No country competing at Tokyo 2020 has welcomed the return of the madison to the fold with more enthusiasm than Team GB. A day after Katie Archibald and Laura Kenny won gold in the discipline’s first Olympic event for women, Matt Walls and Ethan Hayter reached deep into their energy reserves to take silver in the men’s race – making its first appearance since 2008 on Saturday.
Gold went to the world champions, the Danish pairing of Lasse Norman Hansen and Michael Morkov, while France’s Benjamin Thomas and Donavan Grondin were left with bronze after Hayter’s tie-breaking sprint right at the death of the 200-lap race.
While Britain’s women had dominated from the off on Friday, the men were forced to activate the nuclear option as their medal chances began to recede with 30 laps to go. “I was cooked at the halfway stage but we had a bit of gas at the end to finish it off,” said Walls, fresh from his gold medal in the omnium on Thursday. “It was everything I had.
“There was definitely some points in there we could have improved on but to say we haven’t rode together and we haven’t raced a madison in a long time, there was going to be some mistakes but we rode well and were feeling good. We came away with a silver so I’m pretty happy with it.”
Walls and Hayter, who share a house in Manchester, had not been able to prepare with the endless practice runs that helped Kenny and Archibald dominate, but they followed the women’s lead in donning hi-vis helmets to set them apart from other riders on a crowded, chaotic track.
Hayter, who was part of the pursuit team that finished a disappointing seventh said: “We set out on the front to try to get a bit of a head start. I think my legs started to go first.
“We were a lot closer to winning than I thought we would be. The Danes were the strongest pair, definitely. We did do some madison. I did some of the sessions with Katie and Laura in the academy, which was great.”
After a frustrating start to the week that prompted speculation about British cycling’s purple patch coming to an end, the madison has triggered a revival in the fortunes that could continue into the final day of racing on Sunday, when three gold medals are up for grabs.
In some of the most dramatic action of the day, Jack Carlin had to compete twice to qualify for the men’s keirin quarter-finals after the first race ended in a crash that was blamed on the Scot and the Dutch rider Matthijs Buchli, who was relegated and then finished third in the repechage.
“He clipped my elbow. Our video shows exactly what happened,” Carlin said. “It’s racing. I reacted to someone clipping my elbow. I hope he’s OK.”
Carlin will be joined by the defending champion, Jason Kenny, who is seeking a record-setting seventh gold medal, taking him past another keirin great, Chris Hoy. “Everybody’s desperate to advance. I’m just chuffed to still be in the hunt,” said Kenny, who advanced via the first-round repechages after finishing fourth in his opening heat.
“It’s obvious I’m not the fastest. That doesn’t mean I can’t come away with something. The keirin is about being in the right place at the right time and scrapping for every inch.”
Carlin, who took bronze in the individual sprint on Friday, also knows, almost to his cost, how unpredictable keirin can be. “It was absolute chaos,” he said, adding that at times he simply “closed my eyes and hoped for the best”.
“Keirin’s like that, look at today,” he said of the crashes in both his outings. “There have been a lot of crashes and a lot of close calls. Everyone’s doing whatever it takes to get through and it’s dangerous. I’ve never been in anything like it. Everyone wants it so badly they’ll do anything.”
Katy Marchant will leave Tokyo empty-handed after her 2-0 defeat in the women’s sprint quarter-finals to Hong Kong’s former world champion Lee Wai Sze, who will face another former world champion, Germany’s Emma Hinze, in Sunday’s final. Marchant, a sprint bronze medalist in Rio, crashed out of the keirin on Thursday.
The loudest cheer from the spectators were for Japan’s Yudai Nitta and Yuta Wakimoto, who won their keirin heats. They earn huge sums on the professional keirin circuit in Japan, where the sport was invented more than seven decades ago to raise revenue from gambling to rebuild the country’s war-torn economy.
Despite having more than 2,000 professional racers and about 40 velodromes at its disposal, Japan has fared poorly in Olympic keirin, winning a single bronze in the men’s event sinceit made its debut at Sydney 2000.
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A medal for Nitta would have added significance. The 35-year-old is from Fukushima, one of the areas struck by the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, whose slow recovery inspired the message – now largely forgotten in the pandemic – behind Japan’s bid for the 2020 Games.
“We’ve been working for five years, every day we come to this velodrome for this moment,” said Japan’s track coach, the former French track cyclist Benoit Vetu. “So we have no choice, we have to be ready and we have to be good. And if I want to still have a job after the Olympics we have to win a medal.”