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The four-man track bike rides for gold - in world record time
Photo: MATTHEW CHILDS / REUTERS
After 125 meters it looked like an exciting race.
Great Britain's four-man track got off to a better start at Tokyo's Izu Velodrome, about 0.2 seconds ahead of the German quartet.
Such a distance can make the difference in a 4000 meter race.
Especially when two such strong track bike teams race against each other.
Two teams that had set new world records a few hours earlier.
But it didn't get exciting.
The Olympic final developed into a German gold race and a demonstration of power.
After the first round, Franziska Brauße, Lisa Brennauer, Lisa Klein and Mieke Kröger were almost equal to their competitors.
Then the German side glowed green at every intermediate time.
One second ahead, two seconds ahead, three seconds ahead.
In the end, Klein led her team, could already see the British women’s rear wheel and if the race had lasted one more lap, it would have been possible to lap it.
Instead, the Germans put their fists in the air, Brennauer lifted her bike at the finish.
4: 04.242
"You can always dream," she had said the day before. In qualifying, the German team had only just improved the five-year-old world record set by Great Britain, Olympic champion in Rio 2016, by three seconds. Although the Britons around Katie Archibald and Elinor Barker regained the best mark in their run on Tuesday, this time only lasted ten minutes. "We thought we wouldn't let the British women take the record away so easily," said Brauße. The German team topped the time in the run-up and in the final. Three world records within 25 hours.
The magic time now stands at 4: 04.242 minutes.
By comparison, that's six seconds faster than Britain's world record from 2016, when the competition was first Olympic.
And about 26 seconds faster than the German team from back then.
The four-man track has made a tiger jump into the world class and to the top since the games in Brazil where they failed to qualify.
The fact that the appearance in Tokyo turned into a world record hunt may be due, on the one hand, to the quality of the run, which is made of fast Siberian spruce wood.
Emma Hinze, who had won silver in the team sprint with partner Lea Sophie Friedrich, said the track was “very smooth”.
But the gold winners also explain their success with the step-by-step work and harmony in the team.
After the Olympics in Rio, the four had worked their way up to silver at the EM 2019 and bronze at the World Cup in Berlin 2020.
At that time, national coach André Korff wanted to see more in his female drivers.
“We came here with the aim of winning a medal.
I already noticed in Berlin that there is a lot more potential in the girls.
I am positively surprised myself that things are going so well now, "said Korff." Here you have called up everything that was possible.
Women's cycling has received an enormous amount of hype.
Everything has become more professional.
This has developed enormously in the last ten years «.
A team has formed
Mieke Kröger is the only woman in the quartet who was already there in 2016. She has taken part in the development to this day. Lisa Brennauer is an enormous addition to the team. The most experienced starter at 33 years of age has already won several world championship titles on the road in the time trial. In addition, there were two drivers, 25-year-old Klein and 22-year-old Brauße, who were already extremely successful in the youth field. And actually Gudrun Stock from Munich was also part of the team, but the 26-year-old was unable to travel to Tokyo due to an illness. “The world record is also on her cap, even if she wasn't there with her own legs,” said Brennauer.
The team has found each other.
“It's just a harmony, we're pretty good at it.
When it works, it's like being on rails.
You are so in focus, you only see the front wheel in front of you, you make yourself small and give your all, ”said Klein.
The four-wheeled track bike, a train that lays its own rails.
At the award ceremony, at least Brennauer was still in the focus of the winners.
Before she was called, she took the podium.
"You can hear the name and Team Germany," she said later: "Then you just want to be on the podium."
With material from dpa and sid