Gallery of images from day two at the track World Cup in Manchester
Three more gold medals landed in the British camp on day two of the track world cup in Manchester as the host nation continued its dominance.
The third gold was won at the end of the evening as young Lizzie Armitstead made up for missing out on yesterday's scratch race with a convincing win in the points race. Victoria Pendleton added to the tally with silver in the 500m time trial.
Posting 9.869 seconds in qualifying, he was simply untouchable. "A lot of the sessions I've been doing in training have been comparable to what I was doing pre-Beijing, and that gives you big confidence," he said afterwards. "A personal goal was to build on last week's national championships and to do a 9.8 today was really pleasing, other than Beijing that's my fastest ever time."
Women's 500m time trial
Anna Meares snatched gold from under Victoria Pendleton's nose in the 500m time trial to leave the Briton with a silver medal to add to her gold from the sprint competition yesterday.
Riding before Meares, Pendleton posted a personal best of 33.838 seconds to put her in the gold medal position. Meares' time of 33.632 knocked her straight off the top, but the Australian's extra two-tenths of a second could quite easily be put down to her tri-bars.
Pendleton had ridden with drop handlebars to replicate the conditions of her Olympic event, the sprint. "I don't do the 500, I'm not a 500 metre rider I'm not a 500 metre specialist, I'm not about to start wasting my time on a non-Olympic event anyway, but I did it because I didn't have a team sprint partner today, so I thought I'd better do something."
Men's sprint
In the final, Hoy's experience was enough to see off the spirited Crampton 2-0. Kenny completed the clean sweep with a 2-0 win over Perkins in the bronze medal race, although both were exhilarating sprints with the riders going shoulder-to-shoulder.
Taking four of the top five places was a huge boost for Britain's bid to qualifying early for the World Championships without having to take full-strength teams to the far-flung World Cup rounds in Melbourne, Colombia and China.
8th Michael D'Almeida (US Creteil
Women's individual pursuit
Wendy Houvenaghel won the women's pursuit with ease, catching Australian Josephine Tomic on her final lap before rolling over the line and still posting a world-class time.
Immediately after receiving her gold medal, Houvenaghel condemned the decision that the women's pursuit should suffer the same fate as the men's kilometre and women's 500m time trial: removal from the Olympic cycling schedule.
"The ride was something I hadn't really targeted for this World Cup bearing in mind the news that's inbound regarding the Olympic programme," Houvenaghel said. "The main focus will be the event tomorrow [the team pursuit]."
President of the UCI, Pat McQuaid, refused to be drawn on what events would and wouldn't be run at the 2012 Olympic Games in London when asked by Cycling Weekly, but the British team has already started to adjust their rider's programmes according to the news that broke several weeks ago.
"In my training perspective I feel that things are a little up in the air until the decision has been ratified formally however our training has been revised to put more attention on the team pursuit," said Houvenaghel.
"Personally, it's quite a devastation because this is an event I have specialised in for the last three-and-a-half years and I was very much looking forward to continuing in the same vein and take it the whole way to London."
Men's Madison
The Belgian partnership of Kenny De Ketele and Tim Mertens won the Madison ahead of Germany's Roger Kluge and Robert Bartko.
Women's team sprint
World champions Australia took gold in the women's sprint as Anna Meares started to make a small dent in to Great Britain's runaway medal tally. The Australian woman had not long gathered her breath from winning the 500m time trial before she was anchoring the Australian pairing to another gold.
Britain's young pairing of Rebecca James and Jessica Vanish were just pipped to the bronze medal by Germany while Pendleton had to sit out of the competition as she has no Sky+HD team mates to ride with. Come the world champs, Pendleton may be reunited with Shanaze Reade as the inclusion of this event in the 2012 Olympics drastically raises its significance.
Results
Gold final
Australia 33.653 bt Netherlands 34.014
Bronze final
Germany 34.390 bt Great Britain 34.414
Women's points race
Lizzie Armitstead rounded off another great night for the host nation with a gold in the points race. The Brit was obviously unhappy with yesterday's scratch race - where she finished out of the medals - and made ammends for it today with a powerful display of sprinting.
Results
1. Lizzie Armitstead (Great Britain) 16 pts
2. Yumari Valdivieso (Cuba) 11
3. Evgeniya Romanyuta (Russia) 10
4. Tatsiana Sharakova (Belarus) 8
5. Belinda Goss (Australia) 7
Related links
Manchester Track World Cup 2009: Cycling Weekly's full coverage indexDay one: Gold for Hoy Pendleton Thomas and Newton
Armitstead flies to points race victory
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