For each article in this long-running WATT WORKS FOR ME series from Cycling Weekly's print edition, we ask a pro rider about their favourite things in training: what has helped them most in getting to where they are today. The aim is to get to the heart of the beliefs and preferences they hold dear when it comes to building form, maximising fitness and ultimately achieving results. For this edition, we speak to Maddie Leech.

How did you get into cycling?

I started after watching the 2016 Rio Olympics. I wasn’t doing many sports at the time, and track cycling came on [the television]. I got my mum to find me a local club and she found Huddersfield Star Wheelers – I think it was the first one that came up on Google. I actually started with cyclo-cross and then road, but I quickly dropped cyclo-cross because I was terrible at it. I then did track and road as a youth rider.

How do you find splitting track and road?

With GB, the track stuff takes preference. I do find the balance quite hard. A lot of the time, the track competitions are split in between a lot of the main road races. If I’m on track, it’s not much volume, just hard, intense riders. Then if I’m out road racing in Belgium, it’s four hours on the cobbles and in the wet. It’s quite a switch.

What are your favourite training sessions?

I quite like a three-hour session with some Zone 3 blocks of 15-20 minutes each, maybe three times in a ride. I’m a diesel rider, so I find it quite nice to sit at one power and just ride that.

What’s the best training advice you’ve ever received?

Sometimes less is actually more. I used to think I had to smash all of my rides and go as hard as I could, but actually, since I’ve started doing my easy rides easier and my hard efforts harder, I’ve made more of an improvement.

You won your first world title last year. What training went into that victory?

In the Madison, you need a lot of repeated efforts, so I was doing a lot of VO2 efforts, like two-minute efforts, or 30 seconds on and off. I also did a lot of strength stuff, like gym work and using big gears on the road for low cadence, high power.

What has that victory done for your career?

It’s given me a bit more confidence in myself. At that competition, I actually wasn’t feeling my best, and I struggled quite a lot in the team pursuit. The Madison win reminded me that, even if you don’t feel how you think you should, you can still perform well.

What are your long-term ambitions?

I’d like to get to the LA Olympics [in 2028]. I’d like to ride the Madison there, and the team pursuit and the omnium – I’ll take anything if there’s an opportunity.

Quick-fire round

What’s your nickname? Everyone calls me M-Dog.

If you could ride in one place for the rest of your life, where would it be? I quite like the Lake District.

Biggest inspiration? Katie Archibald and Laura Kenny – they’re who got me into cycling.

Cafe stop order? I don’t like coffee, so a smoothie or a Diet Coke, and chocolate cake.

Favourite hobby outside of cycling? Walking in the Peak District.

Best moment of your career so far? Winning the Madison world title.

Worst moment of your career so far? Crashing in the first year I did Paris-Roubaix in 2023. I was in agony.

Dream race to win? The Olympics, Madison.

There are days in cycling that are as dreaded as they are inevitable. In this example, I had secretly hoped that somehow Katie Archibald would keep racing forever. But last week she announced that she’s decided it is time to move on to other things.

This made me sad in a way that few rider retirements do. I’ve worked in and around cycling for a long time, but there are relatively few riders of whom I’d describe myself as a straightforward fan. Katie is one of them. I cared about her successes. I cared about her setbacks. I cared about how things were going for her.

On the track she looked like no one else, and I think that’s where my enthusiasm started. I tend to be a fan of riders who have power. Yes, I like watching someone whose career is built on tactical flare, or someone who sparkles erratically, lights up the race, then dies away. But when it comes to instinctive fandom, I want riders who can pile the watts high and pile them all day long.

>> Why Katie Archibald was such an exceptional athlete

(Although Katie had tactical acumen to burn – she was the first rider who pointed out to me that the team leading at a lap to go for a Madison sprint usually goes on to take the points. It doesn’t sound right, but next time you watch a Madison, watch for it and you’ll find she’s spot on.)

I’m also selfish with my fandom. I want value from my emotional investment. So another reason I liked watching Katie race is that she never let me down. Often she (and usually her team or Madison pair) won. But even if she didn’t, she was almost always in it till the end. Her disappointing races felt rare.

She’s aggravatingly talented in other ways. I interviewed her for a podcast a few years ago. When we got the video call up and running, she explained that the backdrop was Laura and Jason Kenny’s basement, because that’s where she was staying. (It was in the aftermath of Covid, so it made sense for a variety of reasons.)

She ended up giving me a weird upside-down tour of the underside of the Kennys’ floor. “This is the spot where Laura always kicks off that pair of clumpy shoes she likes and wakes me up… this is just below their evil washing machine…” I had to pause the recording so I could stop laughing and straighten myself out. It gave me the idea for a reality TV show called something like “Stalker in the Basement”, but I suspect the only person who could have presented it was Katie and she’s much too intelligent to waste on that.

And of course she wrote a great column for Cycling Weekly for a couple of years – as an insight into being an Olympic athlete it was fabulous. As an insight into being Katie Archibald it was better.

Even in her departure she’s got class. I admire a rider who calmly decides it’s time to move on – so many good riders cling on to racing too long and find that when they finally stop they’ve been obsessed with the aerodynamic properties of their shoulders for so long that they have no coherent idea how to function as an adult member of society.

And even more, I admire someone who goes to find a real job outside sport and do something that’s actually useful. It’s fitting that Katie is abandoning us to be a nurse. I can’t imagine she’ll be anything other than brilliant at that too.

It’s going to feel odd to be a fan of a nurse I’ll almost certainly never meet in a professional capacity at a hospital I’ll never visit, but there we are. That’s what I’m going to be.

How To… Choose between the bike path and the road

Often there is a choice between using a road and using a parallel bike path – the latter almost always shared with pedestrians. And yes, it’s a choice. You can use either. Even if no one will ever believe you.

Which you use depends on many things: your speed, your journey, and most importantly, exactly which way you would prefer to end up in hospital.

The hazards on the shared path are multiple. There are pedestrians, children, dogs and, most of all, cars, either parked on the path or driven by people who feel that looking before driving over the path to a turning or driveway is an infringement of their civil liberties. Most of these risks you can mitigate by going slowly.

On the road, you can go faster and there’s really only one hazard. The problem is that it’s a big one. A curiosity of the shared path is that it makes the road beside it more dangerous because so many drivers think you should be on the path. They have hand gestures on the subject that they’re convinced repeal the relevant provisions of the Road Traffic Act and the Highway Code, and feel empowered to overtake at a range of 20 centimetres.

Of course you’ll also get quite a lot of abuse on the path from pedestrians who feel you should be on the road and have their own range of gestures. But at least the pedestrians are not usually quite so heavily armed.

Acts of Cycling Stupidity

I hear of a rider who went on holiday with a few non-cycling friends, taking his bike with him. Over dinner the first evening he treated everyone to a long speech about the toughness of cyclists, their laughter in the face of pain and suffering, and a full-length, “80 kph protected only by a bit of Lycra – footballers could learn a thing or two from us,” routine.

The following morning he went out for a ride. 10 km from their rented house his front wheel slipped on some gravel and down he went.

Suffering from a small bruise and some torn bar tape, he phoned his wife and requested rescue. “Can you bring some antiseptic, I’ve got a bit of a graze,” he said. “And maybe you don’t tell the others where you’re going?”

My first introduction to watching Katie Archibald race was at the Junior National Track Championships in 2012. The race contained recently crowned European champions who were part of the Olympic Development Programme.

You could see the disbelief in the eyes of these experienced juniors at being repeatedly attacked by an unknown Scottish girl by the name of Katie Archibald. Every time the then world champion Lucy Garner sprinted, Katie thrashed at the pedals and launched yet another stinging attack. She was raw, tenacious and instantly thrilling to watch.

Katie was different. She didn't feel the need to play by the rules. She took her own journey and inspired a whole new generation of riders. She was alternative, dyed her hair a wild new colour every few months, and showed everyone it is possible to be high performing and your own individual self.

I started working with Katie in the run up to the Tokyo Olympics and in my first meeting with her she shared a spreadsheet she had been collating on the women's Madison since it had been introduced.

She was and is an absolute student of the sport who I believe is one of the best tacticians within track cycling. She raised the level of understanding and particularly in the Madison and the elimination where she was the first female rider to actively facilitate the elimination of her rivals.

Katie and Laura Kenny were exceptional in the Tokyo Madison, where they won the first gold in the event. It was a huge team effort and Katie was a huge driver in that – indeed, the now famous bright yellow helmets were her idea.

Watch the Track World Championships now and you can see that legacy, not only within the GB squad but also across the international pool of athletes. She is highly respected and for good reason. At the track Worlds in 2021, I selected her for a lot of races! Team pursuit, omnium, points race and Madison.

At that Worlds she showed she was the best bunch rider by taking the omnium world title, but what impressed me was the points race, the last event. She was clearly running out of legs but that same tenacity that she showed as an untamed junior shone through again as she fought ferociously to beat Lotte Kopecky, and she nearly did.

Some athletes try to use their status for fame or financial gain but Katie wasn't interested in that. She openly shared with me that she frequently asked her agent not to do any publicity as she wanted to focus on being the best. She was almost embarrassed to be well known.

Indeed, when she started attending university on her nursing course she didn't think there was any need to mention the fact that she is a multi- Olympic, world and European champion.

However, she has used her status to be an advocate for women's sport and a clear voice for equality. She backed the Track Champions League because she wanted to showcase track cycling and create a pathway to be a professional track cyclist. Even when the world was massively divided by trans inclusion in sport she somehow managed to hit the right tone.

As a team-mate, she was highly regarded. She taught a new generation how to race Madison and was the voice of the women's endurance squad, passionate to ensure they received equal treatment to the men in every element.

All athletes face challenges but Katie has faced some of the worst we can imagine. Losing her partner Rab in 2022 was utterly heartbreaking. It was for sure her biggest challenge and somehow she kept putting one foot in front of the other and was back on the top step of a World Championships the next year. She didn't pretend all was well, she showed vulnerability and that made the British public love her even more.

Katie's longevity and versatility transcended cycling. She is a star – albeit a reluctant one – and even in retirement she continues to do things differently. Most athletes in her position would move into coaching, commentary or take on a public speaking role. But not Katie.

She's still going to change lives. But she's found a way of doing it much closer than through your television set, by being the support for those most vulnerable and most in need through nursing.

As well as being an untouchable force on the bike, Katie Archibald enjoys a wonderful writing talent. As one colleague pointed out, not only could she destroy us all on the bike, she could come for our jobs too, such is her ability to craft engaging and humorous prose.

During a two-year period pre-Covid, Cycling Weekly was lucky enough to have had her in our employ as a column writer, deftly popping out opinion, insight and humour between bouts of bike racing.

Just as her recently-announced retirement from competition is a loss to the sport, when Archibald stepped down in the build-up to the Tokyo Olympics, we were sorry to say goodbye to her keyboarding skills.

Gone but not forgotten, for all of her columns can be found on our website. We took a look through and dug out a few gems, just to celebrate her retirement.

'As you well know, fellow cyclist, we're all obliged to trash-talk triathletes'

In a November 2017 column, the talk turned to tattoos – both of the Olympic and the Ironman kind. Archibald describes her five inked rings as at once both subtle and ostentatious: ("A delicate balance of pretending to be the goodie whilst actually being the arse," she wrote.)

Archibald had got her Olympic rings tattoo after her first Games appearance at Rio in 2016, almost as a matter of course. "As a child I thought an Olympic tattoo wasn’t a choice but a branding that every participant was required to get and feel proud of. So I’ve always understood that if I went to a Games it would be on my skin forever," she wrote.

However, the famous five-rings tattoo was not the first she coveted. That would be the Ironman 'M-dot' icon. That is, until she realised that cycling looks down on triathlon.

"…as you well know, fellow cyclist, we’re all obliged to trash-talk triathletes," she wrote, tongue firmly in cheek. "Just like wearing your glasses under your helmet straps or having mismatching kit, prefixing your ride with a swim and suffixing it with a run is forbidden.

"I’ll never get that tattoo."

'I guess you didn’t listen to a word we said, did you?'

In January 2018 Archibald wrote about being on training camp in Tenerife with Team GB, and staying in the same hotel as Team Sky. Surrounded by 'Zero days' posters, she eventually learned that these were a boast of how few days the pro team had lost to illness in its Grand Tours, thanks to its diligent observation of hand hygiene.

"Somehow, though, I’ve got a cold," Archibald wrote. "I’m mortified. The posters read to me now as: 'Well I guess you didn’t listen to a word we said, did you?' It’s humiliating. I can only assume someone licked me in my sleep because I honestly feel woozy from all the hand foaming I’ve done."

She'd had a "few days compromised" she said, but clearly not too compromised: in the Track Nationals a week later she won golds in the individual pursuit, the points and the scratch race.

'I felt proud to have my first bad-man Shane Sutton story in the bag so early'

A February 2018 column saw Archibald in a playfully reflective mood as she contemplated a return to the Dutch Apeldoorn track for the World Championship. Her first visit there, in 2013 for the Track Euros, was the first time she was selected for Team GB.

"It was the first time I met Shane Sutton," she wrote. "'You look ****ing terrifying,' was his odd version of, 'Hello, nice to meet you.'

"I was, to be fair, sporting more metal on my face and surrounding areas at the time. I felt proud to have my first bad-man Shane Sutton story in the bag so early. I had arrived!"

She added: "Accidentally stumbling on new ways to upset Shane would continue, but other British Cycling firsts eventually dwindled. This World Championships will be my 16th international representation of Great Britain."

It saw her take home a gold (with Emily Nelson in the Madison) and a silver (in the team pursuit).

'My arrogant desire to have the world hear me speak… collapses into 'um's, 'ehm's and 'well's'

A column in November 2018 was written shortly after Archibald was awarded a runner-up prize at the Sunday Times Sportswoman of the Year Award. 'Cycling is like public speaking,' was the takeaway – 'timing is everything'.

She had been interviewed at the Awards do and, in her estimation at least, had not performed as hoped.

"Sometimes I’m asked a simple question and my arrogant desire to have the world hear me speak, arrogance that looked like a tiger when I saw its reflected shadow but is revealed as a sloth on all fours when it steps into the light, collapses into 'um's and 'ehm's and 'well's," she wrote.

The problem with her speaking style, she wrote was that: "I start without much sense of where I’m going which leaves two options: (a) find out on the way or (b) find out once I’ve stopped. The problem with option (b), an option I often go for, is that if I only settle on what I want to say once it’s already been said, my tone never makes it clear where the climax was."

Serendipitously, the event goodie-bag contained a magazine which featured an advert for a book on improving public speaking which, she wrote, she would be ordering.

'I've been competing for air time on the family WhatsApp group…'

Anybody who has followed Katy Archibald's career is likely to be aware that she isn't the only talent in the family. Every now and then, she delighted readers of her column by bringing in her brother John, who himself has a healthy palmarès in pursuiting and time trialling.

She wrote one such column in October 2019, after she'd just finished the Poland GP track event, having won the scratch race there. However, as she pointed out, hers was not the only success in the family that week: John had won himself a bronze medal in mixed relay TTT at the Yorkshire World Championships.

"I’m contented having ended on a high," she wrote of her Poland GP victory, "but I’ve been competing for air time on the family WhatsApp group with my brother. What’s a win at the Poland GP when your brother is on the podium at the World Champs?"

'I realised [my] talent because I wanted to hang, not because I wanted to be the best'

A column written in November 2019 saw Archibald looking back over her entry to the sport as a young teenager. It wasn't so much a question of talent, she mused, as a question of being able to hang with the cool kids.

"What was cool had a big impact on the decisions I made as a teenager," she wrote. "Fixies were cool. Edinburgh was cool. Travelling to Edinburgh to ride a fixie on a velodrome and make friends with other cool people who thought fixies were cool, was cool. I got lucky that I was talented at this cool thing, but I realised that talent because I wanted to hang, not because I wanted to be the best."

She had been a competitive swimmer as a youngster, she explained, but dropped out – as many do, she pointed out – aged 15. Bike racing though, continued to hold her in thrall thanks to all that went with it.

"Mine isn’t the story of an Olympic champion driven to be the best by something intrinsic and great. It’s the story of a vain teenager who liked racing because it was a weekend away in the van with people I wanted to be like," Archibald wrote, humbly skipping over the fact that it is now her that people want to emulate.

