'Can someone write it down this time?' – lost track cycling world record sparks confusion

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.