GB win Olympic silver and bronze in team pursuit races

Great Britain won silver in a pulsating men’s team pursuit final before the women’s quartet backed that up with bronze in the Paris Olympic velodrome.

Ethan Hayter, Dan Bigham, Charlie Tanfield and Ethan Vernon were pipped to gold by Australia, who triumphed in this event for the first time since the 2004 Games.

Elinor Barker, Josie Knight, Anna Morris and Jess Roberts then beat Italy to continue GB’s run of reaching the women’s team pursuit podium at every Olympics since it was introduced in 2012.

The men’s four, alongside Ollie Wood who rode in the earlier rounds, had the honour of winning Great Britain’s 1,000th Olympic medal – combining summer and winter Games.

Team GB have now won four medals in three days on the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines track, after gold and silver in the women’s and men’s team sprint finals respectively.

Despite a strong start, Britain’s men trailed Australia by tiny fractions of a second for most of the 4,000m race and were getting closer at under two-tenths of a second behind as they started the final lap.

But Hayter, who was leading the GB train, came out of his saddle in the closing 200m and almost lost control of his bike as Australia took the victory.

“We were so close and I could see it. I just really gave too much, my whole body went weak and I really struggled to hold myself on the bike in the end,” Hayter told BBC Sport.

“Sorry to the guys but I think we gave everything and we can be proud of that silver medal.”

Team GB have won medals in the men’s team pursuit at six of the past seven Olympics, the only blip in that record coming three years ago in Tokyo, when a controversial crash in their second round of racing against Denmark ended their 13-year reign as Olympic champions.

It was Denmark they defeated on Tuesday to reach the gold-medal final, where they met an Australian quartet with a new world record of three minutes 40.730 seconds under their belts.

They crossed the line in three minutes 42.067 – slower than the previous world record held by Italy – to beat GB by more than two seconds.

Bigham, who worked as a performance engineer for Denmark at the last Olympics before returning to the GB set-up as a rider, said: “We rode the fastest ride we have ever done on every ride. We were in the best form and the best kit, and literally we all gave it everything.

“It was scrappy because you are on the limit. You are riding quicker than you have ever ridden before and as Ethan said we probably gave it that little bit too much.”

Tokyo 2020 champions Italy took bronze, beating the Danes to take the final place on the podium.

The GB women’s quartet was without its taliswoman Katie Archibald, a two-time Olympic champion and five-time world champion, who was ruled out just weeks before the Games after breaking her leg in a freak garden accident.

The riders have previously spoken of their shock at the news and the need to reset, but in Barker and Knight, they had two riders with plenty of Olympic pedigree.

They had showed no sign of their disrupted build-up in qualifying on Tuesday, setting the third fastest time in a new national record.

They lowered that best again, by almost two seconds, to 4:04.908 in the first round earlier on Wednesday but it was not enough to secure a place in the gold-medal final as they came up short against the United States.

Against Italy they trailed for more than three-quarters of the race, at times by more than a second.

But with fewer than 500 metres to go, and with Knight – who alongside Barker won silver in Tokyo – at the front, they overturned that deficit with Italy lacking the legs after their fast start to push back again.

GB stopped the clock in 4:06.382, with the Italians crossing more than two and a half seconds later.

“I could not be more proud of these girls,” Knight told BBC Sport.

“Six weeks ago when Katie broke her ankle, I felt like my Olympic dream had gone down the drain a little bit after committing to team pursuit.

“But we re-strategised, we brought Jess into the team and I could not be more proud of us getting on an Olympic podium.”

It marks a special occasion for Llanishen High School in Cardiff. Barker and Morris were in the same year at the school, while Barker’s younger sister Megan, the reserve rider here in Paris, was also a pupil.

The United States beat New Zealand in the final to win gold for the first time in history, marking a second Olympic title of the Games for road race champion Kristen Faulkner.

Elsewhere in Wednesday’s racing, Jack Carlin and Hamish Turnbull progressed to the quarter-finals of the men’s individual sprint, which take place on Thursday.