Two scenes half an hour apart at the velodrome provided a neat distillation of how these Games played out for those riding in Team GB skinsuits. We can abbreviate it to medals and mayhem, blood and tears.
First, it fell to Emma Finucane to take bronze in the women’s sprint and with it came a significant slice of history. At the age of 21, this descendent of a World War II spitfire ace became the first British woman since Mary Rand in 1964 to claim three medals at one Olympics.
Not even Laura Kenny went to such places, so a gold and two third-place finishes made for an excellent return from an athlete who just two and a half years ago had no expectation of even being here.
Her tears, delivered by the bucket over the past week, were drawn from a mixture of stress and happiness. ‘Obviously, I would have loved to win that gold medal, but gold and two bronzes is more than I could have dreamed of,’ she said.
‘This week has been such a rollercoaster. I wish I’d got a book for someone to tell me how to get through an Olympic week.’
Emma Finucane’s extraordinary maiden Olympics continued on the final day in Paris
The 21-year-old added bronze in the women’s sprint to mark her third podium of the games
The other side of the equation, the mayhem and blood, followed soon after. That came in the form of Jack Carlin, whose aggressive style had drawn a stinging critique from the Dutch on Friday. ‘Rugby on wheels’, they called it rather haughtily, before seeing one of their own, Jan-Willem van Schip, disqualified on Saturday for appearing to headbutt Ollie Wood out of the Madison.
Against that fraught, ugly backdrop, Carlin contested the keirin having already taken a silver in the team sprint and bronze in the individual. With a playful nickname of Long John Silver among some of his team-mates for not yet winning a European, world or Olympic gold, the Scot nurtured a marginal hope of breaking the streak on closing day, but instead was involved in one of the more dramatic crashes of the gathering.
It occurred when he entered the final turn at 30mph and at the back of the group. A tangle between Japanese rider Shinji Nakano and Malaysia’s Muhammad Sahrom triggered a scary wipeout that engulfed all three and tossed Carlin hard across the boards with his bike cartwheeling over his head.
He received almost 10 minutes of treatment at trackside before he was aided to the exit. His £3000 skinsuit had been torn to shreds and so was his back.
As fate would have it, Harrie Lavreysen, a Dutchman, secured his third Olympic title and completed a clean sweep of the sprints.
But it was heartbreak for Jack Carlin as he was involved in a serious crash in the men’s keirin
Across the track, roads and mounds, Britain has claimed more bike medals than any other nation here, with 11, but their return of two gold medals is the fewest from Team GB since Athens in 2004. The norm has typically been between six and eight visits to the top step and netting fewer than the Netherlands will sting like a lacerated back.
While the cycling squad’s medal targets have been met, in line with the £29.3million they received in lottery funding, there were a few too many near misses, or indeed crashes, which included Hamish Turnbull and Neah Evans on the final day. The latter could only manage 15th in the women’s omnium.
In some regards the lack of silver-to-gold conversations speaks to the wider performance of the British delegation in Paris. Records and memories have been made, but not quite enough of the golden kind.
It would be a harsh soul who applied the same line to Finucane, even though Dame Laura Kenny was among those who predicted as many as three gold medals for the Welsh athlete. The pressure on her shoulders has grown substantially since she won the individual sprint at the world championships last year – she was youngest to take that crown in half a century.
Her chance of a repeat on this stage evaporated when she lost her semi-final to the eventual winner, New Zealander Ellesse Andrews, on Sunday, before she recovered to beat Hetty van de Wouw 2-0 for the bronze. The other two medals have been kept under her pillow all week.
‘Honestly, it’s just like a dream,’ she said. ‘It’s just been such a whirlwind of a week.
Carlin had to be attended to by medical staff after wiping out at a speed of 30mph
‘I’ve cried a lot, and it just shows that I’m strong enough to get it out and reset. I’ve raced for seven days now, and my mind’s been on a mad one.
‘I wasn’t actually crying at the pressure. I was crying because I was exhausted. My mind was telling me things like, “You can’t do it, I want to do it”. It is more my internal pressure, how I wanted to deliver myself when my legs were screaming, telling me to stop. But I wanted to keep going.’
It took her all the way to a place in history.