Former Olympic silver medallist Toshiaki Fushimi has died after crashing in a keirin race in his home country of Japan. The 50-year-old was racing in the Matsusaka Keirin, where he struck a barrier at the side of the track, reportedly in an attempt to avoid a pile-up that was unfolding in front of him.

He sustained spinal and skull fractures in the crash, according to a report by The Independent, and died the following morning.

A celebrated figure in Japanese keirin racing, Fushimi was part of the team sprint trio who won a silver medal for Japan in the Athens Olympics 2004. He racked up 619 career wins, including three Keirin Grand Prix titles – Japan's blue riband keirin event.

His former track rival Josiah Ng paid tribute to Fushimi on social media, writing: "R.I.P. Fushimi San. Toshiaki Fushimi wasn’t just a competitor. He was one of the best keirin riders Japan has ever produced. Grand Prix winner. Olympic Silver Medalist. A true professional on the track. We raced against each other for years. That kind of rivalry builds a respect that doesn’t fade.

"Devastated to hear he lost his life doing what he loved," he added. "My thoughts are with his family and the entire Keirin community in Japan. Rest in peace, champion."

Hiroshi Kido, chairman of the Japanese Keirin Autorace Foundation, said that safety measure would be reexamined: “It is truly heartbreaking that he lost his life in an accident during a race. We will reconfirm our safety measures and thoroughly ensure fair and safe races.”

Keirin became an Olympic event in 2000, but originated as a betting sport in Japan in the 1940s. The bikes are steel with smaller gears and, like the kit used, they are standardised, with riders racing in different colours. In Japan it takes place on large, outdoor velodromes made of concrete, meaning the event is part sprint, part endurance.

Because of the betting aspect of the sport in Japan, when riders undertake a race they are not allowed to communicate with the outside world, explains Brit Joe Truman, who raced the country's keirin series twice.

“Because obviously betting is a massive part, when we go to a race, we’ve got essentially four days where we’re in lockdown and we’re not allowed any devices that transmit information to the outside world," he said.

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.

A youth development plan has been launched by USA Cycling today, which will use grants to try and attract promising junior athletes into track cycling from other forms of cycling, and even completely different sports.

The Youth Track Cycling Development Grant was inspired by the success of the Search for Speed talent transfer program, which seeks to introduce track sprint cycling to a broader and more diverse audience throughout Los Angeles and the Southern California basin.

The new funded membership-supported talent development initiative is designed to help velodromes, clubs and coaches identify talent and encourage junior athletes, primarily aged between 14 and 18, to try track cycling.

The objective of the Youth Track Cycling Development Grant is to use financial support to break down a significant barrier to entry, and create structured development opportunities for athletes who are competing in other cycling disciplines, or pursuing completely different athletic pursuits, so they can experience the excitement of competitive track cycling.

Initially the program hopes to boost the numbers of young people taking part in the sport at local velodrome level, but the longer-term goal is to create pathways for participation in Junior Track National Championships, High School Track National Championships, and to identify athletic potential for future national teams.

“Track cycling has a long history of developing some of the country’s top athletes,” said USA Cycling Director of Membership, Eric Bennett. “The Youth Track Cycling Development Grant is designed to help local programs create welcoming entry points for young athletes while strengthening connections between velodromes, coaches, and the next generation of riders.”

Two grant awards of $2,500 per program are up for grabs, with USA Cycling stipulating that proposals must focus on the development of junior riders (14-18 year olds) and provide a structured curriculum designed to transition athletes into track racing and training. Velodromes, cycling clubs and USA Cycling-certified coaches can all apply for funding, with applications being reviewed by a three-person USA Cycling panel, which will assess the potential impact of the proposed program.

Interested and eligible parties should apply via the website, and if successful can use the funding to facilitate velodrome access, coaching fees, track bike rentals and educational materials related to track cycling safety and athlete development. Applications for the Youth Track Cycling Development Grant open on 27 May and close on 10 June. Award notifications will be distributed by 17 June, and funds are expected to be dispersed by 1 July.

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.

Members of the Canadian women’s track squad have expressed their concern and frustration after Cycling Canada pulled the women’s team pursuit from its 2028 Los Angeles Olympics program.

The federation said it will not field a women’s team pursuit squad at this October’s UCI Track World Championships in Shanghai, China, nor will it look to qualify one for LA. It will continue, however, to fund the men’s team pursuit squad throughout the Olympic cycle.

The decision has drawn indignation from members of the women’s program, who have described it as “gut wrenching and infuriating”.

“What has happened this past week is not something I am willing to stand for,” wrote Fiona Majendie, a reserve member of the squad at the Paris Olympics in 2024, on Instagram.

“People will always try and put a ceiling on you. Cycling Canada is not only putting a lid on the women’s program right now, they are burying it beneath the ground, and they are destroying years of equality as well as the future of the sport in Canada for all our developing juniors,” Majendie continued.

“To rip away our chance to qualify for the Olympics is both gut wrenching and infuriating.”

In a statement shared with Cycling Weekly, Cycling Canada CEO Mathieu Boucher explained the decision was “performance-based [...] informed by objective, evidence-based analysis. While difficult, it was made in the best interest of the program’s long-term success.”

Boucher said the squad’s results since Paris 2024 “were not trending towards medal winning potential” in LA. He added that recent performances, both in competition and training, “did not indicate these gaps were likely to be closed in time” for the 2028 Games.

The Canadian women’s team pursuit squad won bronze medals at both the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 Olympics. In Paris two years ago, they placed eighth, while the men’s squad were seventh.

More recently, the women’s squad finished ninth at the UCI Track World Championships in Santiago, Chile last October. The men’s squad were 11th.

No Canadian man has won an Olympic medal in track cycling since Curt Harnett took bronze in the men’s sprint in 1996.

Last week, members of the women’s track squad addressed an open letter to Cycling Canada, funding provider Sport Canada and not-for-profit organisation Own the Podium, voicing their concerns of a “disparity in access to high-performance opportunities based on gender”, in particular an “unequal pathway to Olympic participation”.

The squad requested a formal review of the decision to curb the program, and asked for it to be reinstated in time for the 2026 UCI Track World Championships in October.

“None of this happened because the athletes stopped caring or stopped working hard enough,” wrote Lily Plante, a squad member for the last six years, on Instagram.

“Like many others on this team, I sacrificed financially, physically, mentally, and personally to represent Canada on the international stage. I paid thousands of dollars out of pocket to race across the world, qualify spots for Worlds, and keep this program alive because I believed in what it could become.

“Behind every result were athletes doing everything they could with what they were given. And that’s exactly why this hurts so much,” Plante continued.

Ariane Bonhomme, a two-time Olympian who won four team pursuit titles at the Pan American Championships with the squad, said she retired in January, aged 30, after receiving an email saying her Sport Canada funding was being withdrawn.

“The decline of this program has nothing to do with the strength, talent, or commitment of the riders. It has everything to do with how the program has been managed over the past several years,” Bonhomme said.

Canada’s women’s endurance squad funding for the LA Olympics will instead go towards the individual events – Omnium and Madison – as well as the wider development pathway.

“We remain committed to the development of the women’s team pursuit program,” Cycling Canada CEO Boucher said.

“We are taking deliberate steps to strengthen athlete development moving forward. Targeted investments, in collaboration with the cycling ecosystem, will support future growth through key opportunities, including the Junior Track World Championships (August 2026), the Apeldoorn Next Gen Track event (January 2027), the Pan American Championships (February 2027), and the Milton World Cup (April 2027).”

Teenage cyclist Moritz Mauss underwent emergency surgery last weekend to remove a 50cm wooden splinter from his hip after he crashed in an track event.

The incident happened at the International Belgian Track Meeting in Gent on Sunday, when Mauss was competing in the Madison.

Writing on Instagram afterwards, the 18-year-old German, who is part of UAE Team Emirates’ under-23 squad, said he came within centimetres of a “career-ending injury”.

“During my fall, I slid across the track, and a 50 cm long piece of wood splintered from the track and went directly through my hip and upper left leg,” Mauss wrote.

“I was taken directly to the hospital and had surgery only about two hours after the accident. Everything went smoothly, and I am already back home now.

“I got really lucky because the splinter missed my nerves and most of my leg muscles. I will be out for a while now, but it could have been A LOT worse. Only a few centimetres could have meant a career-ending injury.”

Mauss prefaced his post with "trigger warning", and said he initially hesitated to share images of the splinters online, but felt it important to “show these sides of the journey and the sport”.

“Among all the wonderful moments this year and everything this sport has already brought me, those low points are also part of it,” the teenager said.

“We have to accept what happened, and I will make the best of it. The work I have put in over the last few months is definitely not lost, and I am certain there is still a lot to come this season. Time to enjoy some unexpected days off the bike now

The velodrome at Gent’s Vlaams Wielercentrum Eddy Merckx (Flemish Cycling Center Eddy Merckx) is Olympic-sized 250m, made from hardwood, and is home to the Belgian Cycling Team.

The International Belgian Track Meeting is an annual Class 1 event that combines junior, under-23 and elite racing.

Mauss, a junior UCI Track World Championships medallist, competes in both track and road events, and rode the under-23 versions of Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège earlier this month. It is uncertain how long he will now be out of competition.

Track cyclist Nikita Kiriltsev was the artist of an astonishing moment at this weekend’s UCI Track World Cup when he sprinted, on foot and wearing cleats, across the line to qualify in the men’s keirin.

Kiriltsev, who is from Russia but competes as a neutral athlete, was one of six riders involved in a heavy crash during the seven-rider event.

France’s Tom Derache won the heat as the only rider to stay upright, but with another qualifying spot available, and the rest of the field lying on the floor, Kiriltsev grabbed his bike by the top tube, ran almost 200m around the final bend and down the home straight, and claimed the second spot in the next round.

The move was perfectly legal, according to UCI regulations. Rule 1.2.109 reads: “A rider may cross the finish line on foot, provided that they have their bicycle with them.”

Kiriltsev’s show of smart judgement came in the kierin’s first round repechage, where he finished 42 seconds behind Derache. Thanks to his running, he qualified by just two seconds ahead of the USA’s Geneway Tang, who chose to remount his bike to finish the race. Great Britain’s Harry Ledingham-Horn also finished a further 10 seconds back.

Afterwards, Kiriltsev rested his bike against the track fence and collapsed on his back on the floor.

A former junior keirin world champion, Kiriltsev went on to progress through the second round repechage and into the minor places final (7-12), finishing 8th overall. Harrie Lavreysen of the Netherlands won the gold medal in the event.

The weekend’s UCI Track World Cup took place in Hong Kong and marked the second instalment of this year's three-part series.

Among the standout riders were Great Britain’s Matthew Richardson, China’s Liying Yuan, and the Netherlands’ Philip Heijnen, all three of whom won two gold medals; Richardson won the team sprint and individual sprint, Yuan the team sprint and the keirin, and Heijnen the omnium and the Madison.

There was also joy for New Zealand, whose men’s and women’s team pursuit squads both won gold.

The next UCI Track World Cup will start this Friday 24 April in Nilai, Malaysia. This year’s UCI Track World Championships, the flagship event of the year, will be held in Shanghai, China in October.

American track, gravel and road cyclist Taylor Phinney has announced his return to racing, seven years after retiring from the sport.

The 2009 individual pursuit track world champion is returning to the discipline, aiming for a spot on the US pursuit team ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

"What started as a return to gravel racing has delicately snowballed into a full on Olympic dream," Phinney wrote on Instagram on Tuesday.

"The track was where I first found love and success in this sport, it was even the first discipline to break my heart when my specialty event, the individual pursuit, was removed from the Olympic program, which prompted me to swiftly abandon the track and go all in on the road," the post continued.

Phinney’s transition to the road had resulted in both triumph and catastrophe. At the 2012 Giro d'Italia, he became the third American to wear the maglia rosa after winning the opening TT stage. A trio of US national TT titles soon followed, but his promising charge was temporarily curtailed by a crash at the 2014 US national championships. There he sustained two breaks in the lower left leg and a knee injury after crashing into a guardrail.

After a dominant year, winning the Tour of Dubai and collecting a stage victory in the Tour of California and the US time trial, he was taken out of the Tour de France squad and into a year of rehabilitation. His official retirement announcement came five years later, when he was just 29: "I feel like my body sort of made this choice for me," he said at the time. "I've now been injured longer than I've not been injured as a professional athlete."

Phinney’s latest comeback began back in November, when training for the team first began. Pushed by his Tour de France Femmes-winning wife, Kasia Niewiadoma, and by his own family’s Olympic legacy. The last time the Olympic Games were held in LA was in 1984, when his mother, Connie Carpenter-Phinney, won gold in the road race. "The seed started to grow and before I knew it all I could think of was closing this final loop in my cycling career," he wrote.

While the transition back into a team environment has been smooth so far, the 35-year-old admitted that he’s got a lot of hard work in the gym ahead of him.

"Regardless of whether I make the official team for LA28 or not, I’m honored to be in the running and will look forward to making some World Cup teams to elevate the team to its highest potential and Olympic qualifying position!"

The ever-lively debate about the UCI’s minimum handlebar widths, and how (and where and why) the new restrictions are going to be enforced, has been reignited after a video emerged of a British Cycling commissaire measuring bar widths and the gap between brake levers at a British road racing event at Lee Valley Velopark in London over the weekend.

The footage, taken by track cyclist and 2025 Master's Kilometre TT National Champion Atiba Quildan (who has posted detailed explainer videos about the subject in the past) showed several riders being forced to significantly adjust their shifters just before riding, in order to comply with the controversial new UCI minimum bar width specifications.

The video sparked a deluge of acerbic comments from other riders, bristling not just about the details and impact of the restrictions, but also the lack of clarity about whether British Cycling was really intending to enforce them to the letter, or not.

Quildan told Cycling Weekly that the problem was a lack of consistency, with anecdotal reports that the restrictions had not been applied at earlier events, and that there had been little coherent advice from the governing body, leaving riders unclear about the legality of their set up. The changes were brought in for safety reasons, and tragically a cyclist did die during a road event at Lee Valley last year, which Quildan believes may have led to the venue having a commissaire there to double down on the enforcement of the UCI rules.

But with confusion reigning, riders were arguably placed in more jeopardy by having to change the position of their shifters at the very last minute. “One guy told me he was struggling to stop,” said Quildan. The situation led to people such as former team pursuit world champion, Hour Record–holder and now head of engineering with Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe Dan Bigham bemoaning a lack of communication from British Cycling about the new regulations.

Amongst the ranks of pro racers there has been a tendency for bar widths to get shorter in recent years, with some notable exceptions, like Classics specialist and multiple cyclo-cross world champion Mathieu van der Poel.

However, midway through last year, as part of a raft of new rules ostensibly intended to improve safety, the UCI announced that a new minimum handlebar width for road bikes of 400mm would be introduced from the beginning of the 2026 season. That's a 50mm increase from 350mm, measured between the outer edges.

This came along with a new minimum gap between the inside of shifter/brake hoods of 280mm. (This latter measurement was a compromise, after the minimum space between levers was initially set at 320mm.) The UCI stated that this rule would apply to bikes taking part in mass-start events. Track bikes, which previously didn’t have a minimum bar width restriction, will see a new rule form January 2027, which specifiies bars must be 350mm outside to outside.

The decision to apply these rules immediately caused concern across the industry, with component manufacturers, team bosses, bike-fit pros and others expressing their disquiet about the impact it might have on production and performance, and critics pointing out that the minimum width stipulation would have an especially negative impact on smaller riders and women cyclists. Initially it seemed as though British Cycling were not going to apply the restrictions, but then out came the video of the commissaire brandishing a yellow measuring stick.

Contacted by Cycling Weekly, British Cycling acknowledged that there had been some confusion around the new UCI technical regulations, and said it was in process of clarifying how the rules would be applied in Britain with all license holders.

The forthcoming clarification stated that, according to British Cycling regulations (R2.1.1, page 109 of the 2026 Handbook): "Unless expressly authorised by the format of the competition, events held under these Technical Regulations are restricted to cycles that are compliant with the UCI Regulations, save for the UCI minimum overall width of handlebars."

British Cycling went on to explain that, in practice, this means the following:

"Riders competing in British Cycling road, circuit and cyclo-cross sanctioned events (including Nat A, Nat B, Reg A, Reg B and Reg C/C+ road and circuit events) do not need to adhere to the new UCI regulation prescribing a minimum overall width of handlebars of 400mm, but they will need to adhere to the minimum distance between the brake lever hoods of 280mm (and also the maximum wheel rim depth of 65mm).

"However, riders competing in UCI road, circuit and cyclo-cross sanctioned events will need to adhere to all UCI regulations. Such events include: Lloyds National Road Championships, The 20th Rutland International CiCLE Classic and the City of London Nocturne Elite Crits. And in cyclo-cross, this applies to any Elite and Junior race which is registered on the UCI calendar."

There is much scepticism amongst riders about whether the new rules actually make cycling safer. “Obviously it’s good that British Cycling have clarified their position, but I don’t think the new UCI rules should have been implemented at all,” says Quildan. “I don’t think anyone has actually crashed because their bars are too narrow”.

And others agree. "Personally I think that there are far more things the UCI and British Cycling should be worrying about for safety," One Life Cycle rider James Ambrose-Parish told Cycling Weekly. "We race on open roads with oncoming cars in the UK with potholes and other road users.