When Katie Archibald attacks, the whole crowd inches forward in their seats. Fans at home reach for the TV remote, and turn the volume up a few notches. Riders crumble in the Scot's wake.

This is the scene that played out again and again during the double Olympic champion's 13-year career, which she has brought to a close today. In that time, she collected more than 50 medals representing Great Britain, including two Olympic golds, seven world titles, and a record 21 European titles.

"I'm not hoping for a grand legacy," Archibald said, "but I hope I've made an impact on the individuals I’ve worked with."

Those that watched her compete, too, will remember her as one of the greats. A dogged attacker, her racing grimace at times looked like a smile. Often, she closed events with a two-handed victory salute to the skies.

Archibald leaves behind a treasure trove of success with her retirement. Here are five of the moments that stand out.

The breakthrough: Commonwealth Games 2014

In the early days of Archibald's track racing career, she set her sight on one goal: representing Scotland at the Commonwealth Games.

She achieved that in 2014, aged 20, and took home a medal, too: bronze in the points race.

Reminiscing in a Q&A shared by British Cycling to mark her retirement, this was the first career highlight that surfaced in her mind.

"It came down to the final sprint, and I feel like I can still go back into my body for that last lap and remember what it was like to try harder than I ever had before," Archibald said. "Every thought disappeared. It was like I didn’t have a brain anymore; I just existed as a body, and it felt incredible."

The riders she shared the podium with that day – silver medallist Elinor Barker and gold medallist Laura Kenny – would end up her Olympic champion team-mates just two years later.

Gold on debut: Rio Olympics 2016

Archibald made her Olympic debut in Rio in 2016, aged 21. She was already an assured racer by this point, holder of a world title and six European titles, but this was the event that would catapult her into cycling legend.

En route to winning the gold medal in the team pursuit, Archibald, alongside Kenny, Barker and Joanna Rowsell, broke the world record three times: first in qualifying, then in the first round, and again in the final.

The Scot felt so connected to her race-winning effort, she said, it was "like my mind left my body" in the final lap. "I don't know if I'll be able to experience that feeling in the future."

More than a decade on, she retires as the world record holder in the event once again; the benchmark now stands at 4:02.808, set by Archibald, Anna Morris, Josie Knight and Millie Couzens at the European Championships in February 2026.

Madison masterclass: Tokyo 2021

"I'll tell you what, that ride from Great Britain was something special. We may never see anything like it again," the Olympics TV commentator declared after Archibald and Kenny won the Madison in Tokyo. "Outstanding", "dominant" and "superb" were also among the words uttered.

The pair's victory was (and here come two more adjectives) both resounding and history-making. In the first-ever women's Madison event at the Olympics, Archibald and Kenny ruled over the competition, claiming 10 out of the 12 sprints, and winning by more than double the points of second place: their 78 to Denmark's 35.

"I've never wanted something so much and I've never been so nervous," Archibald said afterwards.

"I was terrified coming into it, and I think that's made it feel slightly more special to come out with gold."

Omnium dominance: World Championships 2021

Two months after the Tokyo Olympics, Archibald carried her golden form into the UCI Track World Championships in Roubaix, France, where she stunned the rest of the field with a flawless omnium performance.

The 27-year-old won all four events – the scratch race, tempo race, elimination race and points race – to win her fourth world title.

What's even more impressive is that she had done the same thing at the European Championships in Switzerland two weeks prior. It's a party trick she'd go on to repeat again in 2023, when she won her 19th European title, again with a perfect omnium.

Home boards: British Championships 2025

The speakers inside the Manchester Velodrome blasted Scottish singer Gerry Cinnamon's 'She's a Belter' as Archibald exited the track at the British Championships in 2025, the runaway winner of the points race.

Not since 2019 had the Scot competed at the championships, and she returned with a roof-raising spectacle; she took five of the eight sprints, gained a lap on the field, and won by a staggering 37 points.

"My brother [John Archibald] won the national points race in 2018, and similarly was up the road by himself," she recalled afterwards. "When someone you love is in agony, you don't enjoy watching it. I thought, 'The boy needs his bed.' That felt very similar."

The victory brought the loudest roar of the weekend from the crowd – a warm sound that pointed both to the widespread appreciation for Archibald, and the awe she inspired with her racing.

Two-time Olympic gold medallist Katie Archibald has called time on a 13-year racing career that has made her one of the most decorated track cyclists of all time, it was announced on Tuesday.

The 32-year-old, who joined the Great Britain Cycling Team (GBCT) aged 19, won more than 50 medals across her career, including two Olympic golds, seven world titles and a record 21 European titles.

She retires as the reigning Madison world champion and European team pursuit champion, both honours she has won since beginning training to become a nurse last year.

“After 13 years competing on the international stage, and a lifetime competing against my big brother, I’ve decided to retire from the former,” Archibald said.

“Being part of the GBCT has meant being part of something bigger than myself, and it’s been a true honour to race my bike alongside the best in the country.”

Raised in Milngavie, Scotland, Archibald’s competitive introduction to cycling came in grass track in 2011, before she moved to the wooden boards of Edinburgh’s outdoor Meadowbank Velodrome.

Her first major medal was bronze in the points race at the 2014 Commonwealth Games. Two years later, she won her first Olympic title in the team pursuit at the 2016 Rio Games; her second in 2021 was history-making, as she and Laura Kenny became the first female Olympic Madison champions, after the event was introduced to the Games in Tokyo. That victory is considered to be one of the most resounding ever, with more than double the points of second place.

Archibald missed her title defence at the Paris Olympics in 2024 due to a broken leg. She had previously said she wanted to compete at the Commonwealth Games this summer, and the LA Olympics in 2028.

In quotes shared by British Cycling, Archibald said the “draw of the ‘real world’” had been pulling her for a while, but she had been too afraid to leave cycling.

“Now is the right time simply because I’m not scared anymore,” she said. “I can’t claim to know why that is, but for some reason I only have a craving to live the life I’ve been saving for a rainy day, and no fear that I’ll miss the sunshine. It’s simply time.

“In the early stages of my career, I was sure I would never willingly walk away. I’ve been born in the right place at the right time with a talent that’s let me make a job of something people do for fun – that’s wild. I felt that giving this up before it was ripped from my hands would be irrational.

“At some point, though, I realised no one was going to rip it from my hands. I realised the decision would have to be mine, and I’ve found that truth quite hard to handle.”

Last September, Archibald began training as a nurse alongside her role within the GB squad. She completed her first placement earlier this year, and said she has “fallen completely in love with the whole thing”.

“When I let my friends and teammates know I was retiring from sport, they assumed it was because I wasn’t coping doing both,” she said. “The truth is, though, that there’s still a lot of ‘student’ in ‘student nurse’. I’ve had plenty of free time to train, and most of my classmates have jobs and families and commitments more taxing than mine.

“I really want to stress that the nursing training isn’t forcing me into retirement. At the same time, this thing that I’m just enamoured with is making me excited for the future, and that makes this transition less scary.”

Archibald leaves a legacy as one of the greatest endurance riders in track cycling history, and a leading figure in Great Britain’s success over the last decade.

How can you break a record if you don’t know what the benchmark is? That’s the question that sparked a social media investigation this week, after Katie Archibald and Sophie Lewis were declared the new world record holders in the Madison Kilo at the London 3 Day, a fact that now appears to be untrue.

The Madison Kilo, or 1km Madison Time Trial, involves two riders completing a timed kilometre around the track. They’re allowed a few laps to get up to speed, before starting the four-lap effort with a Madison handsling, propelling one rider to attack two laps and then handsling in the other for the remaining two.

The men’s record stands at 53.553 seconds, set by Ed Clancy and Jon Mould in 2018. The women’s? There wasn’t one, it was thought, until last Friday.

As the Madison Kilo is not a championship event – it previously came among the fun of the now defunct Revolution Series – the UCI keeps no trace of the record. Instead, track cycling followers refer to Wikipedia’s ‘List of world records in track cycling’, where the women’s Madison Kilo is absent.

And so, it was presumed that Archibald and Lewis’s time of 1:00.081, set at London’s Lee Valley Velodrome on Friday night, was the new benchmark. The fans in the stands congratulated the pair, so too did Carlton Kirby on the live feed, and the racing continued.

Four days later, though, Archibald cast doubt over what she called her and Lewis’s “sort of” record on Instagram.

“Apparently this weekend was the first time a women’s Mad-Kilo time has been written down,” the two-time Olympic champion wrote, and recalled a time she and Laura Kenny attempted the same event at the Revolution Series, which stopped in 2018. “(Seemingly) any documentation of the times has been lost,” Archibald wrote.

Dutch former pro Kirsten Wild, a nine-time track world champion, then contacted Archibald. “Remember I did it with Dani [Rowe],” Wild said. “Me and Dani were fast, or at least felt fast.”

After the conversation was shared on Instagram, one fan dug up an old Revolution Series Facebook post that declared, on 6 January 2018, that Wild and Rowe had indeed completed a Madison Kilo, and in 59.564 seconds – more than four tenths of a second faster than Archibald and Lewis’s time seven years later.

Is this the world record? It could be. But there's still a feeling a faster time might exist, one that went unrecorded, and is now floating in the history-book ether, waiting to be remembered.

“I’m convinced we could have gone sub 60 [seconds] with some practice,” Archibald said of her and Lewis’s effort. “Maybe next year. In the meantime, can someone write it down this time?”

Are you aware of a faster women's Madison Kilo than 59.564 seconds? Let us know in the comments, or send us an email at cycling@futurenet.com.

Great Britain’s Katie Archibald and Maddie Leech took home a masterful Madison title on Saturday night at the UCI Track World Championships, adding a third gold medal to their country’s tally before Anna Morris made it four in the individual pursuit.

The Madison pair came into the event with the goal of a top-five finish, but ended up the runaway leaders after the Netherlands crashed out. They took the lead in the second half of the 120-lap race, scoring consistently across the final four sprints, and finishing with 30 points, six ahead of France in second, and 10 ahead of the Olympic champions Italy.

The victory marked Archibald’s first in the event since 2018, and her seventh rainbow jersey in total. Leech, a debutant, enjoyed gold as her first Worlds medal.

“It’s pretty crazy. I don’t think I still believe it, but hopefully in the morning it will sink in,” the 22-year-old said.

A stranger to World Championships podiums, Leech was guided through the ceremony by Archibald, who pointed to where to stand, and helped her young team-mate into her rainbow jersey after it became caught on her earring.

“There’s nine years between us,” Archibald said of her partner. “Maddie was 13 years old when the first women’s Madison title was contended. She’s grown up with this race as a reality, which hasn’t always been the case. It feels very cool to be next to somebody on that journey.”

Leech described Archibald as a “legend of the sport”, adding that she had learnt a lot from competing alongside the former Olympic champion. “She’s a great person, so I’m really happy to have had the opportunity to ride with her this week,” she said.

Later in the evening, Anna Morris secured back-to-back world titles in the individual pursuit, toppling Josie Knight in an all-British final.

Only a second separated the two team-mates in qualifying, but Morris made further strides in the final, leading from the first lap, and eventually winning by more than two seconds with a 4:27.005. This year marked the first time the event was contested over 4km, having previously been 3km.

Winning over the new distance, Morris said, was “really special”.

“I didn’t know how I’d feel coming into the race being a defending champion, so that was a new experience. I just tried to stick to my processes, and I had support from my team around me. It was nice to finish it off,” said the British champion and former world record holder.

“It’s really nice to be able to share the podium with Josie. We’ve both been training really hard for it in Manchester, so to keep trying to push the standard within the British cohort is really nice.”

The USA’s Chloé Dygert, four times an individual pursuit world champion, claimed the bronze medal.

Elsewhere on the night in Santiago, Chile, the Netherlands’ Hetty van de Wouw continued to be the breakout star of the championships, breaking her own world record twice in the women’s kilometre time trial to earn her third world title of the competition. The benchmark in the event now stands at 1:03.121, more than a second faster than the previous 1:04.497.

Just three points separated fourth from first in the men’s omnium. Spain’s Albert Torres, having tallied 133, won by two points ahead of Japan’s Kazushige Kuboki and Belgium’s Lindsay de Vylder, the defending champion.

The five-day championships will come to a close on Sunday, with world titles on the line in the women’s points race, women’s keirin, men’s elimination race, men’s Madison and men’s sprint.

Having eased through qualifying, Great Britain’s Matthew Richardson will face Australia’s Leigh Hoffman in the semi-finals of the sprint competition; the winner will go on to face either Harrie Lavreysen (Netherlands) or Nicholas Paul (Trinidad and Tobago).

Find all the information you need to stream the action live through our how-to-watch guide.

Great Britain’s Katie Archibald added a 16th medal to her UCI Track World Championships collection on Thursday night, earning silver in a crash-marred elimination race.

The event was stopped and restarted twice in Santiago, Chile, after two heavy crashes caused two riders to be stretchered off. Archibald came into the final two with Ireland’s Lara Gillespie, and led out the last lap from the front, but was pipped on the line.

“Once we did get going, I had a couple of close calls, and then got into the swing of things,” double Olympic champion Archibald said afterwards. “I’m really, really happy to get to that point to contend when it’s essentially a different race in the final two; you do an elimination race and then you do a match sprint.

“I feel like I did well in the elimination race, and then I just didn’t have the legs in the final there. Normally I come off these races in pieces, physically done-in, and I felt like I didn’t have the top end. I’m, rationally, very happy. Physically, my legs, I’m a bit disappointed, but I guess that’s a mark of respect for a World Championship title.”

Gillespie’s gold medal made her Ireland’s first ever female winner at the Track World Championships.

Immediately after the elimination race, reigning sprint champion Emma Finucane was relegated in her quarterfinal with Iana Burlakova, and forced to bow out early in her title defence.

The Welshwoman, who was targeting a third rainbow jersey in a row, was initially judged to have won the deciding heat, before the UCI commissaires ruled against her for “entering the sprinter’s lane when the opponent was already there”.

GB’s men’s sprinters also left the keirin competition in the quarterfinals, both Olympic silver medallist Matthew Richardson and Harry Ledingham-Horn unable to make the top-four in their heats. The event was won by Dutchman Harrie Lavreysen, now a 18-time world champion.

GB earned two medals in day two, the second coming in the final event of the night, the women’s team pursuit. The quartet of Josie Knight, Anna Morris, Meg Barker and Maddie Leech beat Belgium comfortably in their bronze medal ride-off, after qualifying second-fastest on Wednesday. Italy won the title, ending a two-year British streak.

The GB squad has now collected four medals in Santiago, having picked up silvers in both the men's and women's team sprints on Wednesday.

Elsewhere, Germany’s Moritz Augenstein won the men’s scratch race, and Denmark successfully defended their men's team pursuit title.

The racing continues at the Track World Championships on Friday with finals in the men’s points race, men’s kilometre time trial, men’s individual pursuit, women’s omnium and women’s sprint. Check out our streaming guide for more information on how to watch the action.

Not since 2019 had Katie Archibald competed at the National Track Championships, and in typical fashion, she marked her return with a resounding victory, dominating the points race on the final day.

The double Olympic champion claimed five of the eight sprints in the 80-lap event and gained a lap on the field, roared on by the Manchester Velodrome crowd. Her final tally saw her win by a staggering margin of 37 points ahead of Danielle Watkinson and Cat Ferguson, the silver and bronze medallists.

Speaking afterwards, Archibald said she was “very happy about a plan well executed”.

“I wanted to score early, because I thought the points spread might be clustered across a few riders,” she said. “I thought, ‘If I attack in the final 30 [laps], then at least if I’m up the road, someone can join me, which is better then them being up the road and me having to join them. Then I completely blew my doors.

“My brother [John Archibald] won the national points race in 2018, and similarly was up the road by himself. When someone you love is in agony, you don’t enjoy watching it. I thought, ‘The boy needs his bed.’ That felt very similar.”

As Archibald came off the track after the race, the speakers inside the velodrome blasted ‘She’s a Belter’, a tune by Scottish singer-songwriter Gerry Cinnamon.

Her victory came two days after she won silver in the scratch race, and six years after her previous title – the individual pursuit – on her last appearance at the championships. Returning, Archibald said, has felt like a “nice reset”.

