No falling. Just charging on. This was an evening of unalloyed triumph for Victoria Pendleton and the lung-busting men who a few pulsating minutes earlier set the tone for history making.
We salute those four team pursuit heroes — Ed Clancy, Geraint Thomas, Steven Burke and Peter Kennaugh — for adding more gold to cycling’s glittering summer.
And we pay tribute to Pendleton’s brave, front- riding victory in the keirin. For her, it was redemption after the team sprint mishap of 24 hours earlier when she mistimed the start of her final flying lap. Her partner Jess Varnish’s Olympics ended there and then, but Pendleton’s continued here. And how.
Victory made her the first British woman to win gold medals in individual competitions at two consecutive Games.
‘I wouldn’t want another 24 hours like this,’ she said. ‘I’m glad to be retiring in a few days. It still goes through my mind why I put myself through this.
‘It means a lot to be alongside the other great British women medal winners. It has not sunk in that I could be mentioned in the same breath as Kelly (Holmes) and Rebecca (Adlington). That will take a while. Maybe I can look back in a couple of years and say, “Yeah well done, Vic”.’
She reached the final in fine form, emerging victorious from a tough, first-round field that included her old rival, Anna Meares of Australia. She dominated her next race to emerge in the final buoyed by success. No wonder. She had shown rapier speed on Thursday — she said she had never ridden faster — before the mishap struck.
The keirin is the race that features the fellow on a motorised bike called the derny. It leads the riders around at increasing speed before dropping off with 625 metres remaining.
Pendleton has considered it her third event, though she did win the keirin world title five years ago. Here it took on a greater significance based on what had gone before.
The final was billed as Pendleton versus Meares, the world and Olympic champion. But that is not how it turned out. Guo Shuang of China was second, Lee Wai Sze of Hong Kong third and Meares back in fifth.
Pendleton, though, was in a race of her own from the point she surged to the front halfway through the penultimate lap. She was worthy of Meares’s recent words crediting her for helping raise the tone of women’s track sprinting. Pendleton, always emotional, hugged her team friends and cavorted with the Union flag before completing her slowest lap — one of honour.
Few more smiley, wide-eyed girls can ever have won Olympic medals. She can also be highly strung, wondering whether the pain is worth the glory. Who could begrudge her a little balm? Pendleton’s joy followed on from the men’s,which perhaps helped set an all-comers record for prolonged, deafening noise. Quite right, too, because the team pursuit is the ultimate track event — the 16-lap, 4km blend of precision and power.
The opposition in the final were formidable. Australia’s Jack Bobridge, Glenn O’Shea, Rohan Dennis and Michael Hepburn are vaunted as the Boy Band. The fancied foursome had won the world title on every occasion since the 2008 Beijing Olympics until this year, when the British beat them in Melbourne.
That was some night: a partisan but fair crowd, a fluctuating race, a marker laid down for Friday’s encounter in London. The win there came in a world record 3min 53.295sec. We suggested in these pages then that the performance represented perhaps the all-time apogee of track cycling.
Well, we are in the reappraisal business now. That was a contest but this was a demonstration. The British team led by an incredible 0.491sec after one lap and, although the margin fluctuated slightly, the result was never in doubt. They were eating up the pine. So we turned our attention to the clock. The time: 3min 51.659sec.
It was short of the 3min 50sec barrier that some had long spoken of as being needed for gold here. In truth, 3min 50sec was hardly credible. So it proved, but, still, what an outpouring of talent we witnessed.
Our reservations over how Sir Chris Hoy and his fellow team sprinters won gold after Philip Hindes deliberately fell off his bike to engineer a restart following a bad getaway on Thursday remain, but it did not spoil this euphoric moment. There is a sense of celebration in British cycling, which along with rowing is among the very best run of our Olympic sports. It shows what Lottery funding can achieve when properly applied.
It was like a Turkish bath in the Velodrome. The heat and air pressure are the cocktail that permit fast times, hence the palaver entering the building. You go in through an outer door, wait in a narrow, glass vestibule while that door is shut and walk through a newly opened inner door. Cold air is unwelcome.
The warm climate helped our women’s pursuit team smash their own world record, even if the crowd were bizarrely called on by the announcer to perform a Mexican wave during that first-round charge, diverting attention from the important act of cheering. The noise ebbed and flowed but our girls powered on.
Their time of 3min 15.699sec flashed up on the big screen as the fastest ever. Hail Jo Rowsell, Laura Trott and Dani King. The next fastest trio, from the United States, were nearly four seconds adrift. Gold beckons them and Britain.
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