“The people that put in place these rules I’m sure have never ridden narrow handlebars on their road bike. For me [narrow handlebars] haven't affected the way I handle the bike; if anything, they makes it easier to defend your position in a tight bunch and prevent bars getting hooked on other people.

“I think the rule will only hurt those that have tried to optimise their position who maybe don’t have the raw power to win. Cycling is different to other sports where equipment and innovation can largely affect results. It has always encouraged people to find ways to go faster that don’t involve full-time training plans.”

Ambrose-Parish concedes that British Cycling's update today has at least got rid of the grey areas, but he's still faced with a predicament. "For the past two years I have been using the Toot Asha RR 33cm and 35cm, and prior to that was using 33cm alloy track bars as road bars – previously legal for the 35cm outside width that ran up until 2025," he said. "I'll have to rehose the whole bike as they won’t be long enough to accommodate bars… won’t be able to do this before the weekend!"

Six of the best track cyclists in the world will travel to Japan this summer to take part in a keirin racing series.

Britons Matthew Richardson and Joe Truman will join the sprint event’s Olympic and world champion Harrie Lavreysen (Netherlands), as well as a trio of female riders: Olympic champion Ellesse Andrews (New Zealand), Olympic silver medallist Hetty van de Wouw (Netherlands), and the former sprint world champion Mathilde Gros (France).

The participation of international riders comes as part of a rebooted agreement between the UCI and the Japan Keirin Autorace Foundation (JKA). The last cohort that took part in the series did so in 2019, before the Covid pandemic put a halt to the programme.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly, Richardson, the Olympic keirin silver medallist, said he was first approached by the JKA at the UCI Track World Championships in Santiago, Chile last October.

“I’d been wanting to do this for a very long time,” he said. “This has been a massive bucket list item for me, something that I knew if the time came, and if I got invited, I would 100% say yes.

“You start track cycling and, especially as a sprinter, you get to a level where you start to understand the history of the sport, but also the history of the keirin and where it originates from. That's when you're first introduced to this betting sport in Japan.”

Keirin racing emerged in the Asian country in the late 1940s as a post-war gambling sport. It joined the Olympics in 2000, and, in UCI competitions, involves six riders motor-paced by a derny for three laps, before sprinting against each other for three laps.

Traditional Japanese keirin typically takes place on larger, outdoor velodromes made of concrete, meaning the event is part sprint, part endurance. There is standardised equipment for the riders, who use steel bikes with smaller gears and wear multicoloured jerseys and helmets.

Truman, a GB team-mate of Richardson’s, has raced the series twice, and was part of the last international cohort that went to Japan in 2019.

“I learnt how to be a lot more independent,” the recently crowned kilometre time trial European champion said.

“I went last time when I was 20, and I was straight off the plane from the Commonwealth Games. I went from being in a big bubble with physios and everything, straight to a little town in Japan, on my own for six months.”

One of things that most fascinated Truman was the “completely different vibe” around the racing. “Because obviously betting is a massive part, when we go to a race, we’ve got essentially four days where we’re in lockdown and we’re not allowed any devices that transmit information to the outside world,” he explained.

“It’s just books and old iPods and things like that, but it also gives you a good chance to learn Japanese and chat to some other riders... It basically becomes a little digital detox kind of retreat.”

Another difference to UCI racing is that riders have to declare their tactics before each race. They usually do this the night before, Truman explained, and the tactics are announced to fans and punters.

“For international riders, the most common tactic is senko, where you start your sprint quite early, and you aim to be on the front with a lap to go,” he said.

“I'm just really looking forward to going out to do my first race. It's a really nice experience.”

The 2026 Keirin World Series will take place over nine events in velodromes around Japan between 3 June and 1 September. Alongside the racing, the six international riders will live in Japan for four months, during which time they will study the sport and sit exams.

Sir Chris Hoy famously attended keirin school in 2005, before going on to become a double Olympic champion in the event.

While Truman and Gros have competed in the series before, Richardson, Lavreysen, Andrews and Van de Wouw are all first-timers.

“To me it’s all a mystery,” said Richardson. “It’s almost going to feel like a bit of a travel back in time… I don’t think there’s going to be much that applies to indoor racing other than the sort of length of training that we’ll get from it.

“It’s been a dream of mine for many, many years,” Richardson continued. “Now it’s finally happening, I want to really live in the moment and soak it all in, and try and experience and learn as much as I possibly can – I feel super privileged to be invited.”

Prior to Sunday, Olympic team sprint gold medallist Katy Marchant’s last track race ended in her lying among the fans, her arm broken in two places, having crashed over the fence at London’s Lee Valley Velodrome. Now, 15 months and another child later, she’s back chasing the Olympic dream again.

Marchant returned to competition on the final day of the British Track Championships last week, where she raced in the individual sprint. The 33-year-old was ultimately knocked out in the quarterfinals, but the result mattered little; she came off the track smiling, walked to her paddock, and sat with her two sons, Arthur and Walter, the latter she gave birth to just six months before.

“I’m really happy to be back racing – earlier than expected, I think, but things have been going really well and relatively smoothly,” Marchant told Cycling Weekly.

The sprinter’s previous last race came in late 2024 at the UCI Track Champions League (TCL). The event ended up being abandoned so Marchant could receive urgent medical care, after crashing into the front row at the top of the banking in the keirin final. She now races with mementos of the incident: a dark purple scar down her right forearm, and small metal plates holding the bones together.

“It’s been a whirlwind. It was just a bike race and it was just a freak accident. It was a bit unlucky on my part: wrong place, wrong time,” she said.

How much of the crash does she remember? “I totally remember all of it,” she said. “I knew what was going on. I could see the fence coming, but I didn’t quite anticipate going over it.

“I’ve been really lucky in the last 12 years I’ve done this; I’ve never really had many accidents, [only] a couple of slip and slides. It was a little bit unfortunate for the Track Champs to end like that, especially because it was the last race of what had been an incredible year in 2024.”

Marchant won her first Olympic title that summer with a world-record ride in the team sprint alongside Emma Finucane and Sophie Capewell. The trio then went on to win gold at the UCI Track World Championships two months later. Come Christmas, however, and Marchant was sidelined with a broken radius and ulna, as well as two broken fingers.

Recovering from injury was just one part of Marchant’s year off racing. After having her first child, Arthur, in 2022, and coming back “better than ever”, she and her husband Rob added another son, Walter, to their family last August.

“Crazy to think I grew and birthed a human only six months ago,” Marchant wrote on Instagram following her racing return on Sunday.

She told Cycling Weekly that being a mother of two has been “full-on, [I’m] not going to lie – but it’s been great.

“Physically it’s harder to have two children than it is to have one, and obviously my body has taken a bit of a hit from having another baby, but I’ve recovered really well,” she said.

“I’m back training and I feel great. I’m not where I need to be – I’m a million miles away from where I was when I left the sport in 2024 after the TCL – but I feel more confident this time. When I had Arthur [in 2022], there were days were I was like, ‘Am I flogging a dead horse?’ Whereas this time I have more confidence. I know that the bad days will probably make the good days worth it.”

Those good days, she hopes, will come in major competitions this year. Marchant is eyeing a spot in Team England for July’s Commonwealth Games. She also wants to be part of the Great Britain squad at the World Championships in October, with a longer term goal of defending her Olympic title in LA in 2028.

“I’m here to eke out every last bit that I can. It’d be really nice to just maybe have one last dance at the Olympics,” she said.

“I could retire tomorrow with the most amazing career and more than I could have ever dreamed of, but I never want to retire and say, ‘What if?’ I want to push every boundary that I can. The girls have got a great team going on, and I really want to be in that team.”

Six titles at the British Track Championships went back to the same house in suburban Manchester, after sprint couple Matthew Richardson and Emma Finucane clean swept all of their events.

The pair won three gold medals apiece last week – sprint, keirin and team sprint – and in commanding fashion, too, both going undefeated in every heat across the four days.

After the competition finished on Sunday, and the fans filed out, Richardson and Finucane hung back to pose together trackside for the cameras. The photo will now make for the perfect mantelpiece keepsake: a memento to mark a faultless week of racing.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly, Finucane put her success down to “hard work, determination, and the love for winning”.

“The little me is so proud of myself,” said the 23-year-old, who raced on Sunday in the blue bands of European sprint champion. “You don’t know how long your career is going to be, so every moment like this, racing in front of my family and friends, I want to take it. I really enjoyed racing my bike here, and that’s what it’s about.”

After gapping the rest of the field in the keirin final earlier in the week, Finucane put daylight into her rivals again in the sprint on Sunday, ultimately beating Iona Moir 2-0 in the final.

One of the riders she knocked out during the day was PhD student Kathryn Hinton, who described competing against Finucane as “like trying to race a rocket ship”.

“She could do it with her eyes closed, and still be two seconds ahead of me,” Hinton said of the recent 200m flying lap world record breaker. “But it’s cool. She’s in the most phenomenal shape of any woman in track cycling history ever.”

The gulf between Richardson and his competitors was perhaps even larger. Racing for the first time as European sprint and keirin champion, the 26-year-old said the competition was “my training for the week”, and still laid waste to every race.

He rounded off back-to-back trebles with a resounding victory in the keirin on Sunday, attacking long with two laps to go.

“I felt like I needed a little bit more of a longer effort to keep that aerobic fitness in for this week’s training,” Richardson said afterwards.

Asked earlier in the week what motivates him to compete at the Nationals, he said: “I think it’s important that we support racing in general, but obviously, especially British racing. The sport will die if we don’t race and we don’t put on a good show. I’m trying to do my bit to keep the sport alive.”

Elsewhere on the final day of the British Track Championships, 18-year-old Erin Boothman stunned Olympic medallists Anna Morris and Katie Archibald to win the elimination race.

There was an unexpected winner, too, in the men’s points race, as 20-year-old Ben Marsh edged out individual pursuit champion Charlie Tanfield by just three points, winning with a tally of 57 to 54. The commissaires inside the velodrome initially declared Will Perrett to have retained his title – he celebrated with a raised fist as a result – before recounting the points and changing their decision before the podium ceremony.

The para-cycling trio of Jody Cundy, Rebecca Newark and Jacob Smith won the C1-5 mixed team sprint.

Eighteen-year-old Erin Boothman was “over the moon” just to be in the final three of the elimination race at the British Track Championships alongside Olympic medallists Katie Archibald and Anna Morris. So when she dispatched them both, and won the gold medal, she cupped her mouth in disbelief.

“I think a top five and I would’ve been happy, to be honest,” the teenager smiled afterwards. “I wanted to come into this weekend for a few medals, but I certainly wasn’t expecting it in the elimination race.”

Boothman achieved her medal goal on Friday, when she won bronze in the individual pursuit behind the European champion Josie Knight and world champion Morris. In the elimination race, she rode with poise and power, leading most of the event from the front.

“When I came into the final three and I saw it was those two, it was super intimidating,” she said. “They’re two people I look up to massively, and in my eyes, they’re another league above everyone.

“I think I maybe benefitted from the two of them looking at each other, but I certainly wanted to give it my all and see what my legs could do. I think it paid off in the end.”

The winning combination required half-second decision-making: first, Boothman pipped double Olympic gold medallist Archibald to the line. Morris then pinned the teenager up to the top of the banking – “I thought that was maybe my race over,” Boothman said – but rather than surrendering, she launched her sprint early, carrying her speed round the final bend, and raising her fist in the air in victory.

As she came off the track, Boothman sobbed tears of joy. She was greeted at the gate by her GB team-mate Carys Lloyd, who gripped her by the shoulders and congratulated her. The Scot then staggered slowly back to her paddock, as other riders came out of theirs to hug her.

“It means the world,” said Boothman, a four-time junior track world champion, and now Liv AlUla Jayco development team rider.

“Especially in an elimination where anything can happen, I couldn’t be happier to win an elite national title for myself.”

Fresh from breaking a world record at the European Championships, Emma Finucane has carried her searing form into this week’s British Track Championships, where she is now one win away from a clean sweep.

The Olympic gold medallist, who won the team sprint on Friday, returned on Saturday to rule over the keirin, crossing the line at least three bike lengths ahead of her GB team-mates.

The victories come three weeks after Finucane broke the flying 200m record en route to Euros gold in the sprint. “I came in with good form,” she said of this week's Nationals, “and I’ve kind of used that momentum.

“In that [keirin] final, I knew I needed some space, and as long as I put 100% effort in and found that black line, I knew it would be really hard to get round me. That’s pretty much what I did: I picked a point, found the black line, and absolutely sent it. To cross the line first is really, really special.”

Finucane last achieved a clean sweep at the competition in 2023, then 20 years old and riding on her home velodrome in Newport. “To win a National Champs jersey is always special,” she said, after claiming her seventh on Saturday.

Now with a day to go at the championships, both she and her partner Matthew Richardson are looking for one more win each to take a full sprint gold medal haul back to their home in suburban Manchester; Finucane will race the individual sprint on Sunday, while Richardson will race the keirin – both events in which the two are the European champions.

“The triple would be really cool, and hopefully Matty will do the same. He’s pretty unbeatable here,” Finucane said. “[I'm taking it] one race at a time.”

Team sprint overhaul

Richardson’s second title of the championships came in the team sprint, which he won with Marcus Hiley and Harry Radford – a trio that pledged to race together over a game of Fifa a month ago.

In the final, the team were five thousands of a second down at the end of the second lap, before Richardson pulled them a whole second into the green. Their finishing time of 42.478 would have earned them a gold medal and a world record at the London 2012 Olympics.

“I certainly executed better than I thought I would,” Radford said.

After the race, he, Hiley and Richardson swapped their skinsuits for Stockport County shirts, in honour of their team’s 4-2 victory over Wigan in League One. “It’s a shame we missed the game,” Hiley said. “But I guess coming away with a jersey makes it worthwhile in the end.”

Morris and Bostock double up

There were more national titles, too, for Anna Morris and Matthew Bostock, who each earned their second gold medal of the week.

Morris, who won the scratch race on Thursday and placed second in the individual pursuit on Friday, proved the most consistent scorer in the points race, which she won ahead of Josie Knight and Katie Archibald.

The trio were part of a group that gained a lap during the race, and kept pushing each other into the closing sprints. In the end, Morris tallied 44 points, while Knight collected 33 and Archibald 29.

“When you’ve got the calibre of riders like Katie, Josie, Jess [Roberts] and Erin [Boothman], it really elevates the level of the field,” Morris said. “It makes for good, hard racing. That’s what we want, and that’s what we’ve come here to do.”

Bostock’s second victory came in the elimination race, following his scratch race win from Friday. “It’s been the perfect start to the year,” he said.

The 28-year-old, now racing for Rapha’s new RCC Racing team, rejoined the Great Britain Cycling Team squad last April, having been on the Academy as a teenager.

“I always used to wing it a bit [on the track],” he smiled. “But now, with the help of the coaches, I’m starting to actually really understand it.”

Tandem treble

In the para-cycling events, tandem duo Jenny Holl and Sophie Unwin earned their third gold medals, this time with a catch at the halfway point in the 4km pursuit final.

“We went quicker than either of us were expecting to,” said Unwin, who, with Holl, is the world champion in the event. “To be able to race in the rainbow jersey, and to be able to win in the rainbow jersey, is great.”

There were also wins for Crystal Lane-Wright in the C4-5 scratch race, Elisabeth Simpson in the C1-3 scratch race, Alex Jones in the C4-5 kilometre time trial, Fin Graham in the C1-3 kilometre time trial, and Frederick Ireland and Aaron Pope in the men’s tandem sprint.

Billy Cookson likes to think of this week’s British Track Championships as the FA Cup. “You’ve got the best athletes in the world in their discipline, you’ve got world record holders, world champions and European champions… and then you’ve got me,” he smiles.

“I’m like that non-league team that gets a good, little run and gets to show off what they can do – Havant and Waterlooville, a good few years ago, that’s the one that always sticks in my memory.”

Cookson, a 30-year-old management accountant based in London, only began cycling three months ago. He bought the track bike he’s riding at the championships in Manchester six weeks ago from Facebook Marketplace, and he’s so new to riding the rollers, he has to hold onto a rail while he warms up and down.

“When I set out, I said I wanted to ride in the Nationals,” he says. “A few people laughed at me, and I said, ‘No, I’ll ride in the Nationals.’” It’s the same resolve he showed seven years prior, when, after a life-changing car crash, he had to teach himself to use a knife and fork again.

Cookson was 23 when the accident happened. He had travelled to Australia a month earlier, and was ready to start a new chapter of his life as a club cricketer. Then, one day in late October, he hit a bus head-on while driving.

“I broke both my ankles, tibia, fibia, patella, my femur snapped… I punctured both my lungs as well, and split my liver,” he says. “Sorry to be graphic, but my arm was hanging off, my knee and my bone was smashed out of my leg, and my head was nearly taken off – I’ve got a laceration that went from ear to ear,” he continues, lifting up his fringe to show the scar. “I had like a flap on the top of my head.”

Cookson doesn’t remember the air ambulance taking him to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. His only memory of the accident ends five minutes before it happened. The next thing he recalls is waking up from an induced coma six days later, with his parents at the end of the hospital bed.

“That’s when I realised it was quite bad,” he says. “Because I was in Australia, it was at least 24 hours for them to get there.”

At the time, the doctors said Cookson had lost so much blood that he “didn’t have any of his own left in him”. He underwent 28 surgeries, and spent six months in a rehabilitation hospital, regaining his strength and learning how to walk again.