“It’s a re-grounding, a rebuild from what, at some point in your career, has been the grassroots of it,” she said. “When I’m not racing, it’s been hard to motivate myself, but that feels like a very distant feeling right now, because the weekend’s gone so well."

Also on the final day of the championships, Matthew Richardson and Lauren Bell sealed clean sweeps of the sprint events, the former winning the keirin, and the latter prevailing in the individual sprint.

Noah Hobbs won the men's scratch race, while the trio of Samuel Davies, Rebecca Newark and Jacob Smith took the para-cycling team sprint title.

There were smiles around the velodrome at the start of the session, when the tandem team sprint squad ‘Jean-Claude Tan Damme’ was announced over the tannoy. The quartet – made up of James Ball, Steffan Lloyd, Jenny Holl and Sophie Unwin – went on to win the event.

The last time Katie Archibald raced at the British National Track Championships, the UK had a queen, the number one album in the charts was the soundtrack to the Greatest Showman, and the words ‘Covid-19’ had never been uttered.

That was 2019. Now, six years on, the 30-year-old is set to make her return.

Next week, Archibald will compete in the points and scratch races at the annual championships in Manchester. She's one of a number of Olympians – including Emma Finucane, Sophie Capewell and Matthew Richardson – using the event as a season opener. For Archibald, in particular, there's a hope it will help her "reconnect" with the sport, after years of focusing on bigger goals.

“I really don’t know how this has happened,” she said of her six-year absence. “I kind of saw myself as someone that really loved riding Nationals, it’s my favourite thing to turn up to, and it’s always meant it’s got this real big, emotional attachment to it."

Archibald's list of achievements in cycling is so far reaching, that her success at the Nationals tends to be forgotten. Yes, she has two Olympic gold medals, six world titles, and 20 European titles – an all-time record; but etched at the bottom of her palmarès, too, are an impressive 11 national track titles – her most recent of which came on her last appearance, when she won the individual pursuit.

“For so many people that’s your breakthrough," she said of the competition, "because as an amateur you can turn up to Nationals and beat [the top riders] and it’s nice to be part of that journey for other people, I suppose, or to defend your stature as somebody that made it.

“The way things have conspired, there’s always been something else to prioritise. Perhaps it’s a reflection of a good reset that I’m finally back for Nationals, and ready to rebuild.”

Archibald will go into next week’s Nationals fresh from a five-week break over the winter, the longest of her career. She ended last season by winning her sixth rainbow jersey, followed by the overall at the UCI Track Champions League, turning around a torrid summer, in which she missed the Paris Olympics due to a broken leg.

Still, she said, she felt an “ironic comedown” after winning the team pursuit at October's World Championships. “It was the first time in my career that something like that hadn’t acted as a springboard or a way to carry momentum on,” Archibald explained.

“[I’ve had a] big break, and a big sort of reassessment of long-term goals,” she continued. “I’m in this sweet spot where I’ve got no intention in terms of tackling a massive road season. All of my goals are in the latter half of the year, around Worlds in October and the winter TCL.

“I guess I want to be able to race [the Nationals] to – this sounds really cheesy – reconnect to what it was like before, when this would have been the main goal of my season. I’m looking forward to it.”

The event will be Archibald’s only major track competition this year before the World Championships. She was originally due to compete at the season’s only UCI Nations Cup meet, in Turkey, but found out recently that budget decisions within British Cycling mean a women’s endurance squad will not be sent.

“I guess it’s just a standard pattern of the Olympic cycle that you dedicate your resources into the pointy end,” she said.

“I know really clearly that I want to go to the LA games. But you can’t pull a foot over the bed and think every day about something that’s four years away. The Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2026 is a really, really exciting thing in my season planning for the next two years on.”

Until then, though, Archibald's looking for new experiences, new ways to keep herself motivated on the bike; the first of which will come next week with her Nationals comeback. Then, she explained, she might make a hard turn out of the velodrome, and onto the trails.

“If I’m honest, a lot of what I’ve been doing is riding my mountain bike,” she said. “So I’m playing around with the idea of entering some of the local cross country races to see how that can buttress my [track] season.”

The British National Track Championships are scheduled to take place at the Manchester Velodrome on 21-23 February.

Double Olympic gold medallist Katie Archibald has pulled out of this weekend’s London 3 Day after dislocating her shoulder.

The Scot, who competed in the event’s opening night on Friday, said she had a “small stumble” when exiting the track, and had to go to hospital to have her shoulder put back in.

She will now forego the following two rounds of the competition, scheduled for Saturday evening and Sunday daytime.

Archibald was competing at the newly launched London 3 Day with Neah Evans, in a pairing sponsored by Cycling Weekly. Evans will now compete alongside Robyn Clay as part of a different team.

On Saturday afternoon, Archibald wrote on Instagram that she was “mortified” with her injury, and had been “drugged up to my eyeballs while every doctor in London gave relocating my shoulder a go”.

“The update is that while down here for London 3 Day I had a mishap with my bike when coming off the track and a small stumble,” the 30-year-old wrote.

“That small stumble has resulted, SOMEHOW, in a shoulder dislocation. I don’t know how I do this I really don’t.”

In June this year, Archibald suffered another freak injury, when she tripped on a step in her garden, dislocating her ankle and breaking her leg in two places. After undergoing surgery, she was forced to miss the Paris Olympics, instead undergoing an intense rehabilitation programme.

“I want to hide from the world and pretend I've not done something like this again. I'm mortified,” Archibald wrote. “But it's only going to be a small blip. Currently looks like I'll be able to continue with my racing schedule as planned. Just not as soon as tonight.

“Thank you so much to everyone at the event, especially my dreamy teamy who stayed with me through every relocation attempt. Sorry to my mum who keeps having to find out which A&E I've gone to now.”

Archibald and Evans enjoyed success on Friday’s opening night of the London 3 Day, winning both Madison chase and team elimination events inside the Lee Valley Velodrome.

Earlier this month, Archibald returned to racing, four months after her leg break, winning a gold and bronze medal at the UCI Track World Championships, in the team pursuit and Madison respectively.

The 30-year-old is next scheduled to compete in this year's series of the UCI Track Champions League, which begins in Paris on 23 November.

Fans can watch all the racing at this weekend's London 3 Day for free on Cycling Weekly's Youtube channel.

Great Britain’s women’s team pursuit squad planned for every eventuality in their UCI Track World Championships final against Germany, apart from the one in which they caught their opponents before the line.

“You never get a catch in a Worlds final,” smiled Katie Archibald afterwards. “I was looking at Cam [Meyer, the team’s coach] like, ‘We didn’t go over this!’ I was quite surprised.”

Still, it was with three laps remaining in the 16-lap race that the gun sounded, crowning Archibald and her teammates – Josie Knight, Anna Morris, Meg Barker and Jess Roberts, who swapped in for Barker in the first round – the world champions. The ride sealed a dominant two days for the squad, who qualified first by three seconds on Wednesday, caught their first round opponents, China, after the halfway point, and then cruised away against the Germans.

“We came out swinging, and I’m really quite happy that we did,” Archibald told Cycling Weekly. “We start quick in training all the time, and it still isn’t the plan. We train to get to 100%, so you can have this buffer at 80%, but obviously on race day, you get nervous, maybe you accidentally give 95%.

“All our training sessions have been really hard, we’ve been really struggling to get it off the line, and then it’s gone hot today, race kit on, race feeling on. That’s what’s tuned us into that result.”

Prior to the competition, Archibald said she was at 80% of her full physical ability, still recovering from a broken leg suffered in June. She raced all three rounds of the team pursuit, and didn’t falter once.

“A lot of pain is psychological, isn’t it?” she said. “Not that it’s not real, but you feel it go up and down with stress. That’s the treat of having something that you care about; it can let you tune into one feeling, and that one feeling, I guess, is the wheel in front of me, not the ankle below me.”

Racing as the defending champions, the British quartet drew out a buffer of more than two seconds after just four laps in the final, a gap that only got larger.

For Knight, the team went into the match-up with a “physical benefit” after only racing half of the first round. “But mentally, it was an odd one,” said the Paris Olympics bronze medallist. “From a confidence perspective, I’d almost liked to have gone the full 4km, to just see what we had. But it didn’t matter in the end, because we caught them [in the final].”

The victory marked a second world title for Barker, Morris and Knight – a sixth for Archibald – who were all part of the squad that won the rainbow jersey in Glasgow last year.

Was there any pressure coming back as defending champions? “People kept asking about defending, but nobody can take away the fact that we won last year, and it was just another opportunity to win again," Knight said. "We had nothing to earn. It was just another opportunity, and it feels really fantastic to have won.”

Earlier in the evening, GB’s men’s team pursuit squad were pipped to gold in their final against the hosts and reigning champions Denmark.

The quartet of Ollie Wood, Charlie Tanfield, Ethan Hayter and Josh Charlton started off fastest in Ballerup, but buoyed by the noise of the home crowds, the Danes fought back to win by three tenths of a second.

“It was only after I bailed after my second turn that I could hear it,” said Wood, who replaced first-round rider Rhys Britton in the final. “It’s actually quite a small crowd, but it seemed extremely loud, so I’ll give them that.”

The Brits qualified top on Thursday, two tenths of a second faster than the Danes, and despite getting quicker throughout the competition, were ultimately held off in the final.

Up against the defending champions, Tanfield said, the squad knew they were in for a "dogfight".

"It always is against those guys," he said. “We gave it absolutely everything in the final, but we just lost out a little bit at the finish. I think we got the most out of ourselves today, and that’s just how it is, isn’t it? You can’t win all the time.”

The home support maintained their fervour throughout the medal ceremony, long after the event had finished. As the winners' names were read out over the tannoy, they were drowned out by clapping. The noise, in fact, barely died off as the five Danes slowly squeezed into their new rainbow jerseys, and a flock of swan cuddly toys was awarded to all the medallists.

There were roars, too, from the Japanese media contingent, when they witnessed their first keirin world champion since 1987.

Kento Yamasaki, a rider who didn’t make the country’s Olympic squad this August, stunned the field when he won the event's final, beating Israel’s Mikhail Yakovlev and Colombia’s Kevin Quintero in a photofinish. The Olympic champion, Harrie Lavreysen, a 14-time world champion, took a shock exit in the semi-final, and finished eighth.

The Japanese fans were on their feet again later in the evening, waving hand-held fans in the air when Kazushige Kuboki won an animated men's scratch race.

The 35-year-old was one of a handful of riders who gained a lap on the field in the 60-lap race. He attacked down the back straight to hold off his opponents, and win his first world title in a career that dates back almost two decades.

New Zealand’s Ally Wollaston also won a maiden rainbow jersey, beating defending champion Lotte Kopecky (Belgium) in the women's elimination race.

“[Kopecky] prefers riding from the front, and I prefer riding at the back, so it worked perfectly for the both of us,” she told Cycling Weekly. “I knew going into the final lap that Lotte was going to be really strong, and when she kicked, I did think for a moment, ‘Oh God, I’m not going to be able to come over here.’ But I think with the dynamics of the track, it really benefits a rider coming round with the long straights, so I knew I just had to be patient and wait for the finish line to come.

"To be able to walk away with the rainbows is something I can’t even put into words.”

Great Britain’s Sophie Lewis finished 15th in the elimination race. Other British results on the night included strong showings from the squad’s two 20-year-old debutants, Noah Hobbs and Harry Ledingham-Horn, who placed sixth in the scratch race, and fourth in the keirin respectively.

“I’m surprised, to be fair,” Ledingham-Horn said. “Making the semis, I was really happy with that. That was a good day out. Then everything went right in the semi-final, and I was even competitive in the gold medal final, which is crazy, to be honest.”

Team sprint gold medallists Emma Finucane and Sophie Capewell cruised through to the semi-finals of the individual sprint competition, which will take place on Friday. Should the pair win their heats, they will set up an all-British final for the title.

There’s a step in Katie Archibald’s garden that makes her flinch each time she sets foot on it. “I do feel a bit sick, because I’ve got to go out the same step like every day,” she says. “This is so pathetic, but pretty much every day, I hold onto the handle and take a big, really slow step. It’s just any other step, but I just can’t get my head around how inconsequential an action it was, for such a consequential outcome.”

The inconsequential action she’s talking about came in June this year. One early summer’s day, Archibald walked out into her garden and tripped on the step that now haunts her. The fall was detrimental. She dislocated her ankle, broke her tibia and fibula, and tore two ligaments off the bone. On top of the injury list, the fall ruled out her hopes of going to the Paris Olympics, where she was targeting the Omnium, Madison and team pursuit, with realistic gold medal chances in all three events.

“I’ve had friends of friends ask ‘What really happened?’ because it sounds as weird to me as anybody else. The only phrasing is freak injury,” she says, and then takes herself back to the moment. “The way I fall dislocates my foot. The dislocation breaks both the bones. The bone break rips the ligaments, and it ends up with really an injury of great consequence.

“You know if you close your eyes, and you hold your hand there, and you know what your hand looks like, and then you open your eyes and you see your hand? It was eerie. I would close my eyes, because I had fallen over, and I know where my foot is, but then I open my eyes, and it’s not there anymore. It’s facing the wrong way.”

That sight marked the start of a challenging summer for Archibald, one punctuated by hospital appointments, mental battles and recovery milestones. This week, however, only four months after an injury that left her with a leg like “spaghetti in a bag”, the Scot is back racing, part of the GB squad for the Track World Championships in Denmark. It will be her first event since missing the Olympics in August.

Archibald was lying in a hospital gurney when she first heard Paris was off the cards. “I had a surgeon say to me, ‘I’ve spoken to a specialist, and by the way, you’re not going to go to the Olympics’,” the two-time gold medallist remembers. “Because it was so quick, I was like, ‘I don’t believe you.’ I just didn’t really at first.”

Throughout her career, Archibald has lived by the mantra of keeping her ambitions high and expectations low. She was aware of the extent of her injury – who wouldn’t be? – but held onto her faith and aimed to keep her name on the reserve list for Paris. “I had this glimmer of hope,” she says. That glimmer burned out swiftly in a conversation with the GB squad’s performance director, Stephen Park.

“Sparky actually said that they’d had medical advice, and so it would be negligence to essentially give me that hope, to put me on the non-travelling reserve list, because I would keep training and this would cause irreversible damage,” the 30-year-old says. The news came within 10 days of her fall, and to many, might have felt like an arrow through the heart. For Archibald, “it was really noticeable the weight that it lifted off my chest”.

“It was somebody else’s decision, and it didn’t feel like I was the one giving up. Since then, it’s all been a pretty steep trajectory upwards.”

Following the surgery, which involved plates and pins, the Scot spent six weeks in an orthotic boot that came up to her left knee. She got “really into” swimming, and continued to do upper body work in the gym, “but none of it felt like a cathartic release,” she says. “I’d lost being able to move properly. I’d lost my sense of community a little bit, because cycling is that community for me, and my team were off on training camps, off on holding games, and then off at the Games.”

While her teammates were competing in Paris, Archibald was at the Bisham Abbey National Sports Centre, 30 miles west of London, and 300 miles from the French capital. There, she trained inside the Intensive Rehabilitation Unit (IRU), where she worked through sequences of weight-bearing exercises on her leg. There were televisions throughout the building. Did she watch any of the Olympics? “I did watch it all,” she says.

“The only emotion I felt that I was uncomfortable with – the distasteful emotion, I suppose – was jealousy more than anything else,” she explains. “I could tell that I was being standoffish, and I could tell I wasn’t being a nice person to be around. When the racing actually started, and once I could just be immersed as a fan of the sport, that was the biggest escape. It just seemed really funny that the thing I was trying to avoid thinking about, which was my Olympic dream that wasn’t happening, the best thing to distract me from that was the Olympics.”

Training progress, at first, was slow. Prior to the Olympics, Archibald had begun receiving coaching from her brother, time trial record holder John Archibald, but she "canned [him] off" when the physios told her to go back to basics. "The training was things like trying to do a calf raise,” she says. “It took me fucking two months to be able to do a calf raise.”

Come the end of August, however, and Archibald was back on a bike outdoors. Her track teammates had returned from the Olympics with eight medals, but already the Paris Games was starting to slip into collective memory. Attention turned to the next major championships: the Worlds in Denmark. Team selection would be made at the start of October. It was the motivation Archibald needed.

