A year from today, the curtain will go up on the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, where Team GB will have the mammoth task of trying to emulate its haul of 12 medals from the cycling events at the London Games, including no fewer than eight golds. To put that into perspective, no other nation won more than a single gold.
Achieving anything close to that mark is what is commonly described nowadays as a big ask, especially when Great Britain’s performance at this year’s World Track Championships is taken into account. For the first time since 2001, the British team failed to win a single title on the boards, leading many to claim that its period of dominance is over.
Yet, six months on from that setback at the Paris Worlds, GB technical director Shane Sutton is optimistic as he looks ahead to Rio. “We’re competitive in all but two events, which are women’s BMX and the women’s sprint. But in the latter we’ve got a big player coming back in the shape of Becky James, who is making incremental gains on a daily basis and I fully expect her to get back to the form she had in Minsk [in 2013 when she won the sprint and keirin world titles],” Sutton told the press at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester.
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“We’re in a good place now with a year to go, but six months ago I had a very different opinion,” Sutton confessed. “It’s taken a while for new coaches and support staff to bed in, but that’s been done now. The nation expects and I’m pretty sure we’re going to deliver.”
Outlining the qualification situation for each event, head coach Ian Dyer explained that a revamp of the places available in the sprint events means that Great Britain should secure two places in the men’s sprint and keirin events in Rio. “That’s different to last time around. We had two places in men’s sprint in Beijing, where Jason [Kenny] met Chris [Hoy] in the sprint, and we also had two places in the men’s keirin with Ross [Edgar] and Chris,” Dyer said.
“We achieved that by virtue of having the world champion in those disciplines as well as our nation place. In London that got shrunk, and we had selection races for sprint and keirin positions prior to London, but now they’ve opened it back up again back to two places for sprint and keirin.”
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