“It was two years before I could pick something up with my hand and let go of it,” he says. “I was great to go for a beer with, because I couldn’t get it to my mouth, and I couldn’t let go – if someone needed me to hold their beer, it wasn’t going in my mouth.”

Cookson chose to stay in Australia after the car crash, and only returned to the UK last March. “This winter, I was twiddling my thumbs – not very well, obviously,” he winks, “– and I thought, ‘What shall I do?’ I could go and sit in the pub and watch football most weekends, or I could actually go and do something. That’s when I thought of track cycling.”

A hobby cyclist when he was younger, Cookson used to take his dad’s old mountain bike for weekend rides, and remembered a few track sessions he did as a 15-year-old. He knew track cycling was a Paralympic sport, but how could he get into it? “I did my accreditation at Lee Valley over four consecutive weeks,” he says, “and I went up to Loughborough to do a Talent ID day [with British Cycling].”

Due to his injuries – Cookson’s right arm has been rebuilt and is now shorter than his left – he received a C5 classification, meaning he competes in the racing category for those with the least severe impairments.

Before he'd even received his Talent ID results, he told the coaches he wanted to race at the upcoming Nationals. “They said, ‘We’ll see. If you go every week, then maybe. But it’s quite a high bar.’” In their reticence, though, he saw an exciting challenge. "I asked for a kit list of the things I'd need," he says.

“People were shocked that that was my first-ever bunch race [on Thursday], because of how I positioned myself and stuff,” he says of the scratch race, in which he finished 12th. On Friday, Cookson was disqualified from the elimination race for riding on the blue band – “I wasn’t familiar with [that rule],” he says. “It’s all learning. I’ll take that on board.”

He then went on to place 8th in the kilometre time trial on Saturday evening, clocking 1:17.248 – a speed of almost 47kph.

With so much experience gained in just three months, Cookson is now thinking to longer-term goals. It's just over two years until the Paralympics in LA – is he aiming for that? “I think I have to,” Cookson says, “because that’s what drives me on the days I don’t want to do things. I think I have to have that as a goal, but it’s not the be-all and end-all.

“If I get to a point where I can only compete at Nationals and be slightly competitive at that, being here this weekend, I’m pretty comfortable with that. That would be a pretty cool thing,” he adds. Still, here’s hoping the magic of the FA Cup continues.

In the El Clásico of individual pursuit finals – world champion vs world record holder – it was the latter, Josie Knight, who won the title at the British Track Championships on Friday night.

Just one second separated the newly crowned European champion and rainbow-jersey-wearer Anna Morris inside the Manchester Velodrome. Morris led for all but the last 250m of the 4km event, at one point by more than two and a half seconds, before Knight clawed it back on the home straight to win with a 4:24.029.

A gasp filled the track centre when the gun sounded and the scoreboard tipped in Knight’s favour. For the second night in a row, the IP world champion had been beaten at this year’s championships, after Charlie Tanfield bettered Josh Charlton on Thursday. Knight was perhaps the last person in the room to realise she’d done it, too.

“I was coming into the straight and I hadn’t heard her gun yet, so I drove all the way to the line, and I really couldn’t tell [who had won],” she told Cycling Weekly. “It took me a half a lap to be like, ‘Oh wait, that’s my name with number one next to it!’”

Knight’s title-winning ride came two weeks after she set a new world record of 4:19.461 at the UEC European Track Championships in Konya, Turkey. She topped the qualifying board at Nationals on Friday morning, nipping Morris by one tenth of a second, to set up an all-star final.

“I could hear the commentators, and for the first six laps – when the pain hasn’t quite got to you yet – I was so aware that they were saying Anna was like 1.5 seconds up,” she said. “With six [laps] to go, I was like, ‘There’s nothing to lose, just empty it all to the line.’ I felt sort of in control of the hurt.

“I’m just over the moon,” the 28-year-old continued. “You can’t really ask for much more than beating the world champion… It’s such a privilege to have such a good race and to race Anna. I hope the crowd realised that that’s as good an IP final as you’ll get anywhere in the world.”

Curiously, Knight competed with the same helmet and wheels that Tanfield rode to victory on Thursday, having gone to his house to borrow them earlier in the morning. She also wore an old European champion's skinsuit belonging track sprinter Emma Finucane, for lack of time to make her own. “The only thing that was mine was my legs and my shoes,” she smiled.

Eighteen-year-old Erin Boothman won the bronze medal in the event, catching her opponent with more than a kilometre to go.

Richardson’s reign continues

Following the individual pursuit final, Matthew Richardson rounded off a peerless display in the sprint competition with a 2-0 victory over 2023 national champion Harry Ledingham-Horn.

Richardson, who beat the 20-time world champion Harrie Lavreysen twice at the European Championships earlier this month, won every heat he contested across Thursday and Friday, at times sitting up with half a lap still to race. He is now a third of the way to defending the clean sweep he managed last year, with the team sprint and keirin still to come.

“I don’t come here to get second. I don’t go anywhere to get second,” Richardson said afterwards.

One person in the media zone likened the sprinter’s dominance to Eusebio’s second-half showing against North Korea at the 1966 World Cup, when he scored four goals, and made his opponents look like schoolboys.

Richardson's tactic, he said, was to “race well, but race smart – I’ve got a pretty big race block this year, and we’re right in the middle of it, so it’s all about making smart decisions and trying to get through races.”

In the women’s team sprint, Olympic champion Emma Finucane combined with her team-mates Rhianna Parris-Smith, Lowri Thomas and Lauren Bell to win the gold medal.

“I was really happy with how we executed the ride,” Finucane said after the final, which she Parris-Smith and Thomas won by a second. “For the first time riding team sprint together, I think it was a solid ride.”

After Parris-Smith’s strong start out the gates, Finucane pulled out a gap to Thomas in the second lap, leaving her Welsh compatriot to charge through and into the victory turn. “There’s only so much you can do when you have the fastest rider in the world in front of you,” Thomas said. “You’ve just got to catch up at the end.”

In the para-cycling events, Archie Atkinson added a C4-5 elimination race title to the scratch race one he won on Thursday. “That’s two for two,” he said. “I’m on a 100% win streak in racing this year, so I’m very happy.”

There were also wins for Matthew Bostock in the men's scratch race, Sophie Unwin and Jenny Holl in the women’s tandem sprint, Chris Latham and Morgan Fice-Noyes in the men’s tandem individual pursuit, Fin Graham in the C1-3 elimination race, Elisabeth Simpson in the C1-3 time trial and Kadeena Cox in the C4-5 time trial.

“It was like somebody had shot him,” says Simon Fletcher, describing the moment his son Lewis crashed on a tarmac BMX track a year and a half ago. First he heard the bang of the fork snapping, then came the sight of the limp body on the floor. “Even now, just remembering…” he continues, catching his throat as he speaks. “We thought the worst.”

Simon was coaching the pump track session when the incident happened. Lewis had ridden the course in Gravesend plenty of times before, but on this run, three quarters of the way round, his bike collapsed beneath him at 45kph, and he barrelled head first into the ground. Within moments, the emergency services turned up in an ambulance and a fire engine – the latter only needed for the most serious call-outs.

“It was so bad they put him to sleep, into a coma, straightaway at the side of the track,” Simon says. Lewis stayed unconscious for three days afterwards. He didn’t leave the intensive care unit at the hospital for two weeks.

Today, Lewis Fletcher is reclining in a plastic chair inside the Manchester Velodrome. He’s just finished qualifying for the individual sprint competition at the British Track Championships, and is giddy to be sharing a track with Team GB riders, let alone to be alive.

He has no memory of the crash that almost ended his life, he says, or any of the six months before it. “They found two bleeds [initially],” the now 18-year-old says. “I was in a coma for three days, and it didn’t get any better. Then they gave me another brain scan, and I had four bleeds – two more bleeds.”

'Cycling saved me'

It took four months before the teenager could return to school. Judged to be at high risk of having a seizure, he was also “banned” from driving for eight months – "I hated that," he says.

“The parts [of my brain that I damaged], were [responsible for] language and emotions,” he says. As such, he struggled with his mental health – “I was depressed for a long time” – and began to have troubles with his speech. “I still do now sometimes,” he says. “I had speech and language therapy. It’s things like, if I had a conversation with you, I’d want to say ‘car’ but I’d say ‘bus’, or I’d want to say ‘bike’ and I’d say ‘car’.”

As time passed, Fletcher returned little by little to cycling. He began by turning his legs slowly on the turbo trainer at home in Dartford, riding until the headaches became so sore he had to stop. Come January 2025, though, just four months after the crash, and he was ready to commit himself again to the bike.

“That’s what saved me,” he says. “I was really, really struggling, then I got on a bike, and I felt back to normal. It’s so hard to explain. I didn’t have emotion, I didn’t feel happy, didn’t feel sad, I was just blunt, so blunt. I got on a bike, and I actually started smiling again.”

Once the fifth-ranked youth BMXer in the world, this time he turned his talent to the velodrome. “I met [my coach] Chris Pyatt, who took me on. Absolute legend, I love that guy,” he says, pointing across to Pyatt in a black polo shirt. “I’ve worked with him now for seven months, and I’ve gone from an 11.3 [seconds] to a 10.3 [in the 200m flying lap].

“I feel like I lost a year of my life – I don’t know about it, but I’m not going to complain. Where I am now, I’m living my dream, racing against riders who have got a GB top on, and opportunities that I want.”

Fletcher is now on a scholarship at the University of Derby. His A-Levels didn’t go to plan – he dropped a subject, had to relearn the syllabus because of the memory loss, and got a C and an E – but the university understood his case, and offered him a place nonetheless. He's studying sport therapy and rehabilitation, which he combines with regular training, and one overarching dream.

“I want to be on GB. That’s my goal,” he says. An arm's reach away, the GB men's sprint squad are warming up in their fenced paddock. Sir Chris Hoy went from BMX racing to track sprint Olympic champion, I say. Fletcher points out that so too did Dutchman Harrie Lavreysen, the now 20-time world champion. Could he have the same destiny? “Fingers crossed,” he smiles.

“I nearly died, so I’m lucky I’m still here. In the next three years, if someone says I’m going to die, I want to be happy. I’m not taking anything for granted.”

Fletcher turns to his dad beside him and reaches out his arm for a high five. “We’re going for the GB squad!” he says excitedly. With his future ahead of him, the crash, on that foggy September evening in Gravesend, suddenly feels a lifetime ago.

It took a “huge” PB and career-best power numbers for Charlie Tanfield to beat the world champion to the individual pursuit title at the British National Track Championships on Thursday evening.

The 29-year-old knocked 1.7 seconds off his personal best when he qualified top with a 4:02.822 inside the Manchester Velodrome. He then carried his form into the final, leading against the national record holder Josh Charlton for more than three quarters of the 4km event, and beating him by over four seconds.

Ahead of the race, photographers flocked to Charlton to capture his first outing in the rainbow bands he won last October. They then found themselves dashing across the track centre to shoot Tanfield, the against-the-odds winner, as he left the boards smiling, applauded by the crowds.

“You can’t race against a better rider than the world champion,” Tanfield told Cycling Weekly afterwards. “I just wanted to come here and do a good ride. I’m so surprised, so surprised. I can’t believe it, to be honest.”

Across the two rides, Tanfield, a previous IP champion in 2018 and 2023, revealed he did “the best power numbers I’ve ever done”. His latest victory came six months after he attempted the Hour Record, but fell short, still setting the seventh furthest distance of all time.

“It helps with your positioning,” he said of his Hour Record training, “and I feel more robust in my second ride and in the back-end of rides. I’m not dropping off as much anymore.

“I think I was sort of stagnating a bit with my training, and after my Hour, I kind of switched things up, and I’m responding quite well to it.”

Seventeen-year-old Leon Atkins won the bronze medal in the event. The teenager will join Lidl-Trek’s academy squad next year.

Morris defends scratch title

Earlier in the evening, the newly crowned European omnium champion Anna Morris defended her national title in the scratch race, trouncing the field with a final-lap dash.

The first attacks came with six laps to go in the 40-lap event, when Team GB’s Josie Knight peeled off the front of the bunch. Morris reacted fastest to close the move down, and did so again four laps later when Jenny Holl and Phoebe Taylor catapulted to the front with two laps remaining.

“I tried to jump on them, did what I could to the line, and luckily that was enough,” Morris, a now six-time national track champion, said.

“It was the most chaotic last six laps I think I’ve raced,” she added. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a scratch race like it, and that’s part of the fun of racing a scratch race: everyone goes in with different tactics.”

Holl and Taylor held the momentum of their attack to place second and third.

Elsewhere on day one of the British Track Championships, para-cyclist Archie Atkinson won the first national title of the event, sprinting to victory in the rainbow bands in the C4-5 scratch race.

There were also new national honours for Crystal Lane-Wright in the women’s C5 elimination race, Elisabeth Simpson in the women's C2 elimination race, Fin Graham in the men's C1-3 scratch race, and the tandem mixed sprint team named ‘Jean Claude Tan Damme’: Sophie Unwin, Jenny Holl, James Ball and Matt Rotherham.

The four-day championships continue on Friday, when double European champion Matthew Richardson will be in action in the sprint. Richardson qualified first in the event on Thursday, as he began his defence of the three titles he won last year.

Fans can stream all the action for free on British Cycling's YouTube channel.

This week’s Lloyds National Track Championships will be broadcast live and free by British Cycling on YouTube.

The four-day event begins on Thursday morning at the Manchester Velodrome, and runs until Sunday afternoon. British Cycling’s YouTube stream will provide live footage of six sessions, two on each of Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

The decision to provide live coverage comes after the governing body put the British National Cyclo-cross Championships behind a paywall last month. Fans had to pay a subscription fee of £2.99 to access the feed, as part of a “pilot initiative” by British Cycling. The National Track Championships are not part of this initiative.

“The Lloyds National Track Championships is always a prestigious and exciting event as riders compete for the much sought after national jersey – a huge honour in anyone’s career, and this year will be no different,” said Jonathan Day, director of events for British Cycling Ventures, in a press release.

“We’re delighted that we will be able to share the joy, tension and thrill of the championships to anyone and everyone, wherever they are. Whether you’re watching from the stands or the sofa, there’s quality on offer as some of the World’s best riders go head-to-head.”

Among the riders on the start list are two-time Olympic champion Katie Archibald, and current Olympic team sprint champions Emma Finucane and Katy Marchant. They will compete alongside a number of their Great Britain Cycling Team squad-mates who impressed at the recent UEC European Track Championships, including Anna Morris, Josie Knight and Matthew Richardson, each of whom won two gold medals in Konya, Turkey.

“The national champion’s jersey is so iconic,” said Finucane ahead of the competition, “and everyone wants to win it, so I’ll really get stuck in and I’m excited for it. It’s been a while since I won a national jersey so I’m really up for it.”

The full schedule of events – which counts 21 championship events, including para-cycling disciplines – is available on the British Cycling website.

British Cycling’s streaming guide for the championships on Youtube is as follows:

Friday 20 February, session one – 11:00
Friday 20 February, session two – 18:00
Saturday 21 February, session one – 11:00
Saturday 21 February, session two – 18:00
Sunday 22 February, session one – 9:00
Sunday 22 February, session two – 16:00

Cycling Weekly will be reporting on all four days of the event from inside the velodrome. Follow our website for racing updates and exclusive interviews.

Great Britain’s Matthew Richardson doubled his tally of UEC European Track Championships titles on Thursday with a perfectly-timed victory in the keirin.

The 26-year-old came from deep in the final, and after the Netherlands’ Harrie Lavreysen attacked from the gun, surged his way through the group over the three laps to win with a dramatic bike throw.

The victory marked a second in as many days for Richardson, who was competing in his first European Championships after changing racing nationality from Australia in 2024. On Wednesday, he won the individual sprint against Lavreysen, ending the Olympic champion’s seven-year unbeaten streak in the event at major championships.

“To me, it was really important to win the keirin today and get the second jersey,” Richardson said. “Obviously to be able to wear it for the entire year, but also to back up my performance from yesterday [winning the sprint].

“To me, that was really important to show that I do have the legs and that I’m here to stay.”

Top of the table

Great Britain closed this year’s European Track Championships as the runaway medal table winners. The squad collected 13 medals over the five days in Konya, Turkey, including seven gold, four silver and two bronze.

British riders also claimed three world records; Emma Finucane set a new benchmark in the flying 200m, the team pursuit squad broke the world record twice on their way to victory, and Josie Knight became the first woman in history to go sub-4:20 in the individual pursuit.

Reflecting on the squad’s performance, Stephen Park, performance director for the Great Britain Cycling Team, commended an “incredibly dominant week”.

“As we look forward to LA 2028 [the Olympics], with that mix of existing riders and some more to drop back into the team, and up and coming riders looking to fill those ranks, the future looks bright to Los Angeles,” Park said.

Elsewhere on the final day of competition, Lotte Kopecky (Belgium) earned her third European title of the week, this time in the Madison alongside Shari Bossuyt. The British pairing of Anna Morris and Katie Archibald claimed silver.

There were also new Madison titles for Moritz Augenstein and Roger Kluge (Germany), the latter on his 40th birthday. Meanwhile, Alina Lysenko, a Russian athlete racing under a neutral flag, won the women’s keirin.

Great Britain’s Josie Knight claimed her second world record of the week on Wednesday en route to victory in the individual pursuit at the UEC European Track Championships.

