GREAT BRITAIN’S cycling team are assured of at least a silver medal this afternoon, after the pursuiters reached the final of the team discipline against Australia. Britain have long been under the Australians’ thumb in this event, so second place will not be enough. Chris Newton, one of the pursuit team, said: “We’ve had silver before and now we’re in this final to fight for gold.”
“I know we can go as fast as them,” Simon Jones, the Britain track coach, said. But victory will be a tall order. In qualifying for the final yesterday, Australia shattered the world record by almost a second.
Key to the final outcome will be team selection. Bradley Wiggins was drafted in after the first qualifier yesterday to ensure that the Britain quartet defeated France. That was accomplished with some ease, as Wiggins and his team-mates caught and then lapped their opponents at near Olympic-record speeds.
This will be Wiggins’s second medal after his gold in the individual pursuit on Saturday afternoon. The 24-year-old Londoner found inspiration from listening to Champagne Supernova, by Oasis, and the encouragement of Chris Boardman, the 1992 Olympic pursuit champion. That heady cocktail of the Gallagher brothers and Boardman was enough to calm Wiggins’s nerves after he had started to panic about what lay in front of him.
He took refuge in the music coming from his his headphones as the final loomed. “I’d like to thank Noel and Liam Gallagher,” he said, “and Chris Boardman.”
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Boardman, whose role in the team is psychological as much as technical, insisted that his contribution had been minimal.
“As the final got nearer I asked him how he was coping and that was about it,” Boardman said. “But then, just as he got up to get on the bike, I yelled ‘Get him!’ ”
“Him” was Bradley McGee, of Australia, who beat Wiggins to the gold medal at the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The “Battle of the Brads” has been a recurrent theme in track racing over the past couple of years, with McGee holding the upper hand until these Olympic Games. They will confront each other again this afternoon in the team pursuit final.
The persuasive powers of Boardman have been key to Wiggins’s and Britain’s success here. Wiggins would have abandoned the team’s World Class Performance Plan in the autumn of 2002 had Boardman not intervened.
“Bradley was going to work with a French coach,” Boardman said, “so I told him to write down the training plan that he was developing with this guy and send it to me. When I got it, I pulled it apart, pointed out all the holes in it and, after he’d thought about it, he decided to come back on board.”
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The one disappointment of the weekend for the Britain team was the strategic decision over personnel that cost them a chance of winning a medal in the three-man team sprint.
In the first round qualifiers, Craig MacLean’s below-par contribution left the Britain team with a mountain to climb in their next round, against Germany, the eventual winners. Despite drafting in Jason Queally to replace MacLean and setting the second best time in that round, the Britain team was eliminated.
David Brailsford, the team director, took responsibility for the decision and described the omission of Queally in the first round as a “missed opportunity”. It was a mistake that Brailsford cannot afford to make again today.
Now the door of opportunity has swung open again and the bullish Jones is determined that his riders will seize the day. “This is about pride, passion and ignorance,” he said, “and by that, I mean ignorance of pain. We have to be the best we can be. I want the perfect team pursuit.”