British in the firing line

A FEW minutes before the team pursuit, a British team official told Cycling Weekly 'They are going to qualify or they will be shot.' This wasn't a new form of motivation, it merely reflected the assumption in the British camp that the team were on form and heading for a good performance.

Afterwards, Matt Illingworth, Brian Steel, Rob Hayles and Chris Newton looked ready to face a firing squad as they waited for their bus back to the Olympic village. Technically, they had looked flawless on the track, but they were visibly slower than the other teams as they lapped.

'We really thought we were in with a shout of a medal,' said Hayles. 'It's not easy to take in - we haven't taken it in yet. We should at least have been in the top eight. We were four or five seconds faster in training.'

'We did 4-11s in training,' said Illingworth, `and we thought we were on for a "10".'

'We were doing 58-second kilometres in training,' added Newton. 'We got away OK, did a 1-07 first kilometre. We'd agreed on a 4-12 schedule, and the way my legs felt I thought we were on a good ride. I looked at the board and we'd done a 4-15, I thought it was a mistake. We haven't gone that slow for a while - we did a "14" at Manchester at the end of a week's hard training. It's not representative of what the team can do.'

'We didn't get on it from the word go,' was Hayles's assessment, which was then echoed by Illingworth: 'It was heavy going. You would get to the front, and you wouldn't be able to pick it up, we didn't seem to have the speed. The gear was big - 53x15 - and if you were on top of it it was OK, but we weren't on top of it from the start.'

The pursuit squad, which performed creditably last year in Colombia, getting to the quarter-finals, will be a member short for the Manchester world championships following Chris Newton's decision to concentrate on the road. `No one else has his speed,' said Illingworth. 'It would be nice if Chris Boardman could ride, then it should be a definite medal team. We've made progress over the last 18 months, but we could go back now that we've lost Chris Newton.'

Qualifying

1. France 4-09.570
2. Italy 4-09.695
3. Australia 4-09.750
4. Ukraine 4-11.545
5. Russia 4-11.665
6. USA 4-11.950
7. Spain 4-12.780
8. New Zealand 4-14.990
9. Germany 4-15.140
10. Great Britain 4-15.510
11. Lithuania 4-16.050
12. Holland 4-16.175
13. Denmark 4-18.000
14. Argentina 4-20.840
15. Korea 4-25.215
16. Chile 4-25.960
17. Colombia 4-26.400.

Quarter-finals

Russia 4-08.785 bt Ukraine 413.794
Australia 4-09.650 bt USA 4-12.470
Italy 4-09.215 bt Spain 4-11.310
France 4-08.965 bt New Zealand 4-15.610.

Semi-finals

France 4-06.880 (Olympic record) bt Italy (Adler Capelli, Mauro Trentino, Andrea Collinelli, Cristiano Citton) 4-08.317
Russia 406.885 bt Australia (Brett Aitken, Brad McGee, Stuart O'Grady, Dean Woods) 4-07.573. Bronze medal to Australia.

Final

France 4-05.850, Olympic record (Christophe Capelle, Philippe Ermenault, JeanMichel Monin, Francis Moreau) bt Russia 407.655 (Eduard Gritsun, Nikolai Kuznetsov, Alexi Markov, Anton Chantyr).