The 28-year-old, who was also part of the world-record-breaking British team pursuit squad on Monday, took a staggering 4.181 seconds off the individual benchmark in qualifying, becoming the first woman in history to go below 4:20 with her time of 4:19.461.

Knight then went on to beat the Netherlands’ Mischa Bredewold in the gold medal final on Wednesday evening.

“I thought it was possible to maybe break the world record, but I never expected it would be possible to do a sub-4:20, so I’m very happy,” Knight said afterwards.

The record previously belonged to Italian Vittoria Bussi, who went 4:23.624 at a specially organised event in Aguascalientes, Mexico, last year. The women’s individual pursuit world record was broken nine times in 2025 after the UCI increased the event distance from 3km to 4km.

“I raced the 4km distance for the first time at the World Championships and I didn’t pace it very well and I wasn’t very happy,” Knight said. “From that moment, I was fully focused on this race here in Konya today, so I’m really happy to have done a good performance.”

Knight's GB team-mate Millie Couzens won the bronze medal.

Richardson topples Lavreysen

Later in the evening at the competition in Turkey, British sprinter Matthew Richardson pulled off a rare and convincing sprint victory over 20-time world champion Harrie Lavreysen.

In the final, the Dutchman won the first match-up of a best of three, before Richardson overhauled him, sealing the decider by more than a bike length. The moment brought Richardson’s first European title since he swapped nationality from Australia in 2024, and Lavreysen’s first individual sprint defeat at a major championships since 2019.

“It was a really hard fought battle,” Richardson said afterwards. “I’ve been working and trying to beat Harrie for many, many years, and always fell a little bit short, so it’s really satisfying to finally get on that top step.

“Hopefully it was an exciting final for the people watching at home. I certainly enjoyed myself.”

Elsewhere on day four of the European Championships, Mathilde Gros (France) won the women’s kilometre time trial, Iúri Leitão (Portugal) claimed victory in the men’s omnium, and Lotte Kopecky (Belgium) won the women’s points race.

Great Britain head into Thursday’s final day as the runaway leaders in the medal standings with 11 medals, of which six gold. The next best nation, Belgium, has three golds.

Emma Finucane and Anna Morris doubled Great Britain’s gold medal tally at the European Track Championships on Tuesday with victories in the women’s sprint and omnium.

Finucane, who qualified top with a flying 200m world record on Monday, won every race she competed in, beating her GB team-mate, and fellow Olympic gold medallist, Sophie Capewell 2-0 in Tuesday’s final.

Throughout the day, Morris commanded over the four-event omnium competition, scoring highly in the scratch and elimination races, and winning the tempo race, to go into the final points race tied with Belgium’s Shari Bossuyt. The individual pursuit world champion then won four out of the eight sprints to claim gold with 132 points.

Morris was also part of the British women’s team pursuit squad that broke the world record twice on Monday on their way to the European title. Great Britain’s first gold medal of the championships came courtesy of Joe Truman in the kilometre time trial.

Speaking after her sprint victory, Finucane, a three-time world champion, said: “Yesterday I wanted to execute my ride perfectly, and I did; I came away with a world record and I couldn’t believe it. But it doesn’t finish there, you still have to race races, and the girls were really fast; there was lots of fast sprinting and to come away with this medal and this jersey means so, so much to me.”

Morris, too, reflected on a “really tough” day of racing in the omnium.

“[Norway's Anita] Stenberg and Bossuyt made the race really hard and the points race was difficult to navigate but I worked hard to score the points and seal the race there at the end,” she said.

“The European jersey is really special, especially in an event like the omnium, so I’m really happy and proud to be taking this back home.”

With two days of competition remaining in Konya, Turkey, Great Britain currently sit top of the medals table with eight medals. In addition to the four golds, the squad has collected silvers in both the men’s and women’s team sprint, as well as the women’s sprint, and a bronze in the men’s team pursuit.

The men’s and women’s team pursuit world records were both broken on Monday at the UEC European Track Championships.

Twice the Great Britain women’s quartet of Katie Archibald, Millie Couzens, Josie Knight and Anna Morris bettered a benchmark in the 4km event that had stood since 2021. Their time of 4:03.634 in the first round took more than six tenths of a second off the previous record. They then won the gold medal later in the evening with an even faster 4:02.808 in their final against Germany, the former world record holders.

Also in the first round, the Danish men became the first quartet in history to break the 3:40 barrier with their time of 3:39.977. The team of Tobias Hansen, Frederik Rodenberg, Rasmus Pedersen and Lasse Norman Leth, the reigning world champions, also went on to win the title, beating Switzerland.

The men's record was previously held by Australia, who clocked 3:40.730 at the Paris Olympics in 2024.

In total, there were four record-breaking rides in Konya, Turkey, on a remarkable second day of the competition.

In qualifying for the individual sprint, British track sprinter Emma Finucane broke the world record in the flying 200m, beating the previous benchmark by more than two tenths of a second with a time of 9.759 seconds.

“People know that I wanted to break a world record. I think every girl coming into this competition wanted to take the opportunity, too,” Finuncane said afterwards. “To look at the board and see 9.7 and break a world record is unbelievable. I actually can’t believe it.”

The track in Konya, opened in 2022, is located at 1,200m above sea level, an altitude that lowers the air density, which in turn reduces aerodynamic drag. It is also wider and steeper than other tracks, with longer transitions in the corners, which can help 'slingshot' riders.

Elsewhere on Monday, Joe Truman (Great Britain) won his first international championship gold medal in the one-kilometre time trial. The 28-year-old qualified third in the event, before clocking the competition’s fastest time – 57.541 seconds – in the final.

Lotte Kopecky (Belgium) won her seventh Europeans gold medal, and her fourth in the elimination race, while Tim Torn Teutenberg (Germany) won the men’s points race.

On Tuesday, Finucane will face Alina Lysenko (neutral athlete) in the semifinals of the women’s sprint competition. The Brit’s compatriot and Olympic gold medal-winning team-mate Sophie Capewell will ride against Lea Sophie Friedrich (Germany).

British track sprinter Emma Finucane broke the flying 200m world record by more than two tenths of a second on Monday morning.

The 23-year-old, an Olympic champion and three-time world champion, clocked a time of 9.759 seconds in qualifying for the individual sprint at the UEC European Track Championships in Konya, Turkey. She became only the third woman in history to go under 10 seconds in the event, doing so with an average speed was 73.78kph (45.84mph)

The previous women’s world record was held by China’s Yuan Liying, who recorded a 9.976 last March at the same velodrome in Konya. The track, located at 1,200m above sea level, is wider and steeper than others, and is where Matthew Richardson set the men’s world record at 8.857 seconds last August.

“People know that I wanted to break a world record. I think every girl coming into this competition wanted to take the opportunity, too,” Finuncane said afterwards.

“I was really nervous to execute the perfect ride. I think I pretty much went out there and did everything I think I could possibly perfectly. To come away, to look at the board and see 9.7 and break a world record is unbelievable. I actually can’t believe it.”

Earlier on Monday morning, Finucane's GB team-mate Sophie Capewell came within six hundredths of a second of Liying’s benchmark as the second woman ever to go sub-10.

Capewell won a silver medal on Sunday in the team sprint, an event Finucane chose to skip in order to focus on the flying 200m world record and individual sprint competition.

“I’ve seen on Instagram that a few girls are going to try and do it,” the 23-year-old told Cycling Weekly last month. “I saw Lea [Sophie Freidrich, former flying 200m world record holder] put something on Instagram like, ‘Watch this space.’ Then obviously Hetty [van de Wouw]. There are a few girls eyeing up this sub-10. Obviously Yuan [Liying] has already done it, so I think let’s just see where that record can go. That’s a goal of mine.”

Freidrich finished third in qualifying with a time of 10.010 seconds, while Van de Wouw placed sixth with 10.120.

Following Finucane’s successful attempt, the organiser of the European Championships, the UEC, wrote on social media: “History rewritten in Konya.”

British Cycling posted on Instagram: “Konya believe it! Emma Finucane knocks nearly a quarter of a second off the women’s flying 200m time-trial record with a time of 9.759.”

Finucane now holds two world records, having set the team sprint benchmark alongside Capewell and Katy Marchant with their gold medal-winning ride at the Paris Olympics in 2024.

Both Finucane and Capewell will compete in the individual sprint finals later on Monday afternoon as the top two seeded riders.

Yuli van der Molen had only been home for 20 minutes when the doctor rang and told her to come back to the hospital. The scan results would typically take a week – but hers were urgent, the doctor could tell that at first glance.

It was a cold day in January 2024, and Van der Molen, just 20 at the time, rushed back with her parents. She remembers the diagnosis hitting hard: the doctor explained she had Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare type of blood cancer that affects the body’s lymphatic system, the network of vessels, nodes and organs that form part of the wider immune system. It was stage four – the most advanced.

“I just froze,” the Dutchwoman, a road and track rider from the outskirts of Amsterdam, says. “Then you go into survival mode. I cried a lot. You just go into your own bubble. Hodgkin’s is [one of] the most treatable [types of] cancer – that’s what they told me – but I still needed chemo, and I still needed to lose my hair, and go through that horrible,” her voice trails off, her eyes welling up. “I’m thinking back now to the moment, and I just froze.”

Almost two years on, the memory is still raw. Van der Molen is sitting on a plastic folding chair at the end of a long corridor at London’s Lee Valley Velodrome. It’s the second night of the London 3 Day track competition, and the now 22-year-old is clutching her right arm, having crashed hard in a race two hours before. The dull ache, she says, is nothing compared to what she’s been through.

It was February 2023, almost a year before the diagnosis, when Van der Molen felt the first symptoms. Riding for AG Insurance-NXTG’s under-23 team, she noticed an unusual lack of power in her right leg while at a training camp. Then came the tiredness and restless nights, stricken with throbbing pain and bouts of sweating.

“I never told my parents how bad it really was,” she says. “I went to the hospital a couple of times because, in the middle of the night, I woke up with a lot of pain, crying.” She gestures to her lower back, the source of the agony, and then points to her groin. “Your lymph nodes stop here, so the pain stopped here,” she says. “Someone said, ‘Maybe it’s a hernia.’ Another person said I needed to stretch more. But that wasn’t the problem. Deep down, I thought there was something really wrong with me, but I didn’t know what.”

Training and racing remained a challenge throughout the 2023 season. Of the 27 road race days Van der Molen started that year, she failed to finish 10, and only broke into the top 30 once. Then, in December, she noticed something strange.

“I was feeling here, my collarbone, and I felt a lump. I was like, ‘Shit, what’s this?’” It jogged a memory: more than 20 years before, her mother had experienced the same, and was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a similar form of the cancer. “I googled it, saw it was cancer and thought, I think I have that. I went to the doctor, took my shirt off, and she was like,” Van der Molen throws her head back with a wide-eyed look, imitating the doctor’s reaction upon seeing the lump. “That was the morning of the Nationals on the track,” she says. Later that afternoon, she raced and came third in the Madison, before being dropped in the qualifying rounds the next day.

The new year, 2024, began with hospital appointments, blood tests, and eventually the scan that explained everything. When the doctor told Van der Molen she would need chemotherapy, she replied that it wouldn’t be possible: she had a training camp coming up. The reality soon sunk in, however, and her first round was scheduled for Valentine’s Day, less than a month after her diagnosis. The treatment would come in three-day blocks, and she would have to undergo four cycles.

“It was a big room with a lot of beds,” she remembers of the first round. “They put all the bags on the bed, and I was like, OK, that’s all going into my body? At first everything is new, so you don’t feel anything. You’re just thinking, ‘What the f**k? Is this really happening to me?’”

With the help of her mother, Esther, the 20-year-old vlogged the next four months and uploaded the videos to YouTube – the most popular has been viewed more than 11,000 times. The early vlogs showed her diagnosis, rounds of chemo, and the moment she shaved her head in the living room. In one video, Van der Molen injects medicine into her abdomen, before breaking down and crying for five minutes while the camera keeps rolling. Such moments are hard to watch, but optimism is never far away; there’s joy as she tries on wigs, and celebrations as she wears a T-shirt that reads “it’s my last day of chemo”. On 14 May 2024, Van der Molen uploaded a 20-minute vlog set in a lively bar, with pink balloons, a photobooth, and dancing. The video is titled ‘surprise party cancer-free’.

Today, Van der Molen’s YouTube channel stands as a diary of the most harrowing period of her life. How does she feel looking back at the videos? “At first I couldn’t really watch myself,” she says. “Now I can watch and I think, I’m really proud of the person that I am now. I never wanted to have cancer, but cancer made me the person I am today, in a good way. But it sucks that I had to go through it.”

Van der Molen restarted training just weeks after her last round of chemo, determined not to lose any more time in her career. She returned to road racing four months later, at a one-day event in Belgium, but it was too soon – she did not reach the finish line.

The thing with chemo, she says, is that it “destroys a lot”; her energy was drained, her racing motor had vanished, and her stomach was sore from the medicine. She waited until October to begin working with a coach again. She then competed on the track at the Six Days of Rotterdam, and won twice – “that was quite nice and unexpected,” she says. But regaining fitness wouldn’t be the only challenge in her recovery.

“In January, I started having really bad panic attacks,” Van der Molen says. The first one came in Spain, where she had travelled for a month’s warm-weather training. “For the first time, I was away from home again, and the fear of having cancer and never [returning to] being a good rider killed me. I just blocked,” she says. “At first, I didn’t want help because I thought I could make it [go away] myself. But the fear of cancer was every day.”

Van der Molen soon began working with psychologists, and was selected to represent the Netherlands at the under-23 European Track Championships that summer. “The training went really badly and I didn’t want to go anymore because I was so bad,” she says.

The competition would end up yielding the proudest moment of her comeback; she placed fourth in the elimination race, a result that proved her endurance was returning, and then won a silver medal in the Madison with teammate Lisa van Belle. “My family was there, so I was happy to have that moment with my mum and my grandma,” she says, adding with a smile: “I will never show it to my parents, but, in the end, it made me quite emotional.”

Van der Molen’s arms are now decorated with subtle tattoos; on the inside of her right wrist is the word ‘survivor’ in block capitals, while another tattoo, higher up on her left arm, says ‘never give up’. They’re indelible reminders of what she has been through, and the person she has become. “I always say there’s an older version of me, a cancer version, and now a new version of me,” she says. How would she describe that new version? “It’s just different. I can’t really describe what’s different. My mum said that I’m maybe more grown up.”

Two years on, Van der Molen’s cancer is in remission. The fear it may return remains – “I think it’s never going to go away,” she says – but it’s a worry gradually receding as it is outshone by the 22–year-old’s excitement about new opportunities. This season marks a fresh start with British Continental team O’Shea RedChilli Bikes, alongside her increasingly secure place in the Dutch national track squad.

“I will maybe never be a big winner or a big name,” Van der Molen says, but there’s no hint of bitterness in her voice. Two years ago, the future was measured in the intervals between hospital appointments. Today, it is measured in training blocks and target races.

Family view: Niki Terpstra

Yuli van der Molen’s uncle is retired pro Niki Terpstra, a former winner of Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders.

The 41-year-old has supported his niece with advice throughout her career. Keen to help out after her diagnosis, Terpstra volunteered last summer at a charity day for Dutch foundation Lymph&Co, where he auctioned off a cycling masterclass. The money raised contributed to the day’s total of more than €77,000. “I didn’t do too much,” Terpstra insists. “I think it’s normal to help your family, but it’s also a good charity.”

Terpstra was also there for Van der Molen’s first track race back, which came just months after her last chemo session in 2024, at an event he helped organise in Alkmaar. What was it like seeing her racing again? “I wouldn’t say emotional, but a little bit,” he says. “It’s exciting to see somebody who was suffering for a while recovering that well and being back in competition.

“Of course, the comeback is going with ups and downs; she’s making two steps forward and one step back, and now she’s made two steps forward with the track season [Van der Molen won the Dutch Derny Championships in November - ed.]. It’s actually incredible.”

Has Terpstra noticed any changes in his niece over the last two years? “I think her character changed,” he says. “I think she’s more willing to suffer at the moment, for her sport. She suffered enough, so the suffering she does now looks like a small effort.”

This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 8th January 2026. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

American cyclist Chloé Dygert (Canyon–SRAM Zondacrypto)has launched a fundraising campaign to help former teammate and decorated track cyclist Sarah Hammer-Kroening, who faces a series of severe medical complications, mounting medical bills and an uncertain road ahead.

Dygert, a celebrated cyclist in her own right, announced the fundraiser on behalf of Hammer-Kroening, describing her longtime friend as "strong, independent, deeply proud, and a devoted mother" who would "never ask for help like this herself, even when she truly needs it."

Hammer-Kroening, widely regarded as one of the most accomplished track cyclists in U.S. history, is a four-time Olympic medalist and an eight-time world champion. She competed in three Olympic Games (2008, 2012, 2016) and was a cornerstone of Team USA’s success in the team pursuit. Dygert and Hammer-Kroening became close during the buildup to the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, which were Hammer’s final Games and Dygert’s first. Dygert described Hammer-Kroening as a "big sister, steady, protective, and always looking out for me."

Since retiring from elite competition in September 2017, Hammer-Kroening has continued to serve the sport as a coach and the Associate Director of High Performance for the paralympic cycling program.

According to Dygert, Hammer-Kroening’s health issues began suddenly on May 14, 2025, when she experienced "severe and uncontrollable pain in her left arm." The following morning, she was rushed to the emergency department and ultimately life-flighted for emergency vascular surgery.