“The way I planned out the progression to think I’ll make it for Worlds, I had these key turbo sessions that would give feedback on my Madison form, and some key track sessions that would give me feedback on my team pursuit form. Those are my two targets at the Worlds: team pursuit and Madison,” she says.

The plan called for immediate improvement. “It had to progress so rapidly that I knew the next week would need to be longer, or would need to be more power, or faster or something, that it almost wasn’t satisfying,” she says. “You’re like, ‘Good, I achieved the bare minimum, and now there’s just another opportunity for failure next time.’ I found it really hard to get that rush that you would normally get from nailing a session.”

Then, on the final day of September, her final session arrived. “And I fucking nailed it, if I’m honest” she grins. “It just felt like a graduation.”

Today, Archibald explains, she considers herself to be at 80% of her full ability. “With physical at 80%, I can still turn up with my technical and my tactical at 100%, so there’s still a lot on the table,” she says. More importantly, though, the former Olympic champion is “happier on the bike than I’ve been in a long time”.

“I just had a serious craving to get back to training, regardless of what result it would lead to, regardless of whether I’d be any good at it. I just really wanted to get back on my bike, back onto the routine, back onto that freedom of doing what you’re good at.

“Now that I’m able to push again, the fact that I can turn up to the track sessions as a contributor, not just a burden, and all the benefits that come with being part of a team that you love, I feel so much more aware of those elements that are making me happier on the bike.”

Four months have passed since the innocuous fall, and still her legs are not symmetrical; she’s missing muscle mass on her left calf, while the ankle is larger, from both the swelling and the metalwork.

“I’ve been showing it to people, I guess for a bit of sympathy or something, and I did that to my dad, and he looks at it and he goes, ‘Well, that leg’s not going to be ready in four weeks, is it?’ This would have been, say, three weeks ago. And I was like, ‘What’s wrong with you, man? I’m trying to go either way, so please, I don’t know why I showed you this shrivelled-up calf’,” she laughs. “Now, if I’m totally honest, I kind of wish I could get the other leg all tightened up and screwed in and nice and stiff.”

The scars will always remind Archibald of that day in June. So too will the step in her garden. But while the tile that she fell on may be daunting, the 30-year-old is unflinching about her future. She feels “super motivated” for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. She's also looking forward to working with a new coach, and is exploring university courses to develop herself off the bike.

“This feels very much like the start of a journey for me,” she says of this week’s World Championships. “It’s a major target – it kind of always is – but I know that as far as Worlds go, this won’t be the most competitive of the four-year cycle. I will be as competitive as I can be.”

Two-time Olympic champion Katie Archibald is out of the Paris Olympics after an innocuous garden fall saw her break bones in her lower leg.

The GB track star confirmed on her Instagram that the incident would prevent her from racing at her third games. 

She wrote: "I tripped over a step in the garden and managed to, somehow, dislocate my ankle; break my tibia and fibula; and rip two ligaments off the bone. What the heck."

It will mean a reshuffle in GB's track lineup, and its team pursuit squad. At last year's Track World Championships, Archibald was part of the squad which won gold in the team pursuit in Glasgow. 

British Cycling also released a statement on the "heartbreaking" news.

"Earlier this week, Katie Archibald had an accident at home which has resulted in a broken ankle which she has since had surgery on," BC said. "Following medical advice, this unfortunately means that Katie will be unable to compete at the upcoming Olympic Games.

"We share in Katie’s heartbreak over her injury, and the cruel manner in which she has been denied the chance to ride for the medals she so coveted in Paris.

"Our focus is now on providing Katie with the best possible support as she begins her recovery, and we know that the whole cycling community will be right behind her for every step."

Archibald wrote on her Instagram: "[I] Had surgery yesterday to pin the bones back together and reattach the ligaments. Then hopefully this afternoon I'll be going home (wearing a more high tech boot than the one in my hot dogs pic).

"A hundred thank yous for the fabulous doctors, nurses, radiographers, porters, physios, surgeons and more at the Manchester Royal Infirmary.

"A hundred apologies for what this means for the Olympic team, which I've been told won't involve me.

"I'm still processing that bit of news, but thought I better confirm it publicly instead of leaving it to the grapevine (trip hazard and all that).

"Might be back with more updates, might be gone from the socials for a bit - TBC. Ciao for now."

It is not the first time that Archibald has injured her ankles this Olympic cycle. In 2022, she was crashed into by a car driver, resulting in time off the bike. The same year, she also fractured two transverse processes of the vertebrae in March, and then broke her collarbone in a crash at a UCI Track Nations Cup in April.

Two-time Olympic champion Katie Archibald will miss next week’s European Track Championships, the Great Britain Cycling Team (GBCT) has revealed. 

Archibald holds the record for the most European titles, having earned her 18th, 19th and 20th in 2022, but will not be part of the GBCT squad in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands on 10 January. 

A press contact from British Cycling told Cycling Weekly that the 29-year-old’s focus in the first half of this year will be on the UCI Nations Cup events. 

There will be three Nations Cup rounds before the Olympics this August, each worth more qualifying points than the European Championships. 

Speaking to the media at the UCI Track Champions League last year, Archibald said “the big one” will be the Nations Cup round in Adelaide, Australia, scheduled for 2-4 February. She is then expected to compete at the round in Milton, Canada in April. 

Currently, Archibald is on a road training camp with her trade team Ceratizit-WNT. 

Besides the Scot's absence, GBCT will take a full strength women’s endurance squad to the European Championships. 

Team pursuit world champions Josie Knight, Anna Morris, Meg Barker and Elinor Barker will all travel to Apeldoorn, alongside Madison world champion Neah Evans, Sophie Lewis and Jess Roberts. 

The men’s endurance squad will also be charged with firepower, with Ineos Grenadiers rider Ethan Hayter returning to the boards for the first time since 2022. He will be joined by fellow former team pursuit world champions Dan Bigham, Ollie Wood and Ethan Vernon as the quartet look to gain qualifying points for the Olympics, following a disastrous crash at the 2023 World Championships. 

Women’s sprint world champion Emma Finucane will lead the sprint squad’s hopes, along with Olympic silver medallist Jack Carlin. 

In a press release, head coach Jon Norfolk said: “The track squad enters 2024 with strong momentum from the previous season which saw nine world and 12 European medals won, and I’m excited to see what a good block of winter training produces out in Apeldoorn."

Norfolk added: “There is real strength and depth in our current track squad, and the European championships will provide good competition experience as well as an opportunity for riders to showcase their abilities as we head towards Olympic selection.” 

The European Championships will be held from 10-14 January at the Omnisport velodrome in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. 

The 23-rider GBCT squad is listed below. 

Women’s endurance 

Meg Barker 
Elinor Barker  
Neah Evans 
Josie Knight 
Sophie Lewis 
Anna Morris 
Jess Roberts 

Men’s endurance

Dan Bigham 
Ethan Hayter 
Will Perrett 
Mark Stewart 
Charlie Tanfield 
Will Tidball 
Ollie Wood 
Ethan Vernon 

Women’s sprint 

Sophie Capewell 
Emma Finucane 
Katy Marchant 
Lowri Thomas 

Men’s sprint

Jack Carlin  
Ali Fielding 
Joe Truman 
Hamish Turnbull 

Katie Archibald secured the overall women’s endurance title at the UCI Track Champions League on Saturday, on another rousing round for the Brits. 

Having won every elimination race so far this series, the two-time Olympic gold medallist bowed out third in the event in round five, but still earned the league win by 15 points.

Her overall victory rounded off a commanding double-header weekend for the Brits, in which five different riders prevailed. 

“It feels very good [to win],” Archibald told Cycling Weekly afterwards. “It wasn’t a sort of unassailable lead at the end there, and it’s a shame not to win on the final round. 

“I feel mainly bad because this was the race that my sister came to, so she might not be the lucky charm I was after, but I’m really happy.” 

Endurance league winner in 2021, Archibald was always the forerunner for this year’s crown. She took the leader’s jersey in the first round in Mallorca, Spain, and kept it on her shoulders throughout the competition.

“I’m not the most explosive, I’m not the longest, but my natural form lies really in track racing and those three to five minute efforts, which is exactly what this series is,” Archibald said. “When it comes to firing the gun, this, for some reason, is just what I’m good at.”  

It was a successful night, too, for fellow Scots Mark Stewart and Neah Evans, who took their first victories of the series, each winning a scratch race. 

Stewart was part of a four-rider move that swapped through turns to hold off the pack in the men's event. In the final lap, the 28-year-old peeled off the front and drove away to victory, before Will Perrett sprinted to a British one-two. 

“For at least a few laps, we were a team against the bunch,” Stewart said. “I knew with four laps to go we had a big enough gap, and I love that way of thinking - and these are millisecond thoughts - but you’re like, ‘Right, how can I beat this guy? What’s his strength?’ 

“To be able to, basically, in one lap, turn around that thought process, execute it and go, ‘Mega, I was right. It paid off,’ is pretty cool.” 

Stewart’s victory enlivened the home crowds in London, who unleashed a wall of noise when Evans thundered to victory later in the night. 

The Scot latched onto an attack from Olivija Baleišytė (Lithuania) with eight laps to go, and then powered solo, waving to the stands as she crossed the line. 

“It’s one of those cliché things where you always say, ‘home crowds, the noise is amazing,’ but it really is,” Evans told Cycling Weekly. “We had been off the front a little bit, so I knew I didn’t have the sharpest legs for the sprint, and then the crowd just started roaring and I was like, ‘Go on, give everything.’” 

Elsewhere, scratch race world champion Will Tidball (Great Britain) finished second to Canada’s Dylan Bibic in the men’s endurance league. 

Harrie Lavreysen (Netherlands) and Ellesse Andrews (New Zealand) took home the sprint league titles, the duo having asserted their dominance throughout the competition. Lavreysen won seven of his 10 events across the five rounds, while Andrews won six. 

Katie Archibald crowned a barnstorming night for the Brits at the UCI Track Champions League on Friday, continuing her unbeaten run in the elimination race at the series. 

The Scot’s victory followed wins for Danni Khan and Will Tidball, who both had the home crowds roaring inside London's Olympic velodrome. 

The loudest cheer of all, though, came on the final race of the night, when Archibald lifted her arms triumphantly, having jostled with Norway's Anita Stenberg, and despite an earlier crash.

"[The elimination race] is the thing I enjoy most," she told Cycling Weekly trackside. "I think [Stenberg] was trying to hold me out when we went down to three with Lara [Gillespie], and you could tell she was thinking that maybe I didn't have the legs. 

"What's funny is that, you know when someone shoves you, you shove them back? And it's like, you wouldn't have done it if you weren't provoked? I was like, 'Here we go', and I tried to do the same to her. 

“I went for a drag race," Archibald continued. "Quite often, psychologically, if you get in front of them before the banking, most people crack.” 

And crack Stenberg did. Archibald has now won all four of the elimination races in this third series of the Track Champions League, and was driven on in London by her family wielding a Scotland flag on the home straight. 

She will now take the leader’s jersey into Saturday’s finale, with a 12-point advantage over Stenberg. 

“It’s been a really good test,” the 29-year-old said of the series so far. “I quite often attack early and the other riders know that, but if you’ve ridden well, they can’t do anything about it. Throughout this series, that’s only happened once. 

“When it’s gone down to me and Anita, I’ve had to scrap for every metre.” 

Earlier in the evening, scratch race world champion Tidball opened his Track Champions League account with a victory in the men’s elimination race.

As he went into the final lap, shoulder-to-shoulder with Belgium’s Jules Hesters, the 23-year-old stirred the crowds with a rousing hand gesture. He then lost his opponent's wheel, closed the gap, and won dramatically by a tyre’s width on the line.

“You’ve got to have some fun, you know?” Tidball told Cycling Weekly, after high-fiving the front row down the back straight. “It’s not a World Championship, I’m here in front of a home crowd. Alright, [it was a] shame it wasn’t in my rainbow jersey, but what are the chances you get to do something like that?

Following his scratch race win at August’s Super Worlds, Tidball joked that he became “the opposite of an athlete”, drinking “lots of beers on the beach” and “celebrating a bit too much”.

He is now back to form, he said, adding: “It’s nice to get a bit of attention. I’ve gone a few years without getting the limelight, so it’s nice that things are coming good.”

The first Brit to win in London this year was Saint-Piran rider Khan, who claimed a surprise victory in the women’s scratch race. 

“I’m speechless,” she said as she warmed down on the rollers, a stunned expression on her face. “I never envisaged that I’d be part of this fantastic event, let alone go on to take a win in London."

The 28-year-old stepped away from her career on the track in 2016 to concentrate on the road, only returning to the boards this year. She was part of a three-rider move in Friday's scratch race that went with seven laps to go. 

“I’ve been watching every race for the last few rounds,” she said, “and it’s been won by someone going with seven or eight [laps] to go. I’ve got boxed in every time and finished fifth, sixth, seventh, so I really didn’t want that to happen again.” 

This time, Khan led the final lap and narrowly held off Lily Williams (USA) across the line. She thanked her coach and father afterwards - “I couldn’t do it without them,” she said. 

Elsewhere, Team GB’s Katy Marchant finished runner-up to Alessa-Catriona Pröpster (Germany) in the match sprint, while the Colombian duo of Kevin Quintero and Martha Bayona bossed the keirins. 

The riders will return to London's Lee Valley Velodrome on Saturday evening for the closing round of the competition. 

Katie Archibald fist pumped the air when she realised she had taken the lead of the women’s endurance table on the opening night of the UCI Track Champions League. 

The Brit finished second in the scratch race on Saturday evening, and later won the elimination race with an incisive move under Norway’s Anita Stenberg.  

“When you’re in the leader’s jersey you’ve got to do all the media and talk to these arseholes,” she joked to Cycling Weekly in Palma, Mallorca after the race.

Over the competition's first two series, Archibald was one of the most dominant riders, winning the title in 2021’s inaugural edition. 

She left it late in the scratch race on Saturday night, peeling off the bunch with three laps to go, and ultimately failing to catch the race winner, Lily Williams (USA), and her fellow escapee, Kate Richardson (Great Britain). 

“I just put everything into thinking about if I could get the gap soon, and it was just me going for it,” Archibald explained. “I hit like four figures [in watts], which has never happened [for me] in a scratch. 

“My mum, I’m sure, will give me the debrief.” 

The elimination race, on the other hand, will require less analysis in the family group chat. The two-time Olympic gold medallist stayed quiet throughout the event, nestled in the bunch, before holding off Stenberg in the final lap.  

“I usually try and just ride at threshold,” Archibald said afterwards. “I’ve seen Anita get one over on Jennifer Valente [Olympic omnium champion] at least twice, maybe three times.

“I’ll need to watch it back. Obviously she surrendered that inside line. I don’t know why I’m trying to get myself disqualified, I’m sure I had it. But it was close.” 

Ahead of the opening round, Archibald told the media that the series is "super important" for her in preparing for next summer's Olympics in Paris. 

"Having the strength of this series, the exposure to the racing, the professionalism that is attached to it, is just vital to my career and to that bigger childhood dream of getting on an Olympic podium," she said. 

After the racing in Palma, the Brit rode a lap of honour, albeit to an emptying Velòdrom Illes Balears, with her fellow league leaders: sprinters Harrie Lavreyesen (Netherlands) and Alessa-Catriona Pröpster (Germany), and endurance athlete Eiya Hashimoto (Japan). 

Lavreyesen stamped his dominance on the men’s sprint competition, winning both the Keirin and the match sprint resoundingly. 

Archibald was the only British winner on the night. Other notable British results included a trio of second places, taken by Mark Stewart in the men's scratch, Will Tidball in the men’s elimination - which was initially stopped after a heavy crash - and world champion Emma Finucane in the women’s sprint.  

Two-time Olympic gold medallist Katie Archibald has said the upcoming season of the UCI Track Champions League is “super important” in her preparation for next year’s Paris Olympics. 

The 29-year-old will join 17 other riders in the women’s endurance events for the new season, which opens in Palma, Mallorca this Saturday. 

Archibald won the inaugural Track Champions League title in 2021, and placed second last year behind the USA’s Jennifer Valente, who will forgo this autumn's edition. 

“The opening season was a bit of a dream for me, coming as it was off the back of the Olympic Games and World Championships,” the Brit said in a press conference on Wednesday. “I just sort of carried that momentum through. I’m certainly in that dip before we hopefully head towards Paris, so it’s more of a challenge for me this year.

