Team GB’s hopes of a further medal in the Olympic velodrome were ended in a crash-riddled men’s Madison when Ollie Wood was unceremoniously butted out of the way by Jan-Willem van Schip of the Netherlands, and sent crashing to the track.
Any fading hopes that Wood and Mark Stewart, who had failed to score highly during the race, might reverse that deficit in the final moments of the 200-lap race, evaporated as a stunned Wood struggled to his feet.
“He hit me so hard, I felt like a crash-test dummy,” Wood said. “It’s not my first crash – just a bit different when you get hit from behind, you don’t see it coming. Instead of taking a high line around the track, I thought he’d cut it a bit fine and just ploughed into me.
“I’m trying to catch my breath. I have no clue, absolutely no clue [what happened]. All I know is I got hit really hard, from behind, by literally the biggest rider on the track.”
The incident came less than 24 hours after the Netherlands coach, Mehdi Kordi, had accused British sprinter, Jack Carlin, of playing “rugby on wheels.”
“Everyone’s cognitive functions started to decline rapidly at one given point,” Wood said of the Madison, adding that after the crash, his “arse really hurt”.
He continued: “When there are people all over the track, it is inevitable that people are going to collide wheels or whatever.” Wood was right, and in the chaotic final laps, there were multiple high-speed crashes that went some way to influencing the outcome of the race.
But he admitted too, that Team GB’s chances of achieving a medal position had already slipped away. “In that scenario, we were out of the race,” he said. “There is no point raising anything.”
The Italian duo of Simone Consonni and Elia Viviani did enough in the succession of sprints to move into the race lead with a quarter of the Madison to go. But the spate of nasty crashes quickly changed the hierarchy.
When, with 21 laps to go, Consonni also crashed, the Portuguese pairing of Rui Oliveira and Iúri Leitão lapped the field and then won the penultimate sprint, to snatch the gold medal, their country’s first of the Games, from Italy.
The result left Viviani in tears, Consonni hobbling, and the Tokyo gold medallists, Denmark, equally distraught with a mere bronze.
Before the Madison, Ethan Hayter, silver medallist in the team pursuit, surprisingly withdrew to make way for Stewart. According to sources at Team GB, Hayter is carrying a thigh strain, that was only diagnosed on Wednesday evening, after the team pursuit final.
Despite that, Hayter, a silver medallist in the Madison in Tokyo, still competed in the men’s Omnium on Thursday night, winning the elimination race, but finishing only eighth in the four-part discipline.
“I found out this morning,” Stewart said of his late inclusion. “You saw how deep Ethan went in those team pursuits. He wasn’t right with his injury. He tried to give 100% in the Omnium, but you could see he wasn’t right.”
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Stewart said that he was ready despite the late notice. “I took the role, I took it seriously,” he said, “but we struggled to make an impression. We knew it would be hot, we knew it would be fast for 200 laps – this is the Olympics. So we rode relatively conservatively, but in the end our legs did not quite come around.”
Although prominent at the front of the race for much of the first 100 laps, Stewart and Wood became relegated to also-rans as Italy, Denmark and Japan moved clear of the rest of the field and occupied the medal positions, with 50 laps still to race.
Few, though, least of all the Italians, were prepared for the shocking denouement of the race though, in which the Portuguese sprang perhaps the biggest surprise of the track events so far.
In the men’s keirin, Carlin, who took the bronze in the men’s individual sprint, finished second in the first round to the Olympic sprint champion, Harrie Lavreysen.
Carlin’s teammate, Hamish Turnbull, was unable to break into the top two qualifiers in his heat and was diverted to the repechages, where he progressed into the next round
In the women’s sprint, Emma Finucane and Sophie Capewell, team sprint gold medallists earlier in the week, advanced to the quarter-finals in their early matches, together with Emma Hinze and Lea Friedrich of Germany, the keirin winner, Ellesse Andrews of New Zealand, and Hetty van de Wouw of the Netherlands.
While Finucane comfortably overpowered Australian sprinter Kristina Clonan, Capewell’s experience was more nerve-wracking, as she was pushed to a photo finish, before qualifying against New Zealand’s Shaane Fulton.
But while a seemingly untroubled Finucane progressed through to Sunday’s semi-finals, beating Colombia’s Martha Bayona, Capewell was eliminated after being overwhelmed by Van de Wouw’s acceleration in her quarter-final.