In an effort to save her arm, Hammer-Kroening underwent five surgeries in four days. These were successful, but complications are ongoing.

Dygert reports that Hammer-Kroening has undergone seven surgeries thus far, with at least one more still ahead. Complications from the procedures led to paralysis of her diaphragm, significantly affecting her breathing. As a result, she requires supplemental oxygen for much of the day and continues to undergo medical treatment, care and rehabilitation.

Hammer-Kroening has not made any public statements about her condition, but Dygert reveals that it's been "a long and exhausting road."

Beyond the physical toll, the financial burden has been heavy. Dygert notes that the medical care required throughout 2025 has resulted in "a significant and overwhelming amount of medical bills, many of which remain outstanding." Hammer-Kroeningis also facing the possibility of another surgery in 2026, a procedure that has been denied by insurance and is currently under appeal.

"She must be prepared for the possibility of moving forward with surgery out of pocket if approval does not come in time. Managing existing medical bills while preparing for potential future costs has created an enormous financial strain," Dygert says.

"She would never ask for financial support herself, which is why I am doing it for her. This is not about charity. It is about community, compassion, and stepping in when someone who has always carried herself with quiet strength needs support. She has spent her life taking care of others. Right now, I want to make sure she feels that same care coming back to her."

Funds raised will go toward medical bills and surgical expenses from 2025 as well as the anticipated medical and surgical costs in 2026. The fundraising goal is $55,000, and the campaign is hosted on GoFundMe.

“Any support helps,” Dygert said. “And if you are not in a position to donate, simply sharing this page means more than you know.”

No racing season retrospective would be complete without pausing to contemplate the doings and undoings of our overlords at the Union Cyclists Internationale. From their lofty perch in Switzerland they have issued edicts ranging from the ingenious to the hilarious.

Ruling over races big and small, from the Tour de France to your local crit, they have made decisions that explored the boundaries of ethics, logic and even physics. It’s time to cast an eye over a few highlights of the UCI’s year.

MISS: Wider bars to slow us down

On the assumption that one of the things making road racing progressively more dangerous is speed, the UCI has decided it’s time to make everyone a bit less quick. From January 2027, bars will need to be at least 40cm wide, with limits on the amount of flare between the tops and the drops and for the turn-in of the brake hoods.

The idea is that if they make everyone less aerodynamic with a wider arm position, they’ll be slower – which is not in itself a daft idea. In recent years, many pros have moved to narrower bars, typically 36-38cm. Shifting to 40cm, a pretty wide bar by modern standards, is a little difficult, especially if you’re a smaller female rider.

It’s also going to slow down small riders more than big riders (think about the body proportions), although maybe anything we can do to keep a lid on Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel is welcome. The other problem with it is that it’s not going to slow things down very much.

MISS: GPS trackers for rider safety

Another safety initiative is the introduction of GPS trackers on bikes so that officials are better able to keep track of where riders are, and above all, ensure there’s never a repeat of the fatal incident at the 2024 Worlds where Swiss rider Muriel Furrer crashed unnoticed and wasn’t found for more than 45 minutes.

Unfortunately an attempt to trial the technology at the Tour de Romandie Féminin turned to farce. Five of the teams said they hadn’t been consulted about the trackers, and pointed out that despite trackers being fitted by the UCI, any incidents or injuries they might cause would be deemed the fault of the team, and refused to nominate a rider for the trial.

The UCI retaliated by rather sulkily saying the teams were only reacting like that because they had commercial interests in a different GPS tracking solution.

The upshot? A standoff culminated in the five teams being thrown off the race, a solution that pleased no one. (Except weirdly obsessed UCI-watchers, obviously.)

MISS: Losing track of time in Spain

At the Spanish time trial championships, the timing went seriously awry. Forty minutes after the race finished, riders were still standing around at the line trying to find out the results. Eventually the commissaires issued some times, then changed some of them, then declared Caja Rural-Seguros’s Abel Balderstone the winner with a time that may, or may not, have been firmly rooted in reality.

On the upside, at least it gave Spain’s least Spanish-sounding pro rider the biggest win of his career to date.

MISS: Miscounted Madison points

If you’ve ever watched a Madison race and wondered how on Earth the commissaires keep track of the chaos, well, they don’t always. At the World Championships in October, the German pair of Roger Kluge and Moritz Augenstein let the Danish team escape to take 10 points at the final sprint, on the basis that, as the Germans could clearly see on the stadium scoreboard, they were comfortably ahead of the Danes for the bronze medal.

Except that the Danes had taken a lap mid race, collecting 20 points that somehow the commissaires didn’t get round to adding to the scoreboard until after the finish, putting the Danes on the podium and the Germans in a state of high dudgeon.

MISS: Gear restrictions to slow us down

Another safety initiative dreamed up in 2025 was a maximum gear size for road races. The idea being that if the biggest gear a rider could use was limited to 54x11, it would prevent some of the higher speeds seen in sprints and on descents.

There were a number of problems with this idea. The first was the possibility that the sneaky, sneaky bike riders would circumvent the restriction by pedalling a little faster. The second was the already very limited amount of time riders spend using their highest gear. The third was that the laws of physics mean that even if you ignore all of that, the reduction in speed is still very small.

The fourth problem was a predictable restraint-of-trade lawsuit from SRAM, whose top-tier groupset has been effectively outlawed by the proposed regulation. This saw the rule overturned by a Belgian court before we even got the chance to see it in action and say, “We told you so.”

MISS: Managing protests

The situation in Gaza produced numerous protests around bike races all season, mainly focussed on the presence of the Israel-Premier Tech team. The protests were most prominent at the Vuelta a España in August and September.

With officials unwilling or unable to change the race route or provide increased security, and equally unwilling to eject Israel-Premier Tech from the event as demanded by both the protesters and Spanish politicians, the result was a badly compromised race of abandoned stages, neutralised racing, and risks to riders of all teams from protesters on the course.

The race did at least culminate with a strangely wonderful podium ceremony. After the official finish of the final stage was abandoned, Tom Pidcock’s mum suggested building a podium in a hotel carpark using some team drinks-coolers and a hastily strung-up backdrop. It was probably the most memorable prize presentation in the race’s history.

MISS: Ambiguity over ketones

Ketone esters are made by the human liver when the body is starved of glycogen, and is used as an alternative fuel source. For some time now there’s been a debate about whether taking ketones in a drink would make you faster. The anecdotal reports from bike riders who’ve tried it range from “No difference at all” to “Even better than doping”. Scientific studies have tended very much towards the former.

The UCI took its time to weigh in. After several seasons of deliberation, it finally announced that it wasn’t planning to propose a ban on ketones on the basis that firstly they’re not dangerous, and secondly there’s no evidence they work anyway.

Strangely it then went on to say, “The UCI does not recommend the inclusion of such supplements in riders’ nutritional plans.” You might like to think of ketones as the first item on the “slightly looked down upon” list. You can use them if you want, but the UCI will judge you for it.

MISS: The DQ of Jan-Willem van Schip

The UCI has a history of taking innovations badly, and doubly so with matters of riding positions. When serial UCI penalty-magnet Jan-Willem van Schip of the Park Hotel Valkenberg team clipped off the front of the bunch on stage one of the Tour of Holland, his radical bike attracted a lot of attention. With a very long, upward sloping stem and minimum width bars, he was able to drop into almost a time-trial position with his head tucked behind his hands.

Van Schip had been using the bike and position for some time, and the commissaires at the race didn’t even blink. But word came from UCI officials in Switzerland who’d been watching the coverage, and they didn’t like it. Van Schip was disqualified from the race.

Strangely, it took nearly 24 hours for anyone to clearly explain why. When they did, it had nothing to do with the riding position, which was unconventional but it turned out didn’t actually break any rules. (We’re guessing they looked very, very closely.) It was because his bike’s seat post hadn’t been correctly registered with the UCI technical committee. Which, from the UCI’s point of view, was possibly a bit lucky.

MISS: Tardy bike-checking

Commissaires carry out dimension checks on time trial bikes immediately before every race. At the Vuelta Femenina, when Movistar arrived a few minutes late at the pre-start check for the team time trial, the whole system descended into chaos.

As the sole official on duty tried to get seven Movistar bike through the check before their start time, other teams started to queue up. Movistar just about beat the start clock to get down the ramp on time, with a couple of riders starting late and chasing on.

All of Uno-X Mobility started seven seconds late after waiting to get their bikes returned. Visma-Lease a Bike only just made it to the start with five riders, with two late starters including Imogen Wolff, who joined the course from the barriers before time trialling through the race vehicles as she attempted (and failed) to catch her teammates.

The UCI acknowledged that “mistakes had been made”, fined Movistar €1,600, and declined to offer any respite to the affected teams and riders. Wolff lost over a minute, but maybe the commissaires felt she wasn’t going to win the Vuelta anyway.

Hits of the year

Sadly there isn’t space to cover the UCI’s (no doubt numerous) hits of the year, nor the various race motos that caused crashes, nor the non-race vehicles that blundered onto the course, nor the unpredictable delights of the new yellow-card system, nor time trial helmets in road races, nor indeed the stage of Itzula Basque where Romain Gregoire was awarded second place, then first, then second again.

But rest assured there’ll be plenty more of the same sort of thing in 2026. It’s perhaps the only thing about the coming season that we can be sure of.

This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 18 December 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Great Britain’s Olympic track cyclists dominated at the Tissot Track Cycling Challenge in Switzerland over the weekend, where they earned 18 medals, of which 11 gold.

The squad ruled in particular over the women’s events, winning every elite final on both the endurance and sprint sides.

Among the standout riders was Anna Morris, the current world, European and national individual pursuit champion, who claimed four victories inside the velodrome in Grenchen over the two-day event: the scratch race, points race, omnium and Madison alongside Katie Archibald.

The 30-year-old wrote on Instagram afterwards that it was a “pretty exciting life moment” to race and win alongside Archibald, and hailed the “clean sweep” she helped the Brits achieve across all the women’s races.

In the sprint events, it was Sophie Capewell who led the supremacy. The Olympic team sprint champion, who decided to sit out of racing for much of the year to recover after last summer’s Games, won both the individual sprint and keirin competitions, guiding a British 1-2-3 in the latter, ahead of Lowri Thomas and Lauren Bell.

“First international in a while after a long break from racing,” Capewell wrote on Instagram. “A couple of wins, good learnings, and back building race rhythm.”

There were also braces of victories for Ollie Wood in the men’s points race and omnium, and Ethan Vernon in the elimination race and Madison.

Vernon rode in the Madison alongside his NSN Cycling road teammate Lewis Askey, a former junior national champion in the event, who returned to the track for the first time in six years.

The Tissot Track Cycling Challenge is an official UCI event that carries a Class 1 licence, making it higher-ranked than National Championships, but less so than World or Continental Championships, or the various UCI Nations Cups.

GB’s medal haul of 18 vastly overshadowed the rest of the competition; the next best nation was France, with four medals and only one gold.

The full list of GB’s medal winners from the 2025 Tissot Track Cycling Challenge is below. The squad did not take any male sprinters to the competition in Switzerland; some recently spent time on a training camp in Lanzarote, while others, including Matthew Richardson, competed at the recent Six Days of Rotterdam.

GB medal winners

GOLD

Men’s elimination race – Ethan Vernon
Men’s Madison – Lewis Askey and Ethan Vernon
Men’s omnium – Ollie Wood
Men’s points race – Ollie Wood
Women’s elimination race – Katie Archibald
Women’s keirin – Sophie Capewell
Women’s Madison – Katie Archibald and Anna Morris
Women’s omnium – Anna Morris
Women’s points race – Anna Morris
Women’s scratch race – Anna Morris
Women’s sprint – Sophie Capewell

SILVER

Men’s Madison – Matthew Bostock and Ollie Wood
Women’s keirin – Lowri Thomas
Women’s points race – Katie Archibald
Women’s sprint – Lowri Thomas

BRONZE

Men’s elimination race – Lewis Askey
Men’s scratch race – Lewis Askey
Women’s keirin – Lauren Bell

Pete Mitchell also won silver in the men’s keirin representing Scotland.

Forget wood, concrete or asphalt, the world’s first aluminium velodrome has officially been unveiled in Tucson, Arizona.

The open-air track, which took 26 months to construct, is built to Olympic standards, measuring 250m and with a 42-degree banking.

Its unique material was chosen to withstand the hot temperatures of the Arizona desert, where it can exceed 100°F (38°C) during the summer. Aluminium is highly durable, weather-resistant, and unlikely to suffer surface degradation, such as cracking or warping, in the heat.

“It’s a little bit otherworldly. It’s very satisfying,” Douglas Lowell, one of the velodrome’s builders, told 13 News during a ribbon cutting ceremony on Wednesday.

“It makes for a wonderful ride. It’s very smooth in a unique way for a 42-degree Olympic-type track.”

Tucson’s new velodrome is now one of five 250m tracks in the United States. The other four are located in Erie, Colorado; Rock Hill, South Carolina; Carson, California; and Los Angeles, where the Olympics will be held in 2028.

The project is said to have cost $5 million, and was funded by private donations. It is situated on a plot by the Musselman Honda Circuit, a go-kart track southeast of Tucson.

Masters track rider Karl Baumgart was one of the first people to ride on the aluminium velodrome. Also speaking to 13 News, he said: “I’ve been lucky enough to be on some world-class tracks, you know, travelling the globe, and this track is up there with the best of them.”

Tucson’s velodrome was designed by Canadian Peter Junek, who has worked in the industry since 1990 and has helped create more than 30 tracks around the world, including the high-altitude velodrome in Aguascalientes, Mexico, a rider favourite for record-setting.

A media release from Tucson Velodrome Inc., the group behind the project, read: "In addition to attracting professional and Olympic-class athletes to Tucson for training and racing activities, the velodrome will be a controlled place for all cyclists to ride, promoting health and fitness.

"Youth and school programs will be held to introduce youngsters to the community of cycling, allowing them to enjoy riding bicycles in a safe facility with trained and certified coaches and instructors."

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.

The new Colnago T1Rs is here. The Italian brand’s new track frame claims to be more aerodynamic, stiffer, versatile, and feature a geometry that makes it suitable for bunch races, individual events, and sprinting.

Its the first dedicated Colnago track bike since the K-One, which was last used in around 2018; the Italian brand does not currently supply a big nation with their velodrome machines.

Its release comes off the back of Colnago bikes being a somewhat dominant force on the road and time trials in the hands of UAE Team Emirates-XRG, UAE Team ADQ, and most dominantly in the hands of Tadej Pogačar.

The T1Rs has been designed with one sole purpose: to be the fastest track bike available for bunch and individual events. It does this thanks to lessons learned from the Y1Rs and TT1, but whilst if you squint it may appear similar, the actual design is far more specific to track racing.

A whole new aero design, for a whole new challenge

So why did Colnago even need the new frame? The last few years have seen aerodynamics drastically increase the speed of bike racing. The team pursuit world record now sits at 3:40.730, while the individual pursuit has dipped below 4 minutes, previously a winning time for the team event.

Meanwhile, bunch events are also raced at speeds in excess of 60kph, and this requires a new design process to create the fastest track frame for the job.

Aerodynamics are not linear

Why does speed matter? Weight is a simple metric because the factors it affects respond more linearly. Since gravity remains constant, reducing weight results in a linear performance gain when air resistance stays steady. However, aerodynamics differ because air resistance increases proportional to the square of velocity, while the power needed to overcome it rises cubically.

In other words, the faster you go, the more challenging the problem becomes. At higher speeds, the power required to overcome drag is much greater than at lower speeds, and it is this physics that explains why, at the Tour de France this year, the fastest setup for the top GC contenders in the mountain TT was a time trial bike rather than a road bike, even when 1kg lighter. That’s how quickly the pros were climbing those mountains.

At track racing speeds, the speeds are even higher, so air resistance is the most dominant force a rider experiences, above all other factors. If I have my maths correct, at 60kph on a 0˚ gradient, the percentage of the force you have to produce to overcome aerodynamic drag is ~94.5%, increasing to 95.9% at 70kph.

This is why the new T1Rs has been designed with speeds of above 60 kph in mind, specifically for these racing speeds. And that specificity is very important.

Why not just copy an aero bike?

Different frame structures perform aerodynamically in different ways at various speeds. One bike might be faster than another at 30 kph, but that relationship could reverse at 60 kph.

One of the main reasons for this is the Reynolds number (Re). Lower Re generally promotes smoother, more laminar airflow, while higher Re produces a more energetic, turbulent boundary layer. Because Re increases proportionally with velocity (when altitude and air density are constant), the faster the speed, the higher the Re.

As speed increases, the air behaves in a more turbulent yet higher-energy manner, which has significant aerodynamic consequences. We see examples of this optimisation elsewhere. For instance, many cycling garments and components incorporate small surface “trips” — textures or seams on front-facing cylindrical surfaces such as the arms — to induce controlled turbulence. This helps the airflow stay attached longer, reducing pressure drag behind the body and lowering total drag, even though skin-friction drag rises slightly. At higher speeds, where air naturally tends toward turbulence, this strategy generally requires the trips to be spaced closer together to adapt to the increased speed.

