Jennifer Valente wins gold in women’s cycling omnium for the United States

[ad_1]

IZU, Japan – Jason Kenny won a record-breaking gold medal for Great Britain on the final day of track cycling at the Tokyo Olympics.

Jennifer Valente and Kelsey Mitchell each won gold while being special to their country.

Valente gave the hapless American cycling team a reason to hold their heads high on Sunday when they recovered from a crash in the points race final to secure their victory, while Mitchell took home a surprising medal from gold in the sprint for Canada.

“It’s special,” Kenny said after his keirin win, “to get gold medals at the end of the day.”

Well said.

Valente and Mitchell, however, come from countries with little track cycling tradition. Kenny comes from a nation that has dominated the Olympics since the 2008 Beijing Games, when he won his first gold medal.

The focus was therefore naturally on Kenny, who had come out of retirement for the Tokyo Games but was bemoaning his form, especially after missing a medal entirely in the men’s sprint.

After winning his semifinal on Sunday, Kenny got behind the motorized training bike for the first three laps of the final. He started his sprint the moment the Derny rolled off the track, and no one seemed to want to react to his daring flyer. This left him all alone with an almost quarter-turn lead to the finish line.

“We said before the race, if they are asleep, should I just throw one?” Kenny said. “It was just too big of an opportunity.”

It was the seventh gold medal for Kenny, breaking the tie with his sprint mentor Chris Hoy for the most among the Brits. And it was his ninth medal overall, breaking the tie with former Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins.

The rest of the field found themselves sprinting for runner-up medals, and Azizulhasni Awang of Malaysia beat Olympic sprint champion Harrie Lavreysen of the Netherlands with a bike throw to the line to win silver.

“At the moment I’m not really happy with it,” Lavreysen said. “I don’t feel like I made a mistake (to leave Kenny) up front, but there was nothing I could do about it. It makes me feel a little stupid, but it’s keirin.”

It was a less successful day for Kenny’s wife Laura, who was the all-gold favorite after competing in the multidisciplinary event the first two times it was contested at the Olympics. Kenny won the Women’s Madison with Katie Archibald earlier at the Tokyo Games, and she had added a silver in the team pursuit to her previous two gold medals.

Yet what could be his last day on an Olympic velodrome has started off in the worst possible way.

Italian rider Elisa Balsamo collided with Irish rider Emily Kay as she entered the final lap of the scratch race, the first event of the omnium, triggering a massive pile-up that knocked down seven riders, including Kenny.

With the riders and their bikes tangled in a heap on the track deck, Valente seized the opportunity and edged out Yumi Kajihara and Annette Edmondson to win the race for maximum points.

Kenny took seven points to win the tempo race but, more importantly, Edmondson and several other contenders dropped 20 points when Valente and Co. went on the attack and lost them a lap.

Kenny’s medal hopes were – and rightly so – eliminated in the playoff race, where she was the seventh rider to come out. Kajihara finished second behind Clara Copponi of France to move within two points of Valente with only the points race remaining.

In the final race of the entire Olympic cycling program, Valente won the first sprint of the points race to consolidate her lead, then recovered from a fall with 30 laps to go so as not to lose ground on his closest pursuers. She finished second in the final sprint to win the gold medal, then burst into tears when she got off her bike.

Kajihara won silver for Japan. Kirsten Wild won bronze for the Netherlands.

The women’s sprint was supposed to be a showdown between Emma Hinze, last year’s world champion from Germany, and Wai Sze Lee, 2019 world champion from South Korea. The two made it through their quarter-finals and Sunday’s races.

So much for that.

Starikova, who had previously beaten defending bronze medalist Katy Marchant to reach the semi-finals, swept Lee in their match. And Mitchell, who beat Lauriane Genest in their all-Canadian quarter-final, beat Hinze in their deciding game.

Mitchell led the way against Starikova in the premiere of their best-of-three final. Then she pushed Starikova back in a drag race to the end to win Canada’s second gold in that event after Lori-Ann Muenzer’s at the 2004 Athens Games.

Lee easily swept Hinze aside for the bronze medal.

“The last year and a half has been very eventful with the postponement of the Olympics and not being able to run,” said Mitchell, “but I have amazing teammates, an amazing coach, staff around me. Supported me so much, and all of my friends and family back home. I knew all the hard work would pay off. “

[ad_2]

Source Link