“Hopefully I’m up to it,” she added. 

Next August, Archibald is expected to lead British hopes on the track at the Olympic Games, and could compete in all three of the team pursuit, Madison and Omnium. 

Asked how important the Track Champions League is in her preparation for Paris, she said: “Super important. What’s vital to me about this series is that this is a framework to exist as a professional track cyclist. And if you exist as a professional track cyclist, then you can chase your Olympic dream.

“Having the strength of this series, the exposure to the racing, the professionalism that is attached to it, is just vital to my career and to that bigger childhood dream of getting on an Olympic podium. This is one of the podiums that you chase along the way.” 

This summer, the 29-year-old was part of Great Britain’s gold medal-winning team pursuit squad at the World Championships, held in her hometown of Glasgow. She spoke candidly at the time about her anxiety at the event, comparing her pre-race nerves to “waiting to be trotted out for slaughter”. 

“[The World Championships] came with a lot of pressure that I didn’t necessarily enjoy, and I didn't necessarily thrive under,” she said in Wednesday’s press conference. “I struggle a bit with nerves. We all do, because I think it’s important to us, these races, and I can’t always shake that for something like the Track Champions League.

“I’ll get nervous for just local track league,” she smiled. “So I get just as nervous for this as well, but it’s another good experience to expose yourself to.” 

Archibald is celebrating a 10-year milestone this week, a decade since her first Team GB selection at the 2013 European Championships.  

The Brit said she ranks her 2021 Track Champions League title “very highly” among her achievements to date, which also count two Olympic gold medals, five world titles and a record 20 European titles. 

"It’s both scary and reassuring, I suppose, how much I have taken from my time as a team pursuiter, as a track cyclist, and as a member of the British Cycling programme," she said. 

"In 2017, we had the first-ever women’s Madison at a World Championships. In 2021, we had the first-ever women’s Madison at an Olympic Games. And in 2021, we had the first-ever UCI Track Champions League. 

“I feel incredibly aware and incredibly lucky for the fact that my career has overlapped with these 'firsts'.” 

Two-time Olympic gold medal winning track cyclist Katie Archibald has said she struggled with the pressure of performing at a home World Championships in Glasgow. 

The Scot, who began her racing career on the boards of the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome, finished fourth in the Omnium on Wednesday night, having fought valiantly for a medal in the last of the four events.  

Her disappointment came three days after the joy of winning her fifth world title, as part of the British quartet that triumphed in the team pursuit on Sunday. 

“It’s not just a loss, but it’s a frustration with yourself,” Archibald said after the Omnium. “Obviously I’m frustrated about how I went through the event as a whole. But it’s nicer to finish on a race where I feel like I’ve given it my all.” 

When the names were read out into the track centre ahead of the first event, the roar from the crowds for Archibald was unmatched. The 29-year-old placed fourth in the opening Scratch race, but struggled in the Tempo and Elimination races, coming 13th and 14th. 

She entered the final event - the Points race - in eighth, and went on to gain two laps on the field, finishing on 127 points, six off a medal. 

“It was just mistake after mistake,” she explained. “I’ve had this anxiety building, since May really, feeling like you’re waiting to be trotted out for slaughter. And I thought, ‘Well, once I get racing, it’ll be ok.’ And the Scratch didn’t go to plan.

“I’ve struggled with the pressure. To come in with form like this, it’s never one thing, and I can’t blame it on one thing. But I’ve obviously made a series of mistakes, and maybe done two proper things in a Points race, and that weighed out to fourth.” 

In recent weeks, Archibald has spoken openly about her difficulty in preparing for this year’s World Championships, which come a year after her partner, Rab Wardell, died in his sleep. 

“What’s funny is that now I feel fine, I guess because I’m a bit dejected,” she said. “I cry all the time, like at everything, mainly happy things. So when you feel disappointed with a race, it’s quite a mellow sense of sadness, compared to the bigger things we all deal with in life.” 

“[This event] was so special, and maybe that’s part of what’s gotten to me. I think I’ve probably put too much on it. Just as a fan, I’ve loved it, I’ve loved every moment. I put too much of my heart into my head, and that seemed to sort of stall my legs.” 

Great Britain’s women’s team pursuit squad became world champions for the first time since 2014 on Saturday night, beating New Zealand in the final in Glasgow. 

The quartet - composed of Katie Archibald, Elinor Barker, Josie Knight and Anna Morris - received a guard of honour from the GB staff once they stepped off their bikes, having clocked a 4-08.771, winning by over four and a half seconds. 

The victory proved a poignant one for Archibald, who paid tribute to her late partner Rab Wardell with a title-winning ride in her home velodrome. 

“She’s unbelievable,” said Barker, who also rode in the team with Archibald last time GB won gold at the World Championships. “It’s really hard to summarise the year she’s had, and how she feels about it, and how we feel about it. But just the fact she’s here is just insane. I don’t really know how she does it, to be honest."

The team’s display inside the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome was commanding. Having recorded the best time in both qualifying and the first round, the quartet fell behind marginally to the Kiwis at the start of their run, before Archibald took the reins at the midway point, and powered them into the lead. 

The final pull for victory fell to Knight, who crossed the line with the Kiwis in sight. 

“With a lap to go, I looked up and I could just see them,” Knight said. “I thought, ‘Even if I blow up completely here, as long as I can still see them, we’ve got this.’”

For the 26-year-old, the win marked a career-first world title - a feat that Morris and Meg Barker, who rode in the first round, also enjoyed. 

“I’ve ridden a lot of finals and come second, the biggest one being Tokyo [Olympics],” Knight said. “I’ve been wanting to win something big for a while, and this is my third team pursuit in the World Championships. 

“It’s gone bronze, silver last year, and honestly, I was just so devastated on the podium last year, and I really didn’t want that to happen again.”

France beat the defending champions Italy to the bronze medal.

Danes end Italian dominance

In the men’s team pursuit, Denmark mirrored the British women in winning all three of their runs, and the gold medal. 

The win ended a two-year streak of Italian dominance in the event, with Filippo Ganna’s quartet taking second, over two seconds down on the winning 3-45.161.

For Danish rider Rasmus Lund, the victory brought sweet revenge. “It’s good to be back,” he told Cycling Weekly. “I actually got a memory on Facebook today that it was two years ago that we lost in the final at the Olympics, exactly to the date. So it’s a bit of a revenge score. Now, it’s finally finished and we’re on top. It’s a really good feeling.”

Lund, who missed his team’s qualifier, has been struggling with two herniated discs in his spine, but was still able to pull a monstrous three-lap turn through the finish line. “I didn’t hear the bell for the last lap,” he smiled. “To be honest, I feel pretty cool. I think it’s an accomplishment that I didn’t really think was possible until today.” 

The 25-year-old was joined by Niklas Larsen, Carl-Frederik Bévort and Lasse Leth on the podium to receive their rainbow jerseys. New Zealand came third.

The British men's quartet - the defending champions - crashed out of qualifying, and did not compete in the finals. 

More para gold for GB

After winning four world titles on Friday night, GB’s para-cyclists kept the party going at the start of Saturday’s evening session, taking two rainbow jerseys in the first two events, and a third later on.

The opener went to Sam Ruddock, who successfully defended his title in the C1 kilometre time trial. When it was clear his 1-12.210 time wouldn’t be beaten, the 33-year-old jumped for joy, collapsed to his knees and thumped the floor.

“It was a feeling of relief and elation all at the same time,” said Ruddock, who has cerebral palsy. “This is an event we didn’t expect to do this well in, because it was the secondary focus next to the individual pursuit. So to get it, and to see the Chinese drop off more than I expected, was a real shock.”

When Ruddock won his first rainbow jersey in the event last year, the Chinese riders were absent from the Championships. “To still be on top, with the best in the world now being here, bodes well for [the Paralympic Games] next year,” he grinned. 

GB's second world title of the evening was claimed by Blaine Hunt who, like Ruddock, doubled his rainbow jersey count with victory in the C5 kilo. Hunt's victory in Glasgow was resounding, beating the USA’s Christopher Murphy by almost a second and a half in the four-lap event.  

In the penultimate event of the night, Jaco van Gass won the C5 Scratch race, adding to his previous title in the kilo. Van Gass pipped fellow Brit Fin Graham to the line, after the pair had gained a lap on the field. 

Two-time Olympic gold medallist Katie Archibald, junior world road and time trial champion Zoe Bäckstedt and former champion Pfeiffer Georgi are among the riders set to compete at the British National Road Championships at the end of the month.

The road race is set to take place over challenging roads in north Yorkshire on 25 June, with the elite and under-23 time trials coming on the Wednesday before. 

Archibald, who rides for Ceratizit-WNT, has not raced on the road since March 2022, but won three titles at the European Track Championships earlier this year. Bäckstedt, meanwhile, spent her first Spring at Women's WorldTour level with EF Education-TIBCO-SVB.

Georgi, who won the National Championships in 2021, has won two races for DSM in 2023, including the Classic Brugge-De Panne in March, and has helped her teammate Charlotte Kool to multiple wins, including the overall at the RideLondon Classique.

According to a provisional start list released by British Cycling on Wednesday, also at the road race will be defending champion Alice Towers (Canyon-SRAM), who won in Scotland last June. She will also come up against the likes of Anna Henderson (Jumbo-Visma), who came third behind Towers and Georgi last year, and former national champions Alice Barnes (Human Powered Health), Hannah Barnes (Uno-X) and Jess Roberts (Coop-Hitec Products).

“I can’t wait to be back on the start line of the National Championships again this year," Towers said in a press release. "Last year’s race was a day to remember and wearing the jersey all year has been a dream come true – it’s flown by!” 

The other WorldTour contenders to take the national champion's bands in Redcar are Olympic track champion Elinor Barker (Uno-X), Claire Steels (Israel-Premier Tech-Roland), Elynor Bäckstedt (Trek-Segafredo), Lizzie Holden (UAE Team ADQ), Millie Couzens and Sophie Wright (Fenix-Deceuninck), Abi Smith (EF Education-TIBCO-SVB), Alex Morrice (Canyon-SRAM) and and Anna Shackley (SD Worx).

Also on the start list is Dame Sarah Storey, with the 16-time Paralympic gold medallist set to take to the road for an 11th time.

Both the men and women will follow an 18.8km loop around Redcar and Saltburn, with the women completing seven laps to cover 132km. The women’s race features 2,826m of climbing over the challenging terrain, with a mix of longer drags and punchy hills.

Storey is also on the start list for the individual time trial, an event she has finished third on three occasions. 

In the absence of last year's defending ITT champion Joss Lowden (Uno-X), the favourite will undoubtedly be 2021's winner Henderson, along with previous winner Alice Barnes. Holden, Georgi, Elynor and Zoe Bäckstedt, and Barker are all on the start list for the ITT as well.

For the time trial, the elite women will set a time over two laps of the course, totalling 27.4km.

British duo Mark Stewart and Katie Archibald won the last of a series of behind-closed-doors points races at the UCI Track Champions League in London last weekend. 

There were no flashing light displays, no frenzied crowds and no celebrations over the line. Events played out late in the afternoon in front of around 50 safety stewards, huddled together in the upper tier of the stands as they waited for the first spectators to arrive. 

Speaking to Cycling Weekly as he cooled down on the rollers, Stewart said: “I didn’t even try to win that.

“My objective was just to warm up, and to do that, I like to hurt. To hurt, you have to be part of the race.” 

The secret events were introduced this series, following feedback from last year’s endurance cohort that there wasn’t enough racing. “You do a 20-lap scratch, and theoretically if you’re out first in the elimination, you come for 23 laps,” Stewart explained. “You’re taking three days out of your training week to do that.”

Throughout the 100-lap event, the Scot kept a low profile, leaving his compatriot Will Perrett to chip away at the sprints with Spain’s Sebastián Mora. In the closing moments, however, Stewart snuck a lap gain, pipping Perret by a single point. 

“Sometimes, if you really want to win a race, you try too hard and you try and force it,” Stewart said. “All I’m trying to do in these races is be really relaxed. I don’t really chase anyone, I let people go. Then, if an opportunity arises in the last 10 laps to get a lap, I can.” 

Though results didn’t count towards the competition's overall standings, the winner received 100 UCI points, the same amount offered for an elimination race victory on the night.

“Normally going into a race, everybody wants to win,” Steward said. “Whereas you go into this, and each rider has a different objective. Maybe only five guys actually want to race them.”

For 26-year-old Perrett, a relative new-comer to the sport’s top flight, there was more at stake. “For me, it’s just an opportunity to learn,” he told Cycling Weekly inside the track centre. “When do you ever get to race the best guys in the world, week in week out, and learn tactically how to race against them?”

This summer, Perrett quit his job as an environmental consultant to fully dedicate himself to track cycling. His goal now, he explained, is to earn a place on British Cycling’s Olympic programme. 

“Of course, the [UCI] points help,” he said. “If you can say you’ve won this many UCI points race this year, it’s a good way of showing you deserve to be picked because it’s down on paper.”

Perrett took one win across the four secret points races, as well as a second and a third place. He is now the top-seeded British rider in the event, and fourth in the world rankings. 

Though he lost out to Stewart in London, the Brit went on to win when it counted most, taking victory in round four’s scratch race in front of the onlooking British Cycling Performance Director, Stephen Park. 

In the women’s points race, like the men’s half an hour before, the bunch floated around the track in silence. There was no commentary inside the velodrome, just the mechanical whirr of the bikes and the creaking of the wooden boards. 

At the halfway mark, Archibald decided she had had enough. The Scot tucked into position, tore off the front and gained a lap on the field. She then did the same again with seven laps to go, rejoining the back of the bunch to secure the win. Even in her warm-up, Archibald was clinical. 

The Scot’s fellow Olympic Madison champion, Laura Kenny, took a more light-hearted approach to the race. “I didn’t come dead last!” she joked. “To be honest, it’s just a bit of fun.

“In the first one [in Mallorca], there was nothing on the line, so I thought ‘Well I’ll just ride round.’ Then in the second one they decided that’s how you are positioned [on the night]. You know how it seems a bit random? So like the leader isn’t always at the front? That’s because it goes off where you finish in the points race.”

Kenny laughed as she admitted she finished last in the first three events. In London, however, on the same track she won her first Olympic gold medal a decade ago, the 30-year-old felt inspired, and won the penultimate sprint to finish on eight points. 

Did the effort take anything out of her? “Nah,” she smiled. “To be honest, it just means now I don’t have to get on the rollers.” 

This story originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 8 December 2023. 

Olympic gold medallist Katie Archibald (Great Britain) said she was “disappointed” after round four of the UCI Track Champions League in London, where she ended the night eight points adrift of endurance league leader Jennifer Valente (USA). 

The 28-year-old went into the evening just one point behind the American and took the lead temporarily with a second place in the scratch race. Archibald then finished seventh in the elimination race, which Valente won to retain her blue jersey. 

“I’m disappointed, but I probably deserved it,” the Scot told the press after the elimination race. “I had quite a few close calls, so I should’ve got my head down. But when you don’t have the legs, it changes your decision-making, which is an issue." 

With Valente now eight points clear, Archibald said her chances of winning the overall standings on Saturday night are “not looking good”. 

“I would need an error from Jennifer,” she added. “I guess anybody can make mistakes. I don’t know why I keep doing them, but it’s available for anybody.” 

Elsewhere, British Madison champion Will Perrett took his first victory of the series in the men’s scratch race, attacking off the front and gaining a lap on the field. The 26-year-old sat up in his saddle as he came across the line, raising his arms and flexing his muscles to the home crowd. 

Speaking to Cycling Weekly after the race, Perrett explained his strategy was to “absolutely whack it”. 

“There’s no point doing it half-heartedly,” he said. “You’ve either got to go flat out, or don’t go at all.”

The first time the Brit came to the Lee Valley Velodrome, he was sat in the stands cheering on his country at the 2012 Olympics. Asked how it felt to win on the same boards, Perrett said: “It’s amazing. Ten years ago when I was watching, I never thought it was attainable to be a cyclist riding for Great Britain.

“It’s incredible what you can do with stepping stones,” he added.    