For frames, the situation differs slightly. Tube sections can be designed as airfoil-like shapes rather than cylindrical ones and feature a longer chord length (the straight line distance from leading to trailing edge). Evidence of this can be seen in the design of the TR1S fork, which exhibits longer, ‘flatter’ aerofoil shapes and an extended chord length. This is because, in this context, aerodynamic efficiency depends heavily on the airflow remaining attached along the surface. The longer the chord or surface, the longer air flows cleanly over it. On the track, where handling and weight are less constrained than on the road, deeper and longer airfoil profiles can be utilised without compromise. At the higher Reynolds numbers reached at 60–70 kph, the airflow has enough energy to stay attached over a long, tapered section. This results in less flow separation, smaller wakes, and consequently lower pressure drag.

A closer look at the design reveals that these differences are more noticeable with the Y1Rs. The new T1Rs frame leverages this by using elongated profiles that taper to fine trailing edges. Although this slightly increases surface area and skin-friction drag, the significant reduction in pressure drag leads to an overall lower drag coefficient.

By contrast, Kamm-tailed tube shapes, characterised by a truncated, squared-off rear, are more common on road frames because they perform effectively across a wide range of yaw angles, such as those encountered in crosswinds and at lower speeds. However, at higher speeds, the effective yaw angle decreases; the apparent wind approaches more directly head-on, allowing shapes to be optimised for that scenario.

On an indoor track, yaw angles are minimal, so the benefits of the truncated profile largely become negligible. Under these conditions, longer, sharper, and pointed airfoil tubes, like those on the T1Rs, generally deliver superior aerodynamic performance.

Interestingly, at lower speeds and lower Re, the less energetic air with greater potential for separation may not stay attached to the length of the tube shape as well, resulting in increased pressure drag from similar designs. What works well in one situation may perform poorly in another.

You wouldn't expect to drive an F1 car through a town centre

Why don’t we see this design methodology on road bikes and time trial bikes?

It’s not entirely accurate to say we don’t see it at all. Of course, some elements of this are present on TT bikes, given the 50-55kph average speeds that pros ride at during those events. However, on road bikes and TT bikes, external factors mean these frame shapes would not be suitable.

First, crosswinds. Not only would this T1Rs frame be more difficult to handle in windy conditions, but the shape of the tubes could also hinder performance compared to the more tailed profile of the Y1Rs. Next is weight; these tube shapes are heavier because more material is needed to create them.

Stiffness is another consideration. On the road, the tarmac is far less smooth than a velodrome's wooden surface. Extended tube shapes tend to offer poor compliance, making a bike like the T1Rs extremely unforgiving outside a velodrome.

Finally, practical considerations come into play, such as water bottles. In a race on the road, you need to carry water. The T1Rs isn’t intended to solve this problem, and owing to its design, it’s highly likely that attaching a bottle would slow the bike down.

This issue is addressed very specifically in Colnago’s TT1 frame, with its integrated frame bottles, and similarly, the Y1Rs’s integrated bottle cage, which shields a standard bottle and integrates it into the frame, designed for specific operating conditions.

What the T1Rs represents is akin to a F1 car — designed for speed and racing on a track. Adding gears, brakes, or bottle cages would undoubtedly prevent it from becoming a fast, or even decent, road bike.

Design studies leading to bikes like this exemplify the application of specificity—creating shapes that perform optimally within their intended environment, much like a fighter jet or a Formula 1 car. Outside that context, it would likely be much slower.

That’s what makes bikes like this really exciting.

The organiser of the DerbyWheel keirin series, ruled to be a “forbidden event” by the UCI two years ago, has said the project is “moving forward” and “will be implemented”.

The new track cycling series was first announced in October 2023, promising a mammoth prize pot of $600,000 (£455,000) for each round.

It planned to follow a similar model to pro keirin racing in Japan, with events expected to be distributed as sports betting content around the world.

Rider inductions took place in early 2024, and a test event was scheduled for last April, but was postponed after the UCI refused to authorise the series, and threatened fines and suspensions for UCI-licensed riders who compete in it.

DerbyWheel’s president DJ Hyun has now released a statement, a year and a half on, apologising for delays and a lack of updates.

“Due to a combination of internal and external challenges, DerbyWheel has been unable to operate normally for over a year,” Hyun wrote, adding that the series has experienced “significant difficulties”.

Earlier this year, the head of DerbyWheel’s race operations stepped down, and recruitment into the role is still underway.

Hyun also explained that, due to the launch delays, the series needs to renew its deals with riders, venues and partners. “Once these improvements are completed early next year, and all stakeholders are aligned, we expect to confirm a revised launch plan and resume regular race operations soon after,” the DerbyWheel president said.

“Although it remains difficult to specify an exact date for the launch of regular races, we want to assure all DW players and partners that the project is moving forward with commitment and care. Even if there is a further delay, DerbyWheel will be implemented, and opportunities for DW players to participate - either as athletes or in other roles - will be provided.”

Events like DerbyWheel only require UCI authorisation if they want to register on the UCI calendar, something a spokesperson from the series previously told Cycling Weekly they do not intend to do.

The UCI, however, has threatened “disciplinary action” against UCI-licenses riders who take part, referring them to an article that says they could face a fine of up to 10,000 CHF (£9,500) and a suspension of up to six months.

DerbyWheel was originally launched with the intention to host weekly racing rounds in the UK, Australia and Korea.

In his statement shared on Wednesday, series president Hyun said plans are progressing for races on an indoor 400m track in Asia. “If confirmed, these races will be held regularly alongside those on 250m tracks in the UK and Australia, creating more competitive opportunities for our riders,” he said.

Specific locations and dates for the series are still unknown.

German track cyclist Roger Kluge has accused the UCI commissaires at last week’s Track World Championships of “misconduct” after they were late to add up a rival team’s points in the Madison, leaving Kluge and his partner unexpectedly without a medal.

With 12 laps to go in the 200-lap event, Denmark's pairing attacked off the front of the bunch, securing 10 points in the final sprint that meant they overtook Germany for bronze. The scoreboard at the time of the attack, however, showed Denmark in fifth, 32 points behind Germany.

Previous points earned were added to the tallies following the race, and Denmark was awarded 20 points for a lap gained shortly after the halfway point.

Although the final standings were correct, Kluge said he and his partner Moritz Augenstein would have reacted differently to the Danish attack if they had known their points tallies were so close.

“There was no danger from our perspective,” Kluge wrote on Instagram. “If we, and certainly Team GB, had known that Team DEN also had about 60 points on their account, Team DEN wouldn’t have simply rolled away with 12 laps to go, we would have been on the wheel, and the final two sprints would have turned out completely differently.”

Belgium won gold in the event with 81 points, Great Britain silver with 73, and Denmark bronze with 71.

Germany’s Kluge and Augenstein, thinking they had a 30-point buffer in third going into the final two sprints, were later judged to have finished fourth with 64 points. The German pair initially turned up to the podium ceremony, but after delays in declaring the official results, were replaced by Denmark.

“This misconduct on the part of the UCI commissaires clearly influenced and distorted the race, which is simply unacceptable and definitely shouldn't be allowed to go unchallenged at a World Championship,” Kluge wrote of the points scoring during the event.

“If we athletes or personnel make mistakes, there are penalties or even disqualifications. We can’t just say, ‘We’re sorry, please accept my apologies.’ But the UCI is allowed to do that, and it’s depriving us athletes, and certainly the federations of a result in an Olympic discipline, which would have led to future advancement for both the individual and the federation.”

In points-based events like the Madison, riders rely on a table shown on a screen at the top of the banking to keep track of where they, and their opponents, stand. The event, which involves 18 pairs swapping in and out of the action with handslings, can often be chaotic, and 15 lap gains were earned by teams in the men’s race at the World Championships on Sunday.

Cycling Weekly has contacted the UCI for response to Kluge’s comments.

Dutch sprinter Harrie Lavreysen etched his name in the history books once again on Sunday when he became the first rider to win four gold medals at a single UCI Track World Championships.

The 28-year-old, having already won the team sprint, keirin and kilometre time trial, rounded out the competition by easing through the sprint competition, beating Great Britain’s Matthew Richardson 2-0 in the final. He marked the victory – his seventh in a row in the event – by waving four fingers to the crowds as he circled the track, one for each rainbow jersey he had earned.

"This is really not normal,” Lavreysen told NOS of his achievement. “I said beforehand that it would be exciting, with the kilometre time trial under my belt, but I felt really great again today.”

This August, Lavreysen’s opponent Richardson broke the world record for the 200m flying lap, showing form that threatened to topple the Dutchman’s dynasty.

"He's certainly the fastest over 200m, but sprinting is a different story,” Lavreysen said. “This one is quite enjoyable. I'm winning my fourth gold here, but the individual sprint is the most important event. It's wonderful when you step onto the track and know, ‘I can take on anyone, I can beat anyone.’ That's pure enjoyment."

Now a 20-time world champion, Lavreysen holds the most titles of any rider in history at the Track World Championships, an honour he claimed last year in Copenhagen. He’s also the Netherlands’ most successful summer Olympian, having won three gold medals at the Paris Games last year.

The joy of taking his latest clean sweep, he said, was “truly indescribable”.

“I kind of dreamed of going for four. It was actually a bit of a goal last year, but I honestly didn't expect it to be possible this year,” he said.

Thanks to Lavreysen’s success, as well as the three golds earned by Hetty van de Wouw and two by Lorena Wiebes, the Netherlands topped the medal table in Santiago, Chile after the five-day event. Great Britain finished second overall, with 14 medals, four of which gold.

Elsewhere on day five, Mexico’s Yareli Acevedo emerged the surprise winner after gaining three laps in the women's points race; Italy’s Elia Viviani hailed the “perfect ending” to his 16-year professional career as he won the elimination race; Mina Sato successfully defended her keirin honours for Japan; and in the final event of the championships, the Belgian pairing of Lyndsay de Vylder and Fabio van den Bossche won the men’s Madison ahead of Great Britain’s Mark Stewart and Josh Tarling.

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.

It was a special evening for Brits named Josh at the UCI Track World Championships on Friday, as Josh Tarling and Josh Charlton won their country’s first titles of the competition in Santiago, Chile.

Tarling, riding in his first event on debut, won the points race with a commanding display, closing down moves, gaining a lap, and winning three sprints. The Welshman’s 56 points gave him a winning margin of six over the USA’s Peter Moore, and a 100% record at the Track Worlds.

“It went to plan so far,” Tarling said post-race, after celebrating his maiden world title by draping a Union Jack over his shoulders.

“I didn’t know how [my first Track Worlds] would be or how it would feel, so not knowing was scary,” he said. “[In the race] I felt pretty good. I think it was good that I got those early points in just so I knew the legs were there.”

A former time trial bronze medallist at the UCI Road World Championships, the 21-year-old will have the chance to earn a second rainbow jersey on Sunday when he competes in the Madison alongside Mark Stewart.

“Now I think I have a little bit more of an idea of where we’re at and Mark’s in a good place as well, so it should be good,” he said.

Later on in the evening, Josh Charlton became the first British man to win the individual pursuit world title since Bradley Wiggins in 2008.

The 22-year-old European champion led his final with Denmark’s Rasmus Pedersen from the opening lap, stretching his advantage out to more than three seconds over the 4km. Charlton’s winning time of 4:04.122 was more than four seconds off his personal best – he broke the world record in qualifying last year with a 3:59.304 and went on to win silver – but comfortably enough to secure a maiden world title.

Elsewhere for Great Britain, Joe Truman scored back-to-back bronze medals in the kilometre time trial, placing behind the Dutch pair of Jeffrey Hoogland and Harrie Lavreysen, who successfully defended his title.

Having qualified second fastest, Truman clocked a time of 59.268 seconds in the final, more than a second behind Hoogland’s 58.163. Lavreysen won with a 57.978.

There was more Dutch glory on Friday night as Lorena Wiebes added omnium gold to her scratch race victory on the opening day, and Hetty van de Wouw won her first individual title in the women’s sprint. Great Britain’s Emma Finucane, the defending champion in the latter, was relegated out of the competition in the quarterfinals for entering her opponent’s sprinter’s lane.

The Track Worlds continue with their penultimate day on Saturday, when titles will be contested in the women’s kilometre time trial, women’s Madison, men’s omnium, and women’s individual pursuit.

Visit our streaming guide to find out how you can watch the action.

This Friday afternoon marks the halfway point of the 2025 UCI Track World Championships in Chile, which is as good a reason as any to put your velodrome knowledge to the test.

Do you know how the Madison got its name? Can you list all the reigning world champions? Do you know the shortest distance around an Olympic velodrome? If so, well done – those questions aren't in this 10-part quiz, but you'll stand in good stead for a strong mark.

Previous Friday cycling quizzes

Test your knowledge of the sport with our previous quizzes.

>> Name the rider by their bike
>> How well do you know Lombardia?
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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.

Great Britain were twice beaten by the Netherlands to gold on the opening day of the UCI Track World Championships in Santiago, Chile.

The Netherlands were defending champions in the men's team sprint events, and retained their rainbow jersey in that, while the women's team sprint final was a mirror image, as GB were edged out.

In the women's sprint, the Dutch team of Kimberly Kalee, Hetty van de Wouw and Steffie van der Peet beat the British trio, Emma Finucane, Iona Moir and Rhianna Parris-Smith, by three hundredths of a second. Australia beat Poland by two seconds in the bronze final to take third.

While Finucane was part of the three which won Olympic and world titles last year, she was joined by two debutants; it was Finucane's sixth world medal at 22.

"I'm so proud of these two," Finucane said. "It's their first world championships and to go out there in the gold medal ride-off, be composed, feel the pressure - we couldn't have asked for more."

Straight after, in the men's team sprint final, the Dutch team of Jeffery Hoogland, Harrie Lavreysen and Roy van den Berg beat the British trio of Matt Richardson, Joe Truman and Harry Ledingham-Horn by three hundredths of a second again. In a repeat of the women's event, Australia were third, beating France in the bronze final.

Lavreysen is now a 17-time world champion. The Dutch three were Olympic champions last summer, while this is a new lineup for GB at this level. Hoogland is an 11-time world champion, while Van den Berg has six rainbow jerseys.

"Coming away with a silver medal is bittersweet for me," Richardson said post-race. This is his first Worlds since switching his nation to GB from Australia.

"My first medal at a world championships in a GB skinsuit is going to feel amazing," he continued. I wish it was the top step, but I can't come away too mad about that.

"We're a fresh line-up, so each time we step on the track we're learning a little bit about each other."

Truman added: "It's the closest we've ever been to the Dutch and it's a really positive first step in the cycle [to LA 2028]."

The other final of the opening day was the women's scratch race, where Lorena Wiebes defended her title, out-sprinting Amalie Dideriksen (Denmmark) and Prudence Fowler (New Zealand).

In qualifying for the men's team pursuit, Denmark went fastest, and qualified for the first round alongside Australia, GB, New Zealand, the United States, Italy, Germany, and Switzerland.

In qualifying for the women's team pursuit, Italy qualified fastest, followed by GB, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Japan, Switzerland and Poland.

The UCI Track World Championships are the pinnacle of the velodrome calendar, the chance for the best riders in the world to show their speed on the boards. They have been happening in a format since 1893, making them older than the Tour de France, and this year's are the 122nd.

There are the familiar events from the Olympics, like the team pursuit, omnium and keirin, but also Worlds-specific events like the kilometre TT and the scratch race. There are 11 finals for both men and women, with rainbow jerseys and gold medals on offer. With the next Olympics in 2028, nations will be starting to form their squads.

This year's event will take place in Santiago, Chile, the first time the Worlds have taken place outside of Europe for the first time since Hong Kong hosted it in 2017 and return to South America for the first time since 2014. The races begin on Wednesday 22 October and end on Sunday 26 October. Chile is four hours behind BST, so keep that in mind.

The start lists are packed with big names, from GB's Emma Finucane and Katie Archibald, to road stars like Lorena Wiebes (Netherlands), and fast men such as Harrie Lavreysen, also of the Netherlands.

Below, Cycling Weekly has compiled everything you need to know about broadcasters and live streams, so you can watch the Track Worlds wherever you are in the world.

Quick guide to watching the Track Worlds

• UK: BBC (Free), TNT Sports/Discovery+ (£30.99/mon)
• US and Canada: Flobikes (USD$29.99/mon, CAN$39.99/mon)
• Australia: Stan (from AUD$12/mon + AUD$15/mon sports add-on)
• Free coverage: BBC | UCI YouTube (geo-restricted)
• Anywhere: Watch your usual stream while abroad with NordVPN

How to watch the Track Worlds in the UK

In the UK, this year's Track World Championships will be shown live and free on the BBC, the country's public service broadcaster. (To watch the BBC, viewers are expected to have a TV licence, which costs £174.50 a year.) You can watch on terrestrial TV or the BBC iPlayer streaming service.

Fans will also be able to watch all of the events on TNT Sports, Warner Bros. Discovery's premium sports channels, with streaming via Discovery+, which is £30.99 a month. This offering also gains viewers access to Warner Bros. Discovery's full range of sports listings.

How to watch the Track Worlds in the US and Canada

For North American viewers, this year's coverage of the UCI Track World Championships is on FloBikes.

FloBikes will be broadcasting in the US and Canada. Subscriptions cost $30 or CA$39.99 a month, with savings for annual plans.

How to watch the Track Worlds in Australia

Cycling fans in Australia can watch the Track World Championships on the Stan Sport streaming service.

You'll need to add the Stan Sport package ($20 per month) to a base Stan subscription (from $12 per month).

