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World Track Championships - CM
Stuttgart, Germany, July 30 - August 3, 2003
Day 5 Wrap: Germany takes team sprint; Swiss win Madison; Grankovskaya wins women's sprint
By Valkerie Mangnall in Stuttgart, Germany
Team sprint
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So spent were Germany's team sprint trio after barreling to a world title, they had no strength left to do a lap of honour before their home crowd. "We gave it everything," gasped Carsten Bergemann after joining Jens Fiedler and Rene Wolff to take the gold medal in an impressive time of 49.957 seconds on the final day of competition.
They beat Frenchmen Mickael Bourgain, Laurent Gane and Arnaud Tournant, who rode 50.071 in the battle for gold and silver, and restored some German pride after the embarrassing withdrawal of the host country's team pursuit quartet because of serious in-fighting.
Fiedler said: "After the demise of the German team pursuiters, we now have a German trio instead."
The Germans qualified third fastest behind Great Britain and France. But the hosts timed their run perfectly, clocking the best time in the first round while France was second fastest, forcing defending champions Great Britain into a duel with Australia for the bronze.
The British team made a number of changes to their line-up, using Craig McLean, Chris Hoy and Jason Queally in qualifying before replacing Hoy with Jamie Staff in the first round. They finally settled on last year's winning combination of McLean, Staff and Hoy to beat the Australian group of Jobie Dajka, Mark French and Ryan Bayley.
Sean Eadie, who combined with Dajka and Bayley for silver last year, was ruled out of the championships with a knee injury.
Shane Kelly did not ride for Australia after his silver medal in the 1000m time trial on opening night, presumably because he had been specifically targeting the kilo. He indicated before the meet started he was effectively only a reserve for the team sprint "as the last possibility if something drastically goes wrong".
Meanwhile, McLean said the British team needed to do more work on the training track ahead of next year's Athens Olympics. "Because we hadn't done anything in training we were kind of going by results in the kilometre to see how everybody's form was," McLean said. "We knew regardless of which order we rode, any one of the three of them could have gone second or third position so we were just playing around really."
"It's probably not the ideal venue to do it, at the world championships . I guess it's better to do it in a competition situation so it's good from that point of view."
Women's sprint and men's madison
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Russia topped the medal table after Svetlana Grankovskaya added the women's sprint title to the keirin crown she won earlier in the championships. Her victories, combined with Olga Slusareva's scratch and points race double, gave Russia four gold medals.
Russia also won two bronze while France was second in the medal tally with two gold, two silver and two bronze and Germany third with two gold and one bronze. Switzerland was fourth after Franco Marvulli won the men's scratch race and then teamed up on the final day with Bruno Risi to win the Madison.
Australia went from topping the table last year to fifth with plenty of silverware (seven) and only one gold from 15 events. Their gold medal was the highlight of the championships when Graeme Brown, Brett Lancaster, Luke Roberts and Peter Dawson smashed the world record to win the team pursuit.
Australian sprint coach Martin Barras said he saw the entire national team's performance two ways. "You can look at the number of medals and the array of events we medalled in to see we have a solid platform with a lot of depth and that is very satisfying and important," Barras said. "But by the same token, coming into this year after last year it was important to see how we would go from being one of the hunters to the hunted. I think it has demonstrated that we need to regain a little bit of hunger and fine tune that extra one or two per cent for next year. We're close but not at the level of last year and you need to win more than one bike race to claim you are top of the world. Realistically we haven't done that here except for one outstanding ride."
In another encouraging sign for Australia's endurance ranks, Katie Mactier gave the great Leontien Zijlaard-Van Moorsel a scare in the women's 3000m individual pursuit, pushing the Dutchwoman all the way before settling for silver behind the reigning Olympic champion.
New Zealand won its only medal of the championships on the last day when Greg Henderson and Hayden Roulston made a gutsy move with 21 laps to go in the 180-lap Madison.
The pair gained a lap on the field to make up ground on Marvulli and Risi, who were already a lap up, and claim the silver medal. Juan Esteban Curuchet and Walter Perez of Argentina also took a lap to win bronze.