In the women’s scratch race, Ireland’s Emily Kay stunned the bunch to claim a maiden Track Champions League win. The 27-year-old made her move with six laps to go, and with nobody daring to pursue, ended up winning by half a lap. 

As she tried to get her breath back after the race, Kay was stuck for words. “I’m not sure I can quite believe it,” she told Cycling Weekly. “I saw the opportunity and I thought ‘well, I’ve got nothing to lose really.’ It’s not gone that well for me so I just thought it’s the last weekend, I’m going to give it a crack.”

Australia’s Matthew Richardson tipped the scales in his favour in the men’s sprint competition, winning the keirin and placing second to 11-time world champion Harrie Lavreysen (Netherlands) in the sprint.

“It’s been down to the wire the whole way through,” said Richardson, who leads by two points ahead of the final round. “At the end of the day, I came here to get top-five and gain some experience, so win or lose tomorrow, I’m happy with how I’ve raced.” 

In the remaining events, Gavin Hoover (USA) was the last man standing in the elimination race, Steffie Van der Peet (Netherlands) won the women’s keirin and Olena Starikova (Ukraine) edged league leader Mathilde Gros in the women’s sprint.

Gros, Valente, Richardson and Claudio Imhof will wear the blue leader's jerseys in Saturday’s fifth and final round.

The UCI Track Champions League is exclusively live on Eurosport and discovery+.

Two-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Archibald bounced back from her first round disappointment on Saturday night, storming to victory in the scratch and elimination races at the UCI Track Champions League in Berlin.

The 28-year-old made a surprise early exit in last weekend’s elimination race, but proved her endurance strength to win both of her events and climb to second on the overall standings.

“Tonight has gone brilliantly and two wins feel amazing,” Archibald told spectators inside the velodrome. “I feel like I’ve come in with a super power. I always love riding here in Berlin, I adore it."

She added: “I’m very happy to be back in the mix in the endurance league.”

In the scratch race, the Scot attacked alongside league leader Jennifer Valente with 12 laps to go. After gaining a lap to rejoin the bunch, Archibald accelerated, holding off the Olympic omnium champion to repeat her victory from the first round. 

The two riders then locked horns again in the elimination race. After Archibald’s Team GB teammate Laura Kenny was knocked out first, confusion took over the race, with seemingly eliminated riders continuing on the track. 

In the end, only Archibald and Valente remained, and when the American eased off on the final lap, Archibald took her time to celebrate down the home straight.

The Scot, having taken maximum points on the night, now trails Valente by just six points in the women’s endurance league. 

Elsewhere, Ollie Wood added to Great Britain’s successes with victory in the men’s scratch race. Despite a crash in the bunch with four laps to go, the team pursuit world champion kept his focus to win the dash to the line. 

Canada’s Mathias Guillemette now leads the men’s endurance league, having bumped Scotsman Mark Stewart from top spot. 

In the men’s sprint events, 11-time world champion Harrie Lavreysen continued his rivalry with Australian Matthew Richardson, with both riders taking a win each in Berlin. Richardson will go into the third round just two points adrift of the Dutchman on the men’s sprint league leaderboard.

Colombia’s Martha Bayona, second in the women’s keirin, took over the lead of the women’s sprint league, despite wins for the in-form Kelsey Mitchell (Canada) and Mathilde Gros (France) on the night. 

The third of five Track Champions League rounds will take place at France’s national velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines on 26 November. 

Great Britain added two more medals to their haul at the UCI Track World Championships, with an awe-inspiring gold in the men’s team pursuit and silver in the women's event. 

Ethan Hayter, Dan Bigham, Ethan Vernon and Ollie Wood stormed to the country's first victory in the men’s team pursuit since 2018, beating Filippo Ganna’s Italy by two tenths of a second in the final. 

The British quartet started slower than their opponents, but quickly found their rhythm, shifting seamlessly through turns to stop the clock at 3-45-829. 

Speaking after the race, Hayter told Cycling Weekly he was “quite confident” the team would win, having bettered Italy’s time twice on Wednesday. 

“I tried to say to the others, you know, we qualified pole position and it’s very rare the winner of the qualifier doesn’t win the Worlds,” the 24-year-old added. “I tried to rub [my confidence] off on the others.”

After his title-winning debut in the team pursuit, Bigham couldn't stop grinning. “I don’t think I really put a foot wrong," the former Hour Record holder said. "I backed myself and it was an absolute dream.

"I don’t think we could’ve done a huge amount better."

In the women's team pursuit final, it was the Italians who came out on top with a time of 4-09-770. The British women, who clocked the fastest time in round one earlier in the day, lost a second in the first few laps, and were ultimately unable to overcome the deficit. 

“We pushed really hard to get to that final,” Olympic silver medalist Josie Knight told Cycling Weekly after the race. “It’s just bittersweet to come away with silver and not gold.” 

Neah Evans, another member of the squad that finished second in Tokyo 2020, said: “I think at one point I said if we came away with a medal, we’d take it.

“As a team we rode really well. We had Meg [Barker], and then Anna [Morris] stepped in, a huge unknown for her, and she really rose to the occasion. Katie [Archibald] has just been phenomenal,” the Scot added. 

“It’s been challenging, and there are so many positives we can take from it. It’s really exciting for the future; [we have a] new coach, there’s some fresh faces on the squad. I can’t wait to see what we can do with a bit more time working together.”

The Danish men and French women took home the bronze medals in the team pursuit, the latter claiming their country’s first podium at the home championships.

The Dutch get back to winning ways

In the men’s keirin, Harrie Lavreysen won his third consecutive title, outsprinting fellow Dutchman Jeffrey Hoogland down the home straight. “I was feeling really good today,” the 10-time world champion told Cycling Weekly. “Yesterday we lost the team sprint title, so I was really hoping to get the jersey.

“I would’ve really hated it if I couldn’t win a jersey this year, so I was really happy with the win.”

Great Britain’s Jack Carlin didn’t qualify for the keirin final, and finished seventh overall.

19-year-old Dylan Bibic (Canada) won his first senior world title in the 15km scratch race. Welshman Rhys Britton, who came third a year ago, couldn’t hold the pace on the final lap, eventually crossing the line in 14th. 

In the women’s elimination race, Lotte Kopecky (Belgium) went one better than her result last year to claim her third rainbow jersey on the track. Despite being involved in a crash early on in the event, Great Britain’s Sophie Lewis hung on to place sixth. 

Elsewhere, Sophie Capewell (Great Britain) bowed out in the quarterfinals of the women’s sprint, losing her opening two battles against France’s Mathilde Gros. The Frenchwoman will be joined by Laurine van Riessen (Netherlands), Lea Sophie Friedrich and the defending world champion Emma Hinze (Germany) in Friday’s semifinals. All four women convincingly won their heats 2-0. 

Mountain biker Rab Wardell has died in his sleep aged 37, just two days after taking victory at the Scottish championship. 

Last weekend Wardell won the elite men’s title at the Scottish MTB XC Championships in Dumfries and Galloway. The cyclist then appeared on BBC Scotland’s The Nine programme on Monday evening to talk through his achievement, mentioning that he had overcome three punctures to take the honours. 

Wardell’s partner and double Olympic track cycling champion Katie Archibald was at home with the 37-year-old when he died. According to the Daily Telegraph Wardell is believed to have suffered an apparent cardiac arrest. 

On Wednesday morning, Archibald posted a short statement on social media confirming the news. 

“I think you’ve heard that Rab died yesterday morning,” wrote Archibald, “I still don't understand what's happened; if this is real; why he'd be taken now - so healthy and happy. He went into cardiac arrest while we were lying in bed. I tried and tried, and the paramedics arrived within minutes, but his heart stopped and they couldn't bring him back. Mine stopped with it. 

“I love him so much and need him here with me. I need him here so badly, but he's gone. I can't describe this pain. Thank you to those making tributes. I can't bear to talk about him in the past tense to say anything myself. You mean everything to me, Rab. I love you.”

Glasgow-based Wardell had been racing mountain bikes since his teenage years, although only turned professional earlier this year. 

In 2020 the hugely popular rider completed the West Highland Way in a new record time, Wardell completed the 96 mile course in 9-14-32. His win last weekend at Kirroughtree Forest was described by Scottish Cycling as a “show of incredible resilience”. 

Reacting to the news of his passing, Scottish Cycling shared a short message which said: “We are devastated to confirm the news that international mountain biker & former employee, Rab Wardell, has passed away today.

“We have very little information at this stage, but we send our love & support to his family, friends & all those in our community who knew him. We ask that you respect Rab’s family’s privacy at this incredibly sad time.”

British Cycling also issued a statement on Wardell to say he will be “sorely missed”, it read: 

“Everybody at British Cycling is deeply saddened to learn of the death of Rab Wardell.

Rab was a brilliant rider, friend and ambassador for our sport, and will be sorely missed by so many. Our thoughts are with his family and many friends at this incredibly difficult time.”

Former Olympic cyclist and Tour de France yellow jersey wearer David Millar said: “So very sad to learn of Rab Wardell leaving us. Properly hard to comprehend.”

Katie Archibald has injured both her ankles after being crashed into by a 4x4 on Sunday. The Olympic Madison champion revealed in an Instagram post that she was turned into while riding past a T-junction.

Fortunately, there were no serious injuries, but it is the latest setback in 2022 for her.

It has been a difficult year for the two-time Olympic gold medallist, four-time world champion, and 17-time European champion. Archibald fractured two transverse processes of the vertebrae in March, and then broke her collarbone in a crash at the UCI Track Nations Cup in April.

As well as winning gold in the Madison in Tokyo, the Scot won gold at the World Championships and European Championships in 2021, before winning the Women's Endurance event at the UCI Track Champions League at the end of the year.

However, it has been a difficult follow-up season, with Archibald admitting in her Instagram post: "[I] Can't say I'm loving 2022."

She wrote: "Last Sunday I went flying over the bonnet of a 4x4.

"Lovely clear day but the driver who turned into me while I was riding past a T junction didn't see me. The ligaments in both my ankles aren't happy (grade 1 unhappiness in my right ankle and grade 2 unhappiness in my left) but are all still attached, and the only thing broken is my bike.

"We also think I've avoided another serious concussion, and the 3.5 ligaments in my dodgy right knee have survived, so celebrations are in order for that.

"Life is long. That's my update. Promise we'll be back to Good News the next time I post; these ones are getting boring."

Archibald was leading the standings in the Omnium before crash at the Track Nations Cup earlier this year, which came during the points race.

After that incident she wrote on Instagram: "The bants at last weekend's track nations cup in Glasgow were good, until they weren't. Last pic is of my collarbone trying to escape from my neck. Not sure why I'm smiling.

"Also can't say I remember waving to you, but my big thanks for all the home support. I'm sorry I couldn't bring it home in the end but I hope everyone watching enjoyed being back in the stadium.

"I promise we don't usually crash this much.

"Shoulder doctor says my collarbone won't heal without surgery. Sleepy doctor says they can't put me under just now because of my head injury. So I have to wait a while to get things fixed. I'm napping a lot in the meantime."

Archibald will now hope her build-up to the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham can resume as usual, and smoothly, soon.

Katie Archibald is returning to road cycling after two seasons away focussing entirely on the track.

Archibald hasn't raced on the road since taking part in the one and only Tour of Scotland as well as the National Championships time trial in 2019.

Since then, she has continued to dominate the track scene taking Madison gold with Laura Kenny in the Olympics, followed by three European titles and a world title in the omnium. 

>>> Cyclocross World Cup race in Antwerp cancelled due to Covid case surge

But she will now re-joining her former team Ceratizit-WNT Pro Cycling on a three-year contract taking her up to 2024. She is expected to focus once again on the track in the build up to the Olympic Games in Paris where she hopes to add to her two golds and one silver.

In a Tweet, Ceratizit-WNT said: "Hip hip hooraaaay! Welcome home Katie After a stellar performance in the first two rounds of the UCI Track Champions League in Mallorca and Lithuania, we thought we’d continue the celebrations by welcoming Katie Archibald back to the team, her home until 2024."

Archibald last raced for the team when it was called Team WNT back in 2017 before she joined Wiggle-High5 a year later. 

She has only managed the one win on the road with a prologue victory at the BeNe Ladies Tour in Belgium, which helped her finished third overall behind the amazing Marianne Vos (Jumbo-Visma) and Lisa Klein (Canyon-SRAM).

Archibald is continuing her amazing season on the track with a, so far, brilliant display at the UCI Track Champions League as after two rounds she leads by 13 points over nearest rival Canadian Maggie Coles-Lyster who has 60 points.

The second round in Panevežys, Lithuania took place on Saturday, November 27 with Archibald taking both the Elimination race as well as the Scratch race. The Champions league continues this coming weekend with a double header at the London velodrome in Stratford, with both nights now sold out.

Ceratizit-WNT is a second division team in the women's professional scene with the likes of Lisa Brennauer and Kirsten Wild the star names on the team's recent roster. 

German champion Brennauer is expected to continue with the team while Maria Giulia Confalonieri and Laura Asencio are also confirmed for 2022 alongside Archibald.

The team only managed three wins in 2021, two of which were Brennauer's German road race and time trial titles. The other was a win for Polish rider Marta Lach at La Picto - Charentaise where she beat former world champion Marta Bastianelli (Alé-BTC-Ljubljana) to the line.

Katie Archibald was back to the top step at the European Championships, taking gold in the scratch race two months after her Olympic success.

It was Archibald's first major tournament since the Tokyo Olympics in August, where she won gold with Laura Kenny in the Madison and silver in the team pursuit.  

British track star Archibald lined up in the women’s scratch race on the opening day of the UEC Track European Championships in Grenchen, Switzerland. 

It was another storming performance for the 27-year-old from Scotland, who claimed gold over Valentine Fortin (France), and Daria Pikulik of Poland, who took the final medal spot in the 40-lap, 10km race. 

The Brits missed out on the medals in the rest of the finals on the first of five race days at the velodrome, as the Netherlands took gold in the women’s team sprint with Shanne Braspennincx, Kyra Lamberink, and Hetty van der Wouw. 

Germany were beat into silver medal in the gold medal ride off for the women’s team sprint with their team of Lea Friedrich, Pauline Grabosch, and Alessa-Catriona Propster. 

Britain’s team of Lauren Bate, Blaine Ridge-Davis and Millicent Tanner finished fourth in  that event, beaten by the Russian squad in the bronze medal final. 

On the men’s side of the competition, the Dutch also claimed gold in the team sprint with Jeffrey Hoogland, Harrie Lavreysen, and Roy van den Berg. 

Silver went to France’s Timmy Gillion, Rayan Helal and Sebastien Vigier, while GB were beat in the bronze medal race again, this time by Poland. 

Alistair Fielding, Joe Truman, and Hamish Turnball of Britain took fourth spot, as Maciej Bielecki, Patryk Rajkowski and Mateusz Rudyk took the bronze.  

The men’s elimination race was the only other medal decided on Tuesday night, as Sergei Rostovtsev took the gold, with João Matias (Portugal) claiming silver and Thomas Boudat (France) rounding out the podium. Britain’s William Perrett finished 15th in that race.

>>> Elinor Barker reveals she won silver medal at Tokyo Olympics while pregnant

The European Championships continue on Wednesday with the team pursuit, the kilo, the points race and the elimination race finals.   

Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald dominated the first-ever women's Olympic Madison at the Tokyo 2020 Games, with Kenny saying "I've never wanted to win a race so badly in all my life."

The British duo won the Madison by 43 points over the Danish pair of Amalie Dideriksen and Julie Leth, after the Team GB riders pulled off an amazing total of 78 points. 

>>> Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald crush the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Madison to take gold

Speaking after the race, Kenny said: "It's unbelievable. I'm just so glad. I've never wanted to win a race so badly in all my life. 

"That was the one. I messaged Jason [Kenny, her husband] this morning and said, 'I feel like my Olympics ends today.' The one race I really wanted to do was this and we went and did it."

With this gold, Kenny moves to the top spot of most successful British female athletes with five golds and a silver, moving her ahead of horse rider Charlotte Dujardin who has the same amount of medals but only three golds.  

Kenny and her husband Jason have both been competing in the Olympics and have been away from their son, Albie.

"I've never missed Albie so much in all my life. I kept saying to people, 'please don't ask me about Albie'.

"I couldn't have done it without these girls. It's so hard leaving him at home but to have Katie there the whole time, I just feel like I'm racing with a sister and I couldn't have done it if we didn't have that relationship."

Archibald took her second ever Olympic gold in the Madison after being in the team pursuit team in Rio 2016. She also took silver in that event at this year's Games. 

She shared the same view as Kenny, saying: "I've never wanted something so much and I've never been so nervous.

"We've been really clinical in our approach to this, none of this would have happened without Monica [Greenwood, British Cycling Olympic coach]. We had a change of coach last year, totally overhauled our entire approach to this event."

The duo won all but two intermediate sprints in Madison as well as the final effort to the line, and taking a lap gain to ensure sure the victory was theirs.

Archibald and Kenny now can focus on the Omnium and a chance of a third medal at the games to go with their golds and silvers. This gold, as well as Matt Walls' gold in the Omnium on August 5, will also boost their confidence. 

"I feel like we're going after the all-round at this track Olympics spreading between Madison and Omnium and it feels so satisfying for it to come off. I've never wanted something so much.

"My mum is one for turning into the sofa rather than the racing. It's always scarier on the sidelines than in the action, in the action you get the reward."

The Omnium is the last event for both riders and it also closes the track racing on the final day of the Games on August 8.

Katie Archibald and Laura Kenny put in a crushing performance in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Madison to take the gold, with no teams able to touch the British pairing. 

The Madison returned to the Olympics after a long hiatus, with Kenny and Archibald among the favourites heading into the race.

But the multiple Olympic gold medallists also had to go up against a strong Dutch pairing of Amy Pieters and Kirsten Wild, who looked to be the biggest rivals out on the track.

Kenny and Archibald dominated proceedings early on, winning almost every sprint lap in the first half of the race to pull out a comfortable points lead on the Dutch.

Then late into the race a lap gain put Team GB out of reach, as Pieters and Wild began to fall apart following a crash, eventually finishing outside the medals.

The Brits took the gold, as Amalie Dideriksen and Julie Leth of Denmark took silver, with bronze going to Gulnaz Khatuntseva and Mariia Novolodskaia of Russia. 

How it happened 

The British pairing came out of the gate with huge motivation in the 120 lap (30km) Madison, which made its return to the Olympics for the first time since 2008. 

Kenny and Archibald held the front of the bunch for the entire opening half of the race, winning a majority of the early sprints. 

With 70 laps still to race, GB had built up a comfortable margin to their nearest rivals the Netherlands, when a big crash in the bunch tipped the balance further in their favour.

As the Netherlands pairing attempt to switch over with a hand throw, one of the Australians found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time, with Kirsten Wild falling as a result of the contact with the Aussie. 

Wild fell in the path of a Belgian and Polish rider, temporarily taking them out of action. 

The Dutch were able to re-enter the fray however, and with 50 laps remaining there was another pivotal moment in the race, as the Dutch squad hit out for the line, with Katie Archibald putting in a huge surge to chase down the move and win the sprint. 

At this point in the action, Team GB had won six of the seven sprints, putting them on 32 points, the Netherlands trailing on 16, with Australia in the bronze spot on seven.

Into the final 30 laps and Archibald smashed another sprint ahead of Denmark, smiling as she crossed the line to extend the lead to 26 ahead of the Netherlands.  

Another crash came as the Belgian duo missed their hand-sling and fell, taking out one of the Australians in the process.

Meanwhile amid the chaos Great Britain gained a lap on the field along with Denmark and the Russian Olympic Committee, scoring an extra 20 points on their total.

With 16 laps to race Britain lead with 67 points, followed by Denmark on 32, and the ROC on 26, the Netherlands bumped out of the medals.

Onto the final of the sprints before the finish and the Netherlands needed to score big, but the points went to France and Denmark with the Netherlands finishing third, GB scoring one point.

Heading towards the finish sprint and the Netherlands needed the victory to move back into the medals, while GB only had to finish the race safely to secure the second track gold of the Tokyo games.  

Heading into the final laps and Archibald led from the front, pulling away from the field and getting the hand-sling on the bell for Kenny to sprint towards the line.

>>> Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games cycling schedule: when to watch the racing

Kenny fired clear and won the race to add to the points tally, taking the gold medal after an utterly dominant display, leading by 43 points. 

The Netherlands couldn’t fight back onto the podium at the line, as Denmark took silver and the ROC claimed bronze.  

Tokyo 2020 Olympics Madison

1. Great Britain, 78pts
2. Denmark, 35pts
3. ROC, 26pts 
4. Netherlands, 21pts
5. France, 19pts
6. Poland, 9pts
7. Australia, 9pts
8. Italy, 2pts
9. United States, 1pt
10. Belgium, -18pts 

It has been a big week in the cycling world, as the Tour de France approaches and the British Olympic squad was announced ahead of the Tokyo games later this year. 

While the pros have been busy with their preparations for two of the biggest events in the world, they have still taken some time out to share their thoughts on social media. 

Cycling Weekly has been trawling Twitter and Instagram to bring you our weekly collection of our favourite posts from the cycling world. 

Here are our tweets of the week: 

1. Cycling fans during the Euros be like... 

2. Does this chat-up line actually work? 

3. The veterans are out in force at this year's Tour de France 

4. The new series of Supermarket Sweep looks rubbish 

5. Try explaining this to a non-cycling fan

6. Katie Archibald with a throwback to her first Olympic track bike? 

7. When the Tour de France averages are a touch depressing  

8. Wout van Aert may not be a real gamer 

9. The other Geraint Thomas is coming around to cycling at last 

10. Cavendish celebrates Tour selection with a meme 

We'll be back in seven days with more tweets of the week. 

I was at the dinner table on a race trip with a group that were talking about the track, about the weather, about the hotel food: small talk. There was a lull in conversation and someone turned to me and asked (I hadn’t said a word until now), "So, Katie, what are your thoughts on transgender athletes?"

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I was walking through a hotel lobby and  I stopped to watch a team-mate play their shot on the pool table. My pause gave space for someone to approach me and ask, "Katie, yeah, I was wondering, do you think they should scrap the use of podium girls?"

I was in the car headed to a race with a mixed group of riders. The radio was on, occasionally the sat-nav would speak, we could hear the hum of traffic outside. Then the person in the front seat turned around to me and asked, "So, like, Katie, do you think women should get paid the same prize money as men?"

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I’ve done something, at some point, that’s made these people see me as Social Politics Girl. Her superpowers include ruining the fun when people are "just making a joke" and causing awkward tension at dinner times by disagreeing with people. Being known as the feminist killjoy of the British Cycling cohort isn’t an image, given the choice, I’d specifically request, and for some reason it encourages my friends and team-mates to quite casually ask me these heavy questions. I don’t really like it.

However, in contrast to this persona, I have not been bold enough or brave enough to write about any of those topics in this column. We’ve spoken about vaginas, sure, but as far as angry feminists go, I’m not pulling my weight.

Our discussions have mainly been about my feelings. A weekly diary where I monologue my thoughts and moods, and the content has validity in a cycling magazine by virtue of my being a professional cyclist.

Isn’t 2019 a wonderful time to exist? Next week, however, I’m going back to bottling my feelings up. This is my last column. For the time-being, I hasten to add.

Never say never, but do say anything else you can convince people to listen to - that’s my motto. My father, forever uncomfortable with how much of myself I share with the world, might read that the column is over with a sigh of relief. I felt relief, too, when I first made the decision. But I’m also sad.

Sad to surrender my weekly catharsis of putting words on a page, and sad to lose my connection with you, the reader.

I spent today going through my old diaries. They become dog-eared, chaotic, and rambling through my teenage years when I seemed to discover every emotion there was, all at once. Once I turn 20 the entries certainly aren’t mellow, but they’re written in a voice that’s no longer as painfully anxious. It was around this time that I started writing publicly; first in a blog, then a monthly column in the Herald on Sunday, and eventually here every week.

It’s only been possible because of my relationship with a bicycle, a relationship that’s occupied the bulk of my subject matter, and a relationship that I’m using now as an excuse to move on.

Have I ever mentioned that I want to go to the Tokyo Olympics? The Games are 250 days away as I write this. A small dot in the distance in real terms, but nonetheless all my eyes want to see.

So for the time being, I’m not stopping writing, but I’m taking it back to my own diary. My great thanks go to Cycling Weekly for letting me onto this page, week after week. And to you, for reading it.

But for now, goodbye...

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

When I used to work on the phones in the family bed shop there was a courier I would often call to try and get customers an estimated time for their delivery.

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The first time I called, I got put on hold and I loved it. Their hold music was 'The Chain' by Fleetwood Mac.

Six months into following through on the inane task of calling up to get the delivery schedule, surely something that could instead be published online, and my love for the song 'The Chain' began to falter. It was a sad day.

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That was seven years ago and, thankfully, the conditioning has now faded and I can crank up the whole Rumours album as blissfully as the next person. You can assume, however, that after such an experience a person might be nervous about a repeat.

Well, and this is related so bear with me, I was racing the UCI Track World Cup in Glasgow last weekend. It's a three-day event but the organisation runs qualifying rounds on 'day zero', which is an unticked session.

You race in relative quiet in front of empty stands, save for some friends and family and for whose benefit the venue might play some music.

Well, imagine my horror when halfway through our team pursuit qualifier, up to my eyeballs in lactate. I realised they were playing the song 'Dreams'.

"God, don't let this go badly and tarnish another Fleetwood Mac song for me with the associated memory!" I screamed internally.

Not actually, of course. I didn't think in a sentence with grammar and structure and clear meaning. But like how a baby can feel fear without learning the verb to be scared, I understood the danger.

The good news is we qualified first, 1.3 seconds ahead of Germany. And for the final the next evening, when the stands were packed and the music subbed out for people's cheering, we won.

It was a new best time for our Tokyo Olympiad squad of (in starting order) Eleanor Dickinson, Neah Evans, Elinor Barker and myself.

I'm going to put the Rumours album on just now and feel good thinking about it.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

Age 13 I got my first proper road bike, a hand-me-down from my dad. He’d had a crash with

a car and the frame sustained enough damage to justify buying a new bike, but not so much as to send the old one to its grave, and so it fell into my possession.

A year later a massive crack appeared in the seat tube. How long had it been there? How much had it grown? I had no idea. That’s the kind of thing you notice while cleaning a bike, which wasn’t really my bag. I liked riding the thing, but rarely looked down at it while doing so...

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Times change. I would like to say that it’s because a poorly maintained bicycle soon chastises your negligence with squeaks and squeals, but in truth I eventually realised it wasn’t cool to have a dirty bike.

What was cool had a big impact on the decisions I made as a teenager. Fixies were cool. Edinburgh was cool. Travelling to Edinburgh to ride a fixie on a velodrome and make friends with other cool people who thought fixies were cool, was cool. I got lucky that I was talented at this cool thing, but I realised that talent because I wanted to hang, not because I wanted to be the best.

>>> Cycling Weekly is available on your Smart phone, tablet and desktop

Cycling took my heart at the age you typically see girls dropping out of sport (there’s a huge female participation dip around age 14) and that isn’t because I was an outlier, it’s because I was engaged by a social scene rather than a sport. I’d been a competitive swimmer as a youngster and quit exactly when you expect girls to quit (age 15) but my bike survived the cull because it was cool. Which embarrasses me greatly.

Mine isn’t the story of an Olympic champion driven to be the best by something intrinsic and great. It’s the story of a vain teenager who liked racing because it was a weekend away in the van with people I wanted to be like. It’s a much bigger story, but I feel this mucky teenage period is an important part of it that at times I’ve tried to hide. So there’s the first part of the truth, the rest is to be continued.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

Apparently the riders in the men’s field at London Six Day go out after the racing most nights, get back to the hotel in the (no longer very) small hours of the morning, then sleep till the afternoon in order to do it all again. They’re basically rock stars. If the women’s field has the same routine, I’ve never been invited.

My Friday evening went like this…

Our last race finished at 10pm. I did a bit of a warm-down then sat in our cabin. Each pair of racers gets a cabin for six-day races - it’s a wooden box with a curtain, a cushion and a lamp where you can shut yourself away from the mayhem of the party outside for a bit.

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This was the first time I’ve had one (historically they’re just for the men). I now think cabins are the greatest things in the world and if I never get one again I’ll know it’s better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. For 10 minutes I just made this “bbbhhhhggg” noise while telling my racing partner, Neah Evans, that everything hurt.

Friday was our first of three race days (‘Six Day’ is the name of the organisation, don’t get caught up in the fine details - it’s still three amazing days) and I was feeling very panicked that I wouldn’t wake up the next morning, never mind do more of the same.

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It passed. I filled my shaker with a recovery mix, got dressed and jumped on my road bike for the five-minute dawdle back to the hotel, riding slowly alongside swathes of fans (a delightfully excited hubbub of people) leaving the velodrome that evening.

One buffet dinner, 14 refills of apple juice, and several deep sighs of satisfaction later, me and Neah were upstairs in our room. Late night entertainment was Neah removing huge wood splinters from her leg, the consequences of a crash that evening, before I got into bed not long after midnight to snuggle with my book.

Eventually the words went blurry and I drifted off to sleep like a newborn baby log. Can’t say I’m jealous of the rock stars.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

Great Britain's women were dominant as they took gold in the Team Pursuit final on the opening night of the Track Cycling World Cup in Glasgow.

The quartet of Katie Archibald, Elinor Barker, Neah Evans and Ellie Dickinson, who recently became European champions, recorded a time of 4:12.244, taking three seconds off their winning time in October in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands.

>>> Dr Richard Freeman claims he was ‘bullied by Shane Sutton into ordering testosterone’

This time also represented the fastest of this Olympic cycle, with only eight months to go until the Tokyo Games, and the fourth-fastest ever.

GB easily beat the second-placed Germans, whose time was 2.099 seconds slower. The men, with their squad made up of Ed Clancy, Charlie Tanfield, Ethan Hayter and Ollie Wood, were unable to follow the women's victory, losing the bronze medal race to France.

However, the sprint trio of Ryan Owens, Jack Carlin and Joe Truman achieved silver in their discipline, beaten by the Netherlands who took gold.

"We’re very happy," Archibald said following the victory. "A lot of the conversations leading into an event like this are on whether you want to focus on a result or a process and we’re focusing on a process, so to come away with a result like this, we’re very happy.

"We went in with a plan that scared us a bit. We wanted to front-end it, which is what you see the best nations in the world do, so to challenge ourselves and come off with a win, it feels good."

Britain also took six medals in the Para-cycling, with Lora Fachie winning gold and Laura Cluxton silver in the Para B individual pursuit, while Crystal Lane-Wright won the women's Para C5 individual pursuit.

Jody Cundy, Finlay Grahan and Jaco van Gass took gold in the mixed Para C1-C5 team sprint, beating another squad of Brits.

The World Cup continues on day two with the men's Madison and women's Omnium expected to provide the highlights.

My first coach told me that everyone has a tin of beans. Some people have a big tin of beans, some people a small one. His lesson was that while you can (and should) train to increase the size of your tin, you can also train to improve your tin-opening technique.

You will know the kind of rider who has a huge tin but can only shake their beans out one at a time. Or the opposite, and my favourite to watch: a huge-tin rider who grabs that ring pull and empties out a colossal amount of beans all in one go, leaving themselves with an empty and clean tin, having somehow managed to scrape the sauce out as well.

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Control of your tin opener is a super-important trait for a track endurance rider. We train the ability to rip the lid off that tin, but need to be careful we’ve got enough beans for the duration. A points race exemplifies this challenge. To win a sprint your top-end speed (read: big bean drop) must exceed that of your competitors.

But you can’t risk leaving yourself vulnerable to attacks and unable to re-fill on beans (also important to train) before you’re asked to start pouring them out again for the next sprint. It’s all about shaking out the right amount at the right time.

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I raced a Madison (the European champs Madison) a couple of hours ago, which you could see as a team points race; sprints every 10 laps, points for taking a lap etc. The big difference to your bean strategy in a Madison compared to a points race is the resting rider will have definite opportunities to, well, rest, and re-fill some of their beans. This means you can really pour them out heading into a sprint because you’re only vulnerable until you can make a change with your partner.

A risk you never take into consideration is whether you will unintentionally miss that change and be stuck in as the active rider with just half a bean left to press on the pedals. It happens. You live, you learn, and aspire to increase the size of your tin so that if it happens again, I’ll be...sorry, I mean you’ll be ready.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

Mark Cavendish and Owain Doull narrowly missed out on overall victory at Six Day London in the nail-biting final race.

The women’s competition was utterly dominated by the Brits, as Katie Archibald and Neah Evans took an emphatic victory over Elinor Barker and Laura Kenny.

Heading into the last night of racing on Sunday (October 27), the Cavendish and Doull led the general classification standings with a comfortable margin, but it would come down the very closing moments for the event to be decided.

Italians Elia Viviani and Simone Consonni took the overall victory, having started the evening in third place and slowly moving their way up the rankings.

The race kicked off with a team elimination, won by Dane Oliver Wulff, before a 250m Madison Time Trial which went to French pairing Bryan Coquard and Donavan Grondin.

Then Cavendish won the 60-lap Derney, passing Caleb Ewan on the home straight to take a tense victory, while Viviani finished third to help keep his team in the race.

Heading into the final event, the 60-minute Madison, the podium was poised for a thrilling finish and the lead changed hands multiple times as racing got underway.

But it was Viviani who passed Doull in the final sprint to soar to the top of the leaderboard and take the overall victory.

Viviani and Consonni finished the event on 498 points, Cavendish and Doull in second on 486 while Dutch pair Yoeri Havik and Wim Stroetinga were third with 470.

In the women’s competition, Katie Archibald and Neah Evans dominated proceedings and took 257 points.

Elinor Barker and Laura Kenny finished second on 198, while Emily Nelson and Manon Lloyd rounded out an all-British podium on 158.

>>> Chris Froome needs further surgery as he looks to racing return 

On the final night of racing in the women’s contest, Czech rider Jarmila Machackova won the 10km Scratch Race, while Archibald overpowered Kenny in the final lap to take third. The final Madison Chase went to Archibald and Evans, with Barker and Kenny second then Nelson and Lloyd third.

In the sprint competition, Maximilian Levy continued his utterly controlling performance taking the overall victory on 293 with Japan’s Yuta Obara finishing second on 259. Robert Forstermann took bronze on 220.

My first outing in British kit was at the 2013 European track champs, in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands. I was an off-programme rider and had gone to Manchester for the two weeks prior to train and trial for the squad. The championships were my third trial. My two previous forays south had gone well and left me enthusiastic for more improvements in my performance, but ultimately I was still an amateur cyclist.

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A year and a half prior, in 2012, I had left school with a plan to spend a year working abroad before going to university. Three months in I canned the whole project and came home. See, 2012 was also the year the Glasgow velodrome opened its doors, and waiting inside was the springboard that would send me on to a career as a professional cyclist. Not that I knew it at the time. All I knew was that I wanted to ride that track, a lot.

I spent the winter training with the Scottish cycling team, and working in the family business, aspiring to qualify for the Glasgow Commonwealth Games. It was on my mum’s birthday in 2013, on March 7, that I met the Team Scotland qualifying time for the individual pursuit (3-41) and started dreaming bigger. The time garnered an invite for testing in Manchester and my new big dream was a spot on the British programme.

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So by that October, my third invite, I told the bed shop I was away. I rode team pursuit with the reigning Olympic champions, got carried round to a European title with them, and waited for Shane Sutton to tell me to pack my bags and move to Manchester. I suppose I was naively optimistic (it took six weeks of nervous waiting) but the phone call eventually came and off to Manchester I went for good.

It sounds a simple story when you condense it into 300 words. I’m reminiscing because tonight I’m back in Apeldoorn for another European championship. Much has changed, but much hasn’t: I’m still in love with team pursuit, I’m still nervous, I’m still sharing a room with Elinor Barker. Hopefully I can leave this Europeans, my seventh, just as optimistic for the future as I was after that first one.

Read next: Britain strike gold again in women’s team pursuit at UEC European Track Championships 2019

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

My dad owns a bed shop so I’ve got an inside contact for beds, mattresses and bedroom furniture at cost. By which I mean: at cost for my dad and the business but 100 per cent discounted for me.

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The consequence is I’ve been somewhat overly-casual in collecting beds and furniture. Last year I started renting an unfurnished house with three bedrooms, which I now share with one of my team-mates and a maniac we know called Megan. So I filled the place with beds and furniture and had a lot of fun playing house. It felt nice to own a dining table, and a sofa-bed, and one of those huge storage units from IKEA, all these things that root you to a place. Until I suddenly realised I was rooted to a place.

Neah (Evans, that’s the team-mate I live with) drives a small Peugeot and feels like she’s let herself go too far because she can no longer pack her life into one car-load (when she moved in with me I think it took three runs). If I get kicked off the squad tomorrow, well I certainly can’t just pack my three beds up into the back of my Mini and get out of here. I’m going to be stuck in Manchester with all these rugs that seemed so essential at the time, all these chairs and lamps and desks. Why do I need to own two desks?

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I see two options. The first is to sell almost everything I own and strip back to the bare essentials. That would be five bikes, a mattress on the floor, a microwave, and a toothbrush. The second option is to focus on my training and aim to avoid getting kicked off the squad for at least another year, maybe seven, so I don’t need to get all these beds down the stairs again. I’ll have to make a list of pros and cons; will let you know which plan I settle on next week.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

What a week in Yorkshire. A once in a lifetime experience for the British riders! Unless they compete in the 2023 World Championships in Glasgow.

For those riders, well, a home Worlds might be a twice in a lifetime experience. Am I explicitly speaking to Scottish rider John Archibald who was gushing in interviews about his "once in a lifetime" opportunity? It's very possible. Twice in a lifetime is still pretty rare, though, so I give a respectful nod to the sentiment.

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What the two events will have in common, besides taking place in Britain, is their inclusion of para-cycling. The Glasgow Worlds will be a slightly different beast (in 2023, the World Championships of 13 different cycling disciplines will be held in one city over two and a half weeks) but Yorkshire also championed diversity by hosting a para-cycling Class 1 event alongside the major champs.

The para-cycling World Championships had taken place two weeks beforehand in Emmen, the Netherlands, but I gather that for many riders the Class 1 event offered grandeur of a different kind: massive crowds.

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My T2 (trike racing) friend Hannah Dines, known to this magazine for her work de-stigmatising conversations about the battering of our intimate parts take on a saddle, told me it was the largest crowd she's ever raced in front of. Dame Sarah Storey described it as the biggest crowd since London 2012.

The event, to my eyes, has made a case for the integration of para and able-bodied championships. The UCI plans to hold a multi-disciplinary champs every four years, and it's going to open up areas of our sport that might otherwise pass the casual fan by.

Fans that, like me, didn't know how hard it is to keep a trike on the ground round corners until they see a rider fly past, one wheel lifting, veins in their neck throbbing from the effort as they burst themselves towards the finish line. I can't wait.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

I’m writing in the foyer of a hotel in Poland, listening to classical music. I don’t have a particular taste for classical but I can’t convince my brain not to focus on others’ conversations when I’m in a public space, so I play something instrumental in my headphones to counteract it. The less enchanting, the better, lest I become interested in the music. I have this column because I can ride a bike fast, not for my cultural takes, and I think that’s something you should have figured out by yourself before now.

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The conversations in this particular public space are in Dutch, a language I do not speak but which I’m still unconsciously nosey enough to not tune out. I think they’re having a good time, but who knows. Would they be laughing this much if what they’re saying is life is meaningless and everything dies? I suppose it’s possible.

We’ve all just finished three days of racing at the Poland GP. “We” are a chunk of the British women’s track team, both sprint and endurance, and including various other nations. I’m just back from getting pizza with the Swiss, a Dane, a German and my lovely British team-mates. Pizza for dinner is no wild night out, but with the European Track Championships in three weeks’ time, it’s extravagant enough.

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This event was our chance for a hit out before the Europeans and it’s certainly met our needs with three or four races on each of the three days. Neah Evans (last week’s featured star as Least Loyal House-mate) and I won the final event, the Madison - the race I was most looking forward to.

Neah also won the omnium, me the points race, and one of the happy laughing Dutch (Mylene De Zoete) the scratch race. I’m contented having ended on a high, but I’ve been competing for air time on the family WhatsApp group with my brother. What’s a win at the Poland GP when your brother is on the podium at the World Champs?

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

Last year I asked the GB performance analyst to change all of the data feedback sheets from reading ‘man one’, when describing a rider’s position in the team pursuit line, to ‘rider one’. I didn’t ask my team-mates, or take a vote, or canvass opinion in any way.

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I just decided it was annoying, and no one would notice either way, so what’s the harm in having it this way? It was the endurance analyst that I spoke to (Robi De, who has since moved on to work at the BBC) and so it’s likely the sprint team still have ‘man one’, ‘man two’, etc on their graphs and other training feedback.

I know the endurance men don’t. It was grammatically accurate for their squad, true, but life is easier if we use the same language.

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That easiness is why ‘man one’ has stuck around for so long. Everyone knows that ‘man three’ in a women’s pursuit team isn’t a man, she’s in the third position of the starting line-up. But the reason you’re saying ‘man three’ is the vernacular was born when team pursuit was a man’s game. The event debuted at the Olympics, for men, in 1908. It turned up for women more than 100 years later, in 2012 as a shortened three-rider three-kilometre version. Finally in 2016, 108 years after the men, women were racing a four-rider four-kilometre team pursuit.

So we changed the graphs to read ‘rider one’ and, as expected, no one noticed. Ultimately, you can pretend that ‘salesman’, ‘chairman’ and ‘businessman’ have become gender neutral through common use, but they reflect a world that hasn’t included 50 per cent of the population, a world that’s treated women as less-than, for millennia. That world is changing, and the very smallest gesture you can make to help it continue to change, is stop calling me ‘man one’.

I tell you all this now because I just read a message in my family group chat about a time trial both my parents are riding at the weekend. It says my mum is my dad’s ‘minute man’. Bah. Here we go again.

Age 12, watching the 2006 Tour de France, my father explained blood doping to me. It’s an unfortunate part of the sport’s history that most of us know about but, at that age, I did not. Here was an opportunity for my dad to talk about the morals and values we all buy into when we enjoy sport.

Here was also an opportunity to explain a biological process. He could have done both, but never one to speak too emotively, he only explained the latter and how you could greatly increase your blood’s oxygen carrying capacity.

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Now, I don’t mean to fault my poor dad (though I definitely can on a wide range of topics if you are interested) because he no doubt believed I was a smart kid who knew this was against the rules. But I wasn’t. It didn’t help that he spoke like a cynic. The way my father explained blood doping, it was simply a part of the sport.

That summer I started senior school, a new and exciting world where different teachers taught different subjects. My biology teacher, Mr Quinn, made a big impact on me after our first lesson. He was also the outdoor education teacher, and sometimes ran to school.

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Well, it wouldn’t have been that very first class that I asked him, though it wasn’t long after. Here was a grown up who was interested both in biology and sport, and over the summer I’d learnt something super interesting about biology and sport! So I asked, as casually as you would your hairdresser about their holiday, if he’d ever tried blood doping.

Then I got confused and embarrassed, because he got confused and angry and at the time I honestly didn’t know what for.

It took becoming more socially educated before I really understood the interaction, and since that penny dropped I’ve felt sick any time I think about it. So, Mr Quinn, if by chance you read the mag: I’m sorry. It’s not that I had such a loose grip on moral ethics that I thought cheating was OK, it’s simply that I was a moron. Please forgive me, if you have any memory of this brief conversation. If not, well... good.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

The best year I've ever had on the road was in 2017. After the 2016 Games my plan was to do all the fun bits of cycling all the time, so I raced a bunch that whole winter and did a big road season the following summer.

The Track Worlds weren't until mid-April, which would usually mean my road season wouldn't start until after that, but since I wasn't doing team pursuit prep I started racing road in March. I won the omnium at that Worlds, and for a few months afterwards it felt like nothing could go wrong.

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I had some pretty ace team-mates (That I would name drop but for fear of how long the list would be) and when I daydream about that season it's all memories of us punting around the UK and Europe feeling properly in the races. I won the sprinter's jersey at Bira (a stage race in Spain), had my most successful year at the Tour of Britain, and got medals in the national road race, time trial and criterium (the final one a shiny gold).

But eventually I realised that if I wanted the fun to continue on the track that following season, if I wanted to play with the big kids in the winter, I'd have to do some specific training.

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So in August I went into a big gym build. I had the Tour of Norway that month but thought I'd be able to muddle through nonetheless. I was wrong and DNFed on the final stage. I was out the back with something like 100km of the stage left and riding in a small group of fellow sufferers, including a Norwegian national.

We reached the feed zone 40km later and all started looking for our team cars to end the pain and get driven to the finish. All except the Norwegian national, who kept riding so she could finish her home race. I remember thinking she was crazy.

This year has been my least active year on the road ever. I just did my first road race of the season in August - the Tour of Scotland. I got dropped a lot, I got cheered on a lot more, and I realised that Norwegian rider wasn't crazy.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

I’m in Glasgow ahead of the Tour of Scotland this weekend (August 9-11). It’s technically called the Women’s Tour of Scotland, but as there’s no Men’s Tour of Scotland I don’t really feel obliged to gender the race name in order to improve your comprehension of what it is.

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There does exist a Youth Tour of Scotland, in fairness. But in equal fairness if anyone has to attach a modifier to the start of their race name to clarify that it’s not that Tour of Scotland, it should be the youths, right? Their race might have existed first, but I already have to reference the fact that I’m a woman all the time (one of the biggest races on the UCI road calendar is called simply ‘The Women’s Tour’) and will never grow out of it. The youths need only be constantly reminded of the fact they’re youths, thus making it a massive part of their identity, for two years.

I thought I’d come up home a bit early and recce part of the second stage that goes from Glasgow to Perth. I can’t say I’m feeling confident about my first road race of the season in August, though, as a consequence of my mother’s enthusiasm, I am feeling excited. She’s planned her watching logistics just as carefully as we have our racing logistics.

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My mum retired a couple years ago and ended up falling into a job as my brother’s personal manager, travelling with him to bike races and the like. But now that John Archibald is a name you know, maybe even a name you know and associate with Derby-based team Huub-Wattbike powered by Vita Coco (a team name so long that only those related to you will consistently go to the effort of typing it out in full) he doesn’t take as much help from his Glasgow-based mother.

It’s really freed her up to focus on her main passion: supporting me.

This Katie Archibald column originally appeared in the print edition of Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.

I think I might be statistically luckier than the average person. When I first had that thought, I decided it didn’t make mathematical sense. Luck is arbitrary by definition and so, like tossing a coin enough times should eventually result in an even number of heads and tails, I thought luck would work in such a way that life evens out. But then I thought, luck is arbitrary by definition and so...why wouldn’t it arbitrarily favour me?

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And I don’t mean I’m privileged. I am privileged, but I’m also separately lucky. I’m not making a show of being grateful for the opportunities I’ve been given or the circumstances I’ve been born into. Again: I am grateful, but separate to all the privilege and opportunity (saving my Oscars ‘thank you mum and dad’ speech for another column), I’m lucky.

Today I fell asleep on a train to Edinburgh. A deep, exhausted, paralysing sleep. It took someone shaking me to wake me up, which they did when the train had terminated. Problem was

I didn’t want to go to Edinburgh (the final stop), I wanted to get off at Linlithgow. So I panicked. Well, the train had only gone and had to stop and move to a rail replacement bus service in Linlithgow and everyone was getting off exactly where I needed waking up. How brilliant is my life?!

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That might not be the best example but it’s the most recent in a series of lucky events. Listing them would make a boring story, but it’s been happening so often that I’m becoming quite laid-back in how I make plans because I assume I’ll luck out. Combining this with a belief in ‘what’s for you won’t go by you’ makes it very easy to sleep at night.

At least it would if I wasn’t covered in scabs and sticking to the sheets still from my crash in Italy last week. Crashing wasn’t very lucky, I admit, but it’s only one side of my body that’s scabby. That’s pretty lucky, right? And since crashing I’ve been away in hotels most nights so it’s other people’s sheets I’ve been making look like a troll’s handkerchief instead of my own… is that luck? Yep, I’ve still got it.

Read Katie Archibald's regular columns about the trials and tribulations of being a professional cyclist in Cycling Weekly, on sale in newsagents and supermarkets, priced £3.25.