Can I watch the Track Worlds for free?

There are many places around the world where you can watch the UCI Track World Championships for free.

As with all its World Championships, the UCI is providing free streaming live on YouTube for the Track World Champs. Geo-restrictions apply, on the basis that the stream is blocked in countries that have a licensed broadcaster, so that includes the UK and the US.

To check availability in your area, the UCI has a list of blocked territories.

In the UK, as outlined above, the BBC is broadcasting the events, with free streaming available on BBC iPlayer.

Coverage is geo-restricted, so if you're away from home right now, you'll need a VPN to get your usual coverage while abroad – more on that below.

How to watch the Track Worlds while abroad

Most streaming platforms have geo-restrictions in place, meaning they only work in certain countries. But being locked out of the races is a thing of the past thanks to a VPN, so you can continue to watch the Track Worlds while on the move.

A Virtual Private Network is a piece of internet security software that can alter your device's location, so you can unblock your usual streaming services, even when you're abroad.

Want to know more? We have an explainer on the benefits, costs, and considerations...
– Should I use a VPN to watch cycling?

When are the Track Worlds on?

The UCI Track World Championships take place over five days, with morning sessions taking place each day from 11am local time, and then an evening session beginning at 6:30pm local time. On the Sunday, the final session begins at 1:30pm local time. However, on the first day, the morning session is not being broadcast.

UK coverage of the Track Worlds begins at 3pm BST for morning sessions, and 10:30pm for evening sessions.

In the US and Canada, morning sessions begin at 10am EDT, and evening sessions at 5:30pm EDT.

See also: Cycling TV and streaming guide

What to expect from the Track Worlds

The year that follows an Olympic Games is reasonably transitional, as teams set up their plans for 2028, blooding younger riders and perhaps moving on from those retiring.

However, there are medals and rainbow jerseys to win, so it is still a big deal, especially as track riders have less opportunities to shine throughout the year. There are fascinating things to watch, from Matt Richardson vs Harrie Lavreysen to Team USA's new look team pursuit squad.

Read our full guide to the event here.

We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.

If helping Team GB to Olympic glory at the 2028 Olympics feels like the dream job, then British Cycling might just have a job for you.

The Great Britain Cycling Team (GBCT), and by extension BC, is looking for a new performance engineering mechanic to help design and develop the next generation of groundbreaking bikes.

There's no pressure, with 11 Olympic and 22 Paralympic medals being won in Paris last summer, as well as their joint-best UCI Track World Championships in 2024.

The mechanic will be part of GBCT's innovation arm, heavily involved in helping GB towards medals and adapt to the latest rule changes.

Currently, the GBCT ride the latest version of the Hope-Lotus HBT, which was ridden to success at both Tokyo and LA, and this will be updated again for Los Angeles in just under three years time. The GBCT performance director, Stephen Park, has called the HBT the "most advanced bike that has ever been ridden by British athletes".

According to the advert, which went live last week: "A key focus of this role is the meticulous preparation and maintenance of equipment for performance testing and development activities.

"The successful candidate will support aerodynamic testing, position optimisation, and equipment development by ensuring all mechanical aspects of test equipment are optimised and reliable."

"This role offers the opportunity to work at the cutting edge of cycling technology, collaborating with world-class athletes, coaches, and performance engineers to enhance efficiency across multiple cycling disciplines," the advert continues.

The key accountabilities range from preparing and maintaining equipment to testing to keeping up to date with the latest developments in bike tech.

BC is looking for someone "meticulous", "technically curious", "collaborative", a "problem solver", and "professional". You should apply if you have a relevant mechanical engineering qualification, with a degree in mechanical or sports engineering desired; you also need to have proven experience as a bike mechanic.

Candidates are expected to "have a genuine interest in how equipment works and how it can be improved. You actively seek to understand the engineering principles behind performance gains and are eager to learn new skills and techniques".

The role is based at the National Cycling Centre, the salary is listed as up to £32,000, and the successful engineer will be expected to start as soon as possible. Candidates have until 9 November to apply. If you want to get a taste of the action, the UCI Track World Championships begin tomorrow.

Ineos Grenadiers rider Josh Tarling is set to make his UCI Track World Championships debut next week.

The 21-year-old time trial specialist has been selected for the event in Santiago, Chile as part of Great Britain’s 22-rider squad, which counts both debutants and experienced track Olympians.

A two-time national champion inside the velodrome, Tarling’s last track race with GB came at the UCI Nations Cup round in Australia in February 2024, where he won gold with the team pursuit squad. In Santiago, he will compete in the points race and the Madison, alongside Mark Stewart, according to the entry list.

The pair are joined in the men’s endurance squad by Olympic silver medallist Charlie Tanfield, former individual pursuit world record holder Josh Charlton, 2023 scratch race world champion Will Tidball, Rapha Super-League winner Matt Bostock and debutant Michael Gill.

In the women’s endurance squad, double Olympic champion Katie Archibald will compete in the elimination race and the Madison, with debutant Maddie Leech, but will not feature in the team pursuit.

“The only other time I’ve not ridden the team pursuit at Worlds was 2017, so I find it a wee bit tricky,” Archibald said in a press conference this week. The 31-year-old began working with her brother, John, as a coach earlier this year, and has been training in Glasgow, with her eye on making the team pursuit squad for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028.

“It’s meant I’ve not been able to make the prep sessions [in Manchester] for team pursuit at Worlds,” she said. “Incidentally, because I’m not riding team pursuit at Worlds, my Hope bike will be ridden by one of the men’s team, because they have a really fresh cohort.”

The remaining three of last year’s world-title-winning squad – Josie Knight, Anna Morris and Megan Barker – will ride the team pursuit in Santiago, alongside Olympic bronze medallist Jess Roberts.

In the sprint events, Olympic champion Emma Finucane will look to earn her third individual sprint title in a row. The 22-year-old is the only one of the team sprint trio who won gold at the Paris Olympics competing at next week's Worlds. She will race alongside debutants Iona Moir, Rhianna Parris-Smith and Rhian Edmunds, with 2023 Worlds silver medallist Lauren Bell also competing across the sprint events.

Two months after breaking the 200m flying lap world record, Matthew Richardson will make his long-awaited Worlds debut for GB. The sprinter, who won three medals for Australia at last year's Olympics, swapped nationality to his birth country after the Games, and was ineligible for selection at last October's Worlds in Copenhagen.

Richardson will be joined by Harry Ledingham-Horn, Joe Truman and Hamish Turnball in the men’s sprint squad, which said farewell to the retiring Jack Carlin earlier this week.

Commenting on the squad, GB performance director Stephen Park said: “As we often see at this stage in an Olympic cycle, we have a great mix of world championship veterans and up and coming talent heading to Santiago.

“I’m looking forward to seeing where we sit among the other nations as all eyes turn to LA 2028.”

The full GB squad for the 2025 UCI Track World Championships in Santiago is below. The event will run from 22-26 October at the Velódromo Peñalolen.

Great Britain's 22-rider squad

Men’s Endurance
Matthew Bostock
Josh Charlton
Michael Gill
Mark Stewart
Josh Tarling
Charlie Tanfield
Will Tidball

Women’s Endurance
Katie Archibald
Meg Barker
Josie Knight
Maddie Leech
Anna Morris
Jessica Roberts

Men’s sprint
Harry Ledingham-Horn
Matthew Richardson
Joe Truman
Hamish Turnbull

Women’s Sprint
Lauren Bell
Rhian Edmunds
Emma Finucane
Iona Moir
Rhianna Parris-Smith

Four-time Olympic medallist Jack Carlin has announced his retirement from cycling at the age of 28.

The track sprinter was part of Great Britain’s squad for 10 years, and went to the Tokyo and Paris Olympic Games, winning silver in the team sprint and bronze in the individual sprint at both.

Carlin’s decision to retire comes as he feels he’s not willing to “give that 100%” to be competitive for the current Olympic cycle to Los Angeles 2028.

Following the Paris Olympics last summer, he said in a press conference this week: “I took a bit of time away to try and find that fire and urge to go again for another four years… and the motivation never came back to really feel like I could throw myself back into it for another long period of time, to give it my all.

“Looking back at my career, you can win or lose things by thousands of a second, and if I wasn’t going to give that 100%, which I don’t feel I have to give, I don’t think it’s worth doing. I think I’d be doing myself a disservice, the people around me a disservice, and also the jersey a disservice.”

Born in Paisley, on the outskirts of Glasgow, Carlin grew up playing football, but fractured both of his ankles when he was 14. He then got into riding mountain and road bikes, before realising he “wasn’t very good in the wet and cold, which isn’t ideal for Scotland, and I’m not very good up hills, so the second the warmth of the [Sir Chris Hoy] Velodrome opened in 2012, it was a no brainer for me.”

Inspired by the Commonwealth Games in his home city in 2014, the Scot joined the GB senior academy two years later, still a teenager, and has since collected four Olympic medals, six World Championships medals, six European Championships medals, and three Commonwealth Games medals, all either silver or bronze.

His final competitive appearance came in the keirin final of the Paris Olympics last August, in which he crashed and injured his hip.

“I am content and truly happy with my career. It’s been 10 years within a high performance role at [British Cycling], and I’ve achieved so much within that and I’m content with that. I thought at that point, ‘What else is there to chase, when I don’t have 100% of me to give to it anymore?’” he said.

“If I was to look back and say to 18-year-old Jack, ‘Listen, you’re going to walk away in 10 years’ time with four Olympic medals around your neck…’ I think I would have bit your hand off for that.”

It’s remembering his younger self that Carlin begins to imagine the legacy he hopes to leave in the sport.

“I sold my Xbox for rollers when I was a kid. My parents sold one of the cars for a set of wheels so that I could actually compete with others that might have had more money to give to their kids. But what my parents gave me, and what I’ve learned from them, is they gave me a lot of their time, they gave me a kind of unwavering self belief, even when I didn’t have it sometimes,” he said.

“I think if I can inspire a kid from a similar background to me to really try and give it a go, and inspire others to help those people achieve what they want to achieve, the way I got helped, that would be massive.”

The Commonwealth Games return to Glasgow next year. Although the event was once an enticing prospect for Carlin, it is one he has ultimately decided to forego.

“I’m totally hanging up my helmet,” he stressed. “I’m not 100% in it anymore. If I want to represent my country and have that jersey on my back, have the honour of having that jersey on my back, whether that’s Scotland or GB, I want to make sure that I’m giving it everything I can… and I decided I wasn’t ready to do that.”

Carlin’s coach and former team-mate Sir Jason Kenny said the Scot’s retirement leaves a “performance gap” in the GB sprint squad.

“I know all his former team-mates and support staff would join me in wishing him all the best with his future endeavours,” Kenny said, “along with his golf handicap!”

This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 11 September 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Matthew Richardson was the last person in the velodrome to realise he had broken a world record. Barrelling at 80kph (50mph), dizzy-eyed, and with his legs still spinning wildly, the small timing board at the top of the banking was a haze of red and blue. The roars from his skeleton support crew, had he been able to hear them, might have given him a hint of his triumph. But Richardson had gone deep, and his bike wasn’t slowing down. “The wind was travelling past my head so fast it blurred a lot of the cheering out,” he remembers. “It wasn’t until probably half a lap later that I actually saw the number 8.9 that I realised I’d done it.”

Never before had a person clocked below the nine-second barrier for the flying 200m. In two attempts, inside Konya’s velodrome in Turkey, the Brit managed it twice.

On 14 August he went 8.941 seconds, before returning the following day and going even quicker, settling the record at 8.857 seconds. “It’s the fastest time trial that there is in track cycling,” says Richardson of the event. “It’s a raw measure, basically, of who is the best.”

As such, like the foremost 100m sprinter in athletics, he now lays claim to being the fastest cyclist in the world. It’s a title that was earned in a matter of seconds, but one that took months of training, a crack team of engineers, and an unwavering will to find speed. Here’s how Richardson did it.

It was mid-March, five months before the record attempt, when the idea first truly took hold. The UCI Nations Cup round in Konya, the first international meet to be held at Turkey’s new velodrome, was Richardson’s first major event with GB since swapping nationality from Australia. It was expected to be a cakewalk for the sprinter, and it was, to an extent: he came away with two gold medals, but the flying 200m qualifier for the match sprint left a sour taste in his mouth. The timing board flashed up after his effort with a new world record. A UCI review of the footage then found the Brit had strayed off the track, beneath the blue band, and his time was voided.

Richardson had known disappointment before. At last year’s Paris Olympics, he held the record for a matter of minutes, before Dutchman Harrie Lavreysen took it off him.

He left the Nations Cup event in Konya in search of redemption. “We realised how quick that track was,” he says. The whole world did: China’s Yuan Liying broke the women’s benchmark on the same, fresh boards the day before Richardson’s botched effort. The Brit scrapped a loose plan he had harboured for years to go record-hunting at altitude in Bolivia or Mexico. Konya, he decided, would do just fine.

The August trip would last five days. Organised by British Cycling as a behind-closed-doors event, Richardson would have two days to acclimatise, and two to chase the record, before his flight home to Manchester. His first attempt was scheduled for Thursday afternoon at 4pm, a time he chose, but not for any scientific reason. “I just didn’t want to have to get up too early,” he says.

As it so happened, 4pm coincided with the day’s warmest temperature – 36°C – bringing favourable atmospheric conditions. When I ask him to go into more depth about the air density, he refuses. It’s for the same reason he won’t reveal the gearing he used on his bike, likely a little over 130 inches. “I don’t want people to map out exactly what I did,” he says. There will be no copycat attempts of his record. The information remains classified to his small crew inside the velodrome.

Richardson’s warm-up began with a turbo trainer spin at 10am. He then necked an oat smoothie for lunch, and returned to the velodrome around 1pm. “It was a pretty chill day knowing all I have to accomplish is one flying 200,” he says.

Nevertheless, the pressure was on. For months, he had dedicated training sessions to practising the effort, improving his top speed and peak power. Short and muscly in stature, shaped like a bullet, he had also changed his ‘wind-up strategy’, working to stay seated for improved aerodynamics, rather than rising out of the saddle.

For the day, his father, Nigel, flew in specially from Perth, Australia, where the family relocated when Matthew was nine years old. “It was important to me that he was there,” the sprinter says. “He was the one that brought me to the velodrome back in Perth many, many years ago now. He was the one that kind of introduced me to track cycling.”

Unlike on race days, there was near silence in the velodrome in the moments before Richardson’s first attempt. It may have seemed eerie, but it didn’t bother him. “I’m always someone who can switch it on, no matter what the occasion; if there’s people in the crowd or there isn’t,” he says.

To help stir the airflow, a motorbike rider took to the boards and ripped around the track at speed. The clock then ticked closer to 4pm, and the time came for Richardson to start winding up his effort. His final exchange of words was with British Cycling coach Andy Pink, the man tasked with giving the sprinter a mammoth, both-feet-off-the-floor push. “I asked if he was ready,” Richardson recalls. “He asked if I was ready, and we both said, ‘Yep.’ Then there we go. He pushes me off.”

Richardson trudged to the top of the banking, and began circling the track slowly, like a raptor hovering over its prey. After three laps building momentum, as per UCI rules, he swooped at full tilt down to the black line, and a bell sounded. The whole sequence lasted less than a minute and a half. After he crossed the finish line, it took another half second before his time flashed up on the board: 8.941 seconds. He had done it: the nine-second barrier had at last been broken. A wobbly Instagram Live feed caught the aftermath of the attempt.

The camera zoomed in on a panting Richardson as he stepped off his bike and keeled over. “The pain in my legs was actually OK,” he recalls, “but the vomiting definitely came. I was like, ‘Oh, I need a bag’ – a classic Richo move – and sure enough a bag came very quickly, and I delivered by filling it all the way up.” The live feed ended abruptly as the scene began. “The substance that came out of my body wasn’t pleasant. I think it was quite black, from memory, which didn’t make me feel super-good. It was a bit of a nightmare,” Richardson laughs.

With no fans in the stands, the celebrations were intimate inside the track centre. Richardson first wrapped his arms around his partner, GB sprinter Emma Finucane, before receiving a warm pat on the back from his father. In the front of his mind, though, his brain was already lining up another stab at the record.

“I needed to get a safe attempt in,” he says. “Given what happened at the Nations Cup earlier in the year, I just wanted to get the first ride under my belt.” That ride, he felt, was lacking in execution. “I rode a lot of it outside the sprint lane,” he explains – that’s to say above not only the black line, but the red one, too. Fearful of steering beneath the track again and colliding with one of the foam pads, Richardson’s cautiousness likely added a few precious metres onto the distance. “I knew there was more time on the table,” he says. He returned the next day ready to go again. “I just let all hell loose.”

There was no live feed of Richardson’s Friday effort, so only he and those inside the velodrome know how well he rode it. Still, the extra eight hundredths of a second he shaved off his own benchmark are proof enough that it was better. “It was as perfect as it could be,” Richardson says.

Though he had no way of measuring it on his bike, he estimates his peak power was around 2,050 watts. He had planned to chance a third attempt, but instead called it a day there. “I don’t think I could have done it any better. I mean, there’s never going to be a perfect line, but I think at that speed, it was as good as it could be,” he says.

Richardson left the velodrome that evening satisfied, clutching a novelty-cheque-sized board with his new world record time: 8.857 seconds. Among the messages on his phone was one from Lavreysen, the previous record holder, who had sent him a private congratulations on Instagram.

