Making the unpredictable look predictable is one measure of greatness in sport. Seen against that yardstick, Laura Kenny’s and Katie Archibald’s dominant ride in the madison in the Izu velodrome will go down as one of the greatest moments in this year’s Olympic Games.
For Kenny, there could hardly have been a more appropriate way to become Great Britain’s most