In August this year, USA Cycling turned heads with a stunning performance in the men's team pursuit at the Pan American Championships in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Eric Young, Ashton Lambie, Gavin Hoover and Colby Lange shattered the country's record for the event, clocking a 3:53.86 en route to the gold medal. With that, the team announced to the world its ambition to qualify a squad for the 2020 Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.
The team will not be starting at the Berlin World Cup this weekend, or the one in London in December. After an off-day at the Milton World Cup, the team will instead regroup in 2019 to target the New Zealand and Hong Kong World Cups before taking aim at the UCI Track World Championships.
While other countries like Great Britain have more resources, a deeper team and better equipment, this ambitious group of eight is hoping to pull off a massive heist and climb over half a dozen countries in the running to make the Olympic Games.
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To find the last time the USA qualified a men's team pursuit squad for the Olympic Games, you would have to thumb way back through the archives to 2000, when the federation's current CEO was still on the squad. Derek Bouchard-Hall was on the team that made the Sydney Games, but they finished outside the qualifying eight in the first round.
Before then, the USA came as high as second at the Los Angeles Games in 1984, but in this millennium it has been the women who have carried the Olympic aspirations for the country's track team, hauling in two silver medals since their team pursuit was added to the Olympic programme in 2012 in addition to Sarah Hammer's two Omnium silvers.
It has been less than two years since USA Cycling started throwing a bit more weight behind its men's endurance track programme, and already the team has shown promise. In addition to its team pursuit result, Ashton Lambie set a new world record in the individual pursuit at the Pan Am Championships.
Clay Worthington, who stepped in this year as the men's track endurance head coach after the departure of Greg Henderson, recognises that it will be a challenge to qualify the team pursuit squad for the 2020 Games in Tokyo, but his diverse band of athletes are making impressive gains.
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via Cyclingnews Latest Interviews and Features http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/dreams-of-tokyo-for-usa-cycling-mens-team-pursuit-squad
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