“It’s nice that I’ve held onto it for longer than a few minutes this time,” Richardson laughs. But he knows his tenure as the world’s fastest cyclist, like Lavreysen’s before him, could end at any time.

“Someone’s going to beat it in the future, for sure. All I did was go and ride a track that’s accessible for anyone else to go and ride,” he says. “Ultimately, records will get beaten, but the nine-second barrier will never get taken away from me.” When does he think his new benchmark will fall? “It could be six months, given that the European Championships are there [in Konya] next year. It could be 10 years. I obviously hope it’s the 10-year one, but it’s out of my control. If someone goes and beats it, someone goes and beats it,” Richardson says.After a short pause, he adds, deadpan: “That person could be me.”

The bike

According to British Cycling’s lead project engineer, Oliver Caddy, Richardson is “typical of a new generation of riders”, who are proactive and hands-on with their equipment choices.

When the sprinter decided he was going to attempt the flying 200m record, he personally contacted bike manufacturer Hope to ask for his own HB.T frame, the same bike Team GB used at the Paris Olympics. Hope obliged, also custom-making him a new wide fork to help smooth the airflow around his legs. Engineering firm Renishaw was then brought in to make 3D-printed titanium handlebars – “the new fork wasn’t compatible with our existing handlebars,” explains Caddy – left unpainted for better grip, at Richardson’s request.

The cranks and split seatpost were the same as the Olympic set-up, as were the mismatched disc wheels – Princeton Carbonworks on the front, and Campagnolo Ghibli 0.9 on the back – fitted with 25mm Continental GP 5000 TT TR tyres. Richardson’s skinsuit was provided by Vorteq, a market-leading brand, whose range starts at a retail price of £3,000.

The bike set-up, Caddy stresses, was “not a budget buster”, but the engineer won’t be drawn on the total cost. “At the end of the day, we made a bike that we know travels well at speed, and [Richardson’s] done it justice.”

From 2027, however, the bike will not be UCI legal, its fork too wide for the governing body’s new rules. Richardson plans to hang it on his wall, and might do so straightaway, after less than 18 seconds of racing.

The story of Matthew Richardson's world record attempt has been made into a feature documentary, which is released today. Stream it now for £5 on Dog Haus Creative's website.

Great Britain returned from the UCI Junior Track World Championships in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, with five gold medals in their hand luggage, and five more of bronze and silver.

The young squad had a successful time in Europe, with young stars Henry Hobbs and Erin Boothman, in particular, having golden weeks. The pair both came home with two rainbow jerseys.

Boothman won the Madison, with Phoebe Taylor, and the team pursuit with Abi Miller, Arabella Blackburn, Evie Smith and Taylor. Meanwhile, Hobbs won in the omnium and in the 1km time trial. The 18-year-old also won silver in the team pursuit with Rory Gravelle, Max Hinds, Dan Thompson and Albie Jones, after they were pipped by Italy in the final.

GB’s other gold came in the men’s team sprint, for Kristian Larigo, Archie Gill, and Ioan Hepburn. There was also silver in the individual sprint for Gill, which was won by Choi Tae-ho of South Korea, bronze in the individual pursuit for Thompson, which was won by Alessio Magagnotti of Italy, and bronze in the men’s Madison for Hinds and Thompson, as Eric Igual and Eñaut Urcaregui of Spain were victors.

“[I] don’t think I could have dreamed of a better week of racing winning the omnium and backing it up with the kilo the next day, after picking up silver in the team pursuit with the lads just a couple days before,” Hobbs posted on Instagram on Monday evening.

“The biggest thanks to the support team and coaches at British Cycling and the GB Cycling Team for making the trip possible and providing the next level coaching to get me in a place to win these kinds of races,” he continued.

Hobbs became the first junior rider to sweep all six endurance events at the Junior British National Track Championships earlier this month, and is a world record holder in the individual pursuit at junior level on his way to gold at last month’s Junior European Championships.

Boothman, meanwhile, already a two-time world champion last year, and a three-time European champion, wrote that she was “super proud” to defend her two titles from 2024, although she was disappointed to miss out on the omnium after crashing out of the points race. The 18-year-old currently holds three world records at junior level.

“To win the TP with the girls this year was a dream come true, we have worked so hard as a team this year,” she said on Instagram. “So [I] couldn’t be happier to break our own world record from Euros and win the coveted rainbow jersey.”

Matthew Richardson has described the flying 200m record, which he set last week, as the "raw measure of who is the best".

The British rider became the first rider to set a time of under nine seconds on the track at the velodrome in Konya, Turkey, last Thursday, and went on to break his own record the next day, setting a benchmark of 8.857.

The 26-year-old took a further 0.084 seconds off the 8.941 record he set the previous day. His average speed for the final effort was 81.3kph.

The flying 200m is not a championship medal event, but rather a qualifying effort used to seed riders in the match sprint. Dutchman Harrie Lavreysen set the previous record at the Paris Olympics last year with a time of 9.088 seconds.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly this week, Richardson said: "I mean, it feels cool, it's nice that I've held on to it for longer than a few minutes this time, which is obviously nice, and then obviously the disappointment of Konya earlier in the year. When I got it taken away from me. So having the world record, I guess, technically, twice in the past few days and to still retain it is a nice feeling."

During the UCI Track Nations Cup in Konya earlier this year, Richardson appeared to break the record, clocking 9.041 seconds, but his effort was scored off by the UCI for straying off the track, beneath the blue band. However, he has now gone even quicker.

"To me, it's just a reflection on all the hard work I've put in over many months chasing it," he said. "It's been a dream of mine to be the first person under nine seconds for a few years. To actually be sitting here having done it, I just feel really proud of myself, really."

Asked why the record has such a special status among track riders, Richardson said: "I think it's just because it's a pure demonstration of how fast you are. It's the fastest sort of time trial that there is in track cycling. It's just an easy claim of, if you're faster in that than someone else, then you are faster than them. So I think it's just a really raw measure of, basically, who is the best."

Also last week, Will Bjergfelt smashed the UCI Hour Record in the C5 classification, becoming the first para-cyclist to surpass the 50km barrier. Charlie Tanfield also took on the elite men’s UCI Hour Record, but fell three kilometres short of Filippo Ganna’s benchmark.

The story behind Matthew Richardson's record breaking ride will be the subject of a feature in the 11 September issue of Cycling Weekly – subscribe to the magazine here.

Just 24 hours after he broke the flying 200m world record, Matthew Richardson returned to the velodrome to beat the benchmark again, setting a new best time of 8.857 seconds.

The track sprinter became the first rider in history to clock under nine seconds in the event on Thursday, doing so inside the velodrome in Konya, Turkey. Afterwards, he said he “rode a lot of it outside the sprint lane” – that is to say, above the black and red lines – and that he had “a bit more” to give.

The 26-year-old lined up another attempt on Friday afternoon and took a further 0.084 seconds off the 8.941 record he set the previous day. His average speed for his latest effort was 81.3kph.

“I knew there was more time on the table after yesterday’s ‘out of sprint lane’ ride, so I knew if I came in with good execution and rode as close to the black as possible, I’d go quicker and that’s what happened,” he said.

“There was more in the tank yesterday, so I was obviously really stoked about yesterday, but I was hungry for more.”

On Thursday, British Cycling booked out the velodrome in Konya, located at 1,200m altitude, for a day of record-hunting. In the morning, Will Bjergfelt smashed the UCI Hour Record in the C5 classification, becoming the first para-cyclist to surpass the 50km barrier. Charlie Tanfield then took on the elite men’s UCI Hour Record, but fell three kilometres short of Filippo Ganna’s benchmark.

The track was also booked out on Friday to allow for second attempts, paving the way for Richardson to have another tilt.

Breaking the record, he said, comes as a “big, big relief”, adding the benchmark is “out of my control now.”

The flying 200m is not a championship medal event, but rather a qualifying effort used to seed riders in the match sprint.

Richardson, who previously represented Australia before switching nationality to his birth country last summer, is the first British man to hold the record in the event.

He rode a custom-painted Hope-Lotus HB.T bike for his attempts, fitted with new 3D-printed handlebars, cranks and forks.

Prior to this week, the flying 200m world record was held by Dutchman and five-time Olympic champion Harrie Lavreysen, who set a time of 9.088 seconds at last year’s Paris Olympics.

Richardson won two silver and one bronze medal at the Games riding for Australia.

Olympic silver medallist Matthew Richardson is going to attempt to become the “fastest cyclist of all time” by breaking the 200m flying lap world record.

The track sprinter will try to beat the record at an event specially organised by British Cycling at the Konya Velodrome in Turkey next week. Two other British riders will also attempt world records; Charlie Tanfield will go for the UCI Hour Record, set by Filippo Ganna in 2022, and para-cyclist Will Bjergfelt will try the same in the C5 category.

The benchmark for Richardson to beat in the flying 200m is 9.088 seconds – a speed of 79.2kph – currently held by Dutchman Harrie Lavreysen, and set at last summer’s Paris Olympics. Richardson hopes to be the first person in history to go below the nine-second barrier.

“For me, it’s a bit of a race between Harrie and I to be the first person to do it,” the 26-year-old said. “It’s been on my radar for the last couple of years, as the world’s gotten a bit closer to going low nines. Obviously we both did 9.0s at the Olympics, so I think it’s kind of a race now to who does it first.”

Richardson previously held the record for a brief moment in qualifying at the 2024 Olympics, where he represented Australia and won two silvers and a bronze medal. “Literally about 30 seconds later I watched Harrie go round the track and I was like, ‘And it’s gone’,” he said. Richardson went on to switch his racing nationality to British after the Games.

The ultimate motivation behind the world record attempt is to become “the fastest track cyclist of all time,” he explained. “But what’s motivated it to be right now is that sort of race, because I think it’s going to happen at some point. Once someone goes sub-nine, they’ll be the first person to ever do that forever. Records get beaten all the time, but barriers stay with that person.”

The velodrome in Konya, located at 1,200m altitude, was opened in 2022, and hosted its first international competition this March in a round of the UCI Track Nations Cup. During the event, Richardson appeared to set a new world record in the flying 200m, before his effort was scored off by the UCI for straying off the track, beneath the blue band.

From the experience, Richardson learned that the track is “pretty optimal” for a flying effort. “Shape wise, it’s really wide, which makes it a fast track,” he said. “We realised how quick that track was, and how fast it can be, especially for what I wanted to do.”

Richardson will attempt the record on a Hope-Lotus HB.T bike designed for the Great Britain Cycling Team at the Paris Olympics. Hope has also developed a custom wide fork for the sprinter, while Renishaw has made him custom handlebars, a seatpost and cranks.

If Richardson breaks the record, he will be the first British rider in history to hold it.

“I want extra goals, extra things to chase – that’s what this is to me,” he said. “It has a nice ring to it as well. Being the fastest track discipline, there are no caveats to it afterwards. It’s not that you’re the fastest time triallist, or the fastest cyclist in X discipline – in a flying 200m, you reach the highest peak speed possible on a track. It’s just cool if I do it to be able to call myself the fastest of all time.

“In my mind, nothing’s ever a done deal, but I’m pretty confident that I’m in a really good place to get the job done.”

British Cycling's record-hunting event will take place next Thursday 14 August, and is principally supported by Shell. There will be no live broadcast of the two Hour Records, but Richardson’s flying 200m will be streamed on Instagram at 2:30pm UK time. If he does not break it, he will be able to complete multiple further attempts.

At 22 years-old Rhianna Paris-Smith already has international titles under her belt. The Team Inspired rider is a Junior European Champion in both the time trial and team sprint, and last year came first in the National Track Championships. Rob Kemp caught up with the young rider as she looks ahead to a summer of racing.

What does a typical training day look like for you?

Right now, we're in our general preparation phase. Gym sessions start at 9am, but we try to get in a little earlier. It's about two hours of lifting, focusing on key movements and accessory work. Then we break for food before heading to the track around 2pm. We finish by 5pm unless we're prepping for an Olympic schedule, when sessions might run later. I'm loving the track work, but not the Bulgarian split squats!

How has your training evolved over the past few years?

The biggest change is just doing more of everything now I'm part of the GB cycling programme. The principles stay the same, but the volume increases. When cycling wasn't my full-time job, I had to juggle training with everything else. Now, I have the time and support to dedicate myself fully to it.

You participated in a fitness project with CW in 2021. What did you learn?

The biggest thing was working with a nutritionist [David Starr] - that was really useful. He helped me refine my diet, introduced me to creatine and caffeine gum, and emphasised meal timing. Those tweaks made a real difference.

Was the creatine a strength booster?

It was mainly for performance, both in the gym and on the bike. I was doing a lot of plyometrics at the time, and after a few weeks on creatine, I felt stronger and more explosive.

Has becoming a national champion boosted your mental strength?

My confidence grew but my mentality has always been pretty steady. If things go badly I may need 24-48 hours to process it... sometimes a week [laughs]. I talk things through with my coaches, figure out what went wrong, and move forward. I don't dwell on mistakes.

Do you think about your influence as a Black cyclist?

I don't think of myself as someone people look up to, but I do hope that I can help inspire others. If I can encourage someone else to get into the sport, that's great. I was more motivated by people telling me I had potential, even when I wasn't sure myself. My motivation remains simply seeing how far I can go.

Alongside the racing at this week’s Critérium du Dauphiné, a new bike has stolen headlines. It came out of the blue, startling in design, and stood out among its contemporaries. Our friends at Cyclingnews were on the ground to spot and photograph it, describing it as “insane” and “mad”.

I’m talking about Factor’s prototype aero bike. We know little about it at the moment – we don’t even know its name – other than Jake Stewart rode a blacked-out version to a commendable fifth place on the first stage. One look at the bike’s obnoxiously wide forks tells us this is no typical road machine. No, Factor’s new model marks a new age of road design, a revolutionary idea that breaks the mould of what bikes should look like. Or does it?

Followers of track racing might have felt a sense of déjà-vu when flicking through the photo galleries of the new Factor. Yes, its front fork may be novel on the road, but it’s nothing new inside velodromes. Once again, the old adage was true: tech trends begin on the track. Let me explain a little more.

In track racing, speed is king. Every Olympic cycle, national federations spend millions developing new bikes and components, hoping to edge millisecond margins over their rivals. The Factor bike’s wide forks can be traced back almost six years, to the Hope HB.T track bike, developed for the Great Britain Cycling Team for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

At the time, the Hope’s fork blades were ground-breaking. Looping out away from the frame, they were said to be designed in a way to manipulate the air flow, splitting it on impact and guiding it around the rider’s legs. In practice, the bike proved a success; it was ridden in Tokyo to seven medals, of which three were gold, and continues to inspire designs today. At last year’s Games in Paris, for example, France, Japan and Australia all switched to track bikes with wider forks – the Look P24, the V-Izu TCM-2 and the Factor HANZŌ.

Factor, you say? The same brand as Stewart’s outrageous new bike? That’s right. Almost a year after Australia’s men's team pursuit squad won gold on a wide-forked machine, the UK manufacturer appears now to have produced a closely aligned road version. All roads lead back to the velodrome. We should’ve seen it coming.

I’ll give you another example: for Filippo Ganna’s UCI Hour Record attempt in 2022, Pinarello developed a new Bolide F HR 3D frame, with unique aero ridges down the seatpost and tube – these were referred to as 'tubercles', and were inspired by humpback whale fins. Fast forward two years and, lo and behold, the same design showed up on the Bolide F time trial bike, released in time for the Paris Olympics.

It should come as no surprise when successful track trends spill across to the road. So why haven’t we seen wide-forked road bikes before? Well, we have, to an extent. Take Ribble’s Ultra SL, released in 2022, with abnormally wide forks. This was a design that was built for speed, much like the Hope HB.T, but reined in the fork width a bit. It came amid a growing movement of wider forks in recent years, facilitated by the takeover of disc brakes, and catering for demands for wider tyre clearance.

There are, however, reasons we haven’t seen forks as wide as the HB.T’s on the road before. First of all, there were concerns that they could be dangerous, with fears other riders’ forks, handlebars or even body parts could get ‘hooked’ in them mid-crash. This seems not to have been an issue on the track, however. Likewise, straying too far from the norm might have risked putting customers off buying the bike – bike brands are businesses after all.

The most important reason, though, is the difference in racing conditions. Wide track bike forks were designed to face wind resistance from one direction – the front – and to be ridden at speeds of 70kph and beyond. There are no crosswinds in a velodrome. Would they fare so well on the road, and at slower speeds?

Well, it’s been trialled. In 2021, Hope unveiled a prototype time trial bike version of its 2019 HB.T, hoping for a new dawn for the design. It was ridden by Great Britain’s Ethan Vernon in the under-23 TT at the UCI World Championships. Vernon placed seventh, and the prototype never made it to the mainstream.

The logical conclusion, at least from the outside, was that the design didn’t transfer across to the road as hoped. But years have since passed, bike tech has progressed, and there’s no harm in trying out something new.

The forks on the new Factor bike aren’t quite as wide as the HB.T's, but they’re as close as we’ve seen. Perhaps Factor have found gains where others didn’t? Stewart was the fastest rider in the bunch on stage one, after all. Maybe the bike will trigger a domino effect in design in the peloton, like the HB.T did on the track? Or perhaps, like Vernon’s prototype in 2021, Stewart’s wide-forked machine will last only as a short-lived concept…

One lesson remains true: if you want to know what the next big road trend might be, start digging around inside velodromes.