and mental agility.
Cavendish avoided a crash and a few close shaves before finishing second behind Fernando Gaviria and might easily have won had the race not ended in confusion.
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After three events, Cavendish sat in seventh place, 18 points behind the joint leaders. This was not sufficient to startle his doubters and probably not enough to placate his supporters. The omnium is a complicated affair and so all is not lost but the 30-year-old from the Isle of Man would have expected to finish higher than he did in the scratch race, a discipline that plays to his strengths.
Shane Sutton, the technical director of British Cycling, has more or less promised that Cavendish will be able to grasp a spot in the squad for this summer’s Games if he finishes in the top three in the omnium this week — and Cavendish is 12 points off a bronze at the halfway stage.
However, even if Cavendish does enough to win a medal at London’s Lee Valley VeloPark, given his lack of recent experience on the track, there will be concern that he would fulfil the role of a luxury rider in Brazil.
Great Britain’s women’s pursuit team took bronze last night. They said that they would make amends for the mess they made of qualifying and they did, beating New Zealand with ease and as stylishly as their qualification had been unsightly.
Laura Trott, Elinor Barker, Ciara Horne and Joanna Rowsell Shand were left with only third place to aim for after that unimpressive race on Thursday.
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Since 2008, Team GB have won six gold medals at world-championship level and two silvers in the pursuit. To reach the race for bronze, they had to come through a play-off with five other teams, which was a little humbling. However, the women responded with guts as they overtook the Chinese with four laps remaining and set a British record of 4min 16.350sec.
Against New Zealand they clocked 4:16.540, a faster time than that recorded by the United States as they beat Canada to take the gold.
Rowsell Shand is confident that the mistakes made in London will not be repeated in Rio this summer.
“I think it’s going to be one of the best events of the games,” she said. “Watch out, we’re going to be back going for that gold.”
It was an all-British race for bronze in the men’s individual pursuit, which was won by Andy Tennant, who completed the 4km 0.174sec ahead of Owain Doull.
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“It’s a lot easier racing someone who isn’t a team-mate who you can really hate,” Tennant said. “So this is bittersweet.”