BEIJING: Chris Hoy of Britain took his third gold medal on the final day of Olympic track cycling yesterday. There was also gold for Victoria Pendleton, bringing Britain’s tally on the track to seven. Argentina won its first gold of the Olympic Games, taking the madison and dealing the only blow to Britain’s dominance on the track.
“I didn’t think about three gold medals. Even today I just thought about the sprint itself,” said Hoy, after defeating his compatriot Jason Kenny in the final of the men’s sprint. Mickael Bourgain of France took the bronze. World champion Hoy needed only two of the three-race series to defeat Kenny. The British coaches had told both men that they were on their own in the final and would not get any help with tactics. “They came and said they didn’t want to have any favoritism. It was the fairest way to do it,” Hoy said. Kenny, 20, in his first Olympic Games, also has two medals. He took gold in the men’s team sprint alongside Hoy on the first day of the track competition. In the women’s race, world champion Pendleton easily defeated Anna Meares of Australia, the Athens bronze medalist.
“Watching all week on television back in the Olympic Village has been very emotional for me,” said Pendleton. “I was an absolute mess just because I so wanted to do it too.” It was an expected victory, but still a victory of sorts for Meares. The gold medalist in the now-defunct 500-meter time-trial in Athens has made a remarkable comeback from devastating injury.
A crash in the keirin at a World Cup event in Los Angeles in January left Meares in a wheelchair with a fractured neck vertebra and a dislocated shoulder. She missed the world championships and had an agonizing wait to see if she would qualify for Beijing. Meares’ was the only medal for the once-dominant Australian squad on the track.
Guo Shuang of China took the bronze medal, to the cheers of the home crowd, defeating Willy Kanis of the Netherlands.
It was a tortuous route to the podium for Guo.
In the semifinals she beat Meares in the first of the three races, but Meares came back for victory in the second.
In the decider, Guo caught her pedal on the sloping track halfway through the race and fell, causing the race to be restarted. That race came down to a photo finish, which showed that Guo had crossed the line a few millimeters ahead of her opponent.
She had barely started celebrating, however, when officials announced that she had been relegated for cutting off her opponent during the sprint and that Meares would advance to the final.
In the madison, an anarchic relay race for teams of two, the 2004 world championship-winning team of Juan Esteban Curuchet and Walter Fernando Perez of Argentina lapped the field early in the race and held on, also taking eight sprinting points. Spain took a last-gasp silver with two sprint points gained at the end of the 200-lap race to finish with seven. Gold has been a long time coming for Curuchet, in his sixth Olympic Games at the age of 43.
Perez said the pair had always believed they could win, despite only coming eighth in this year’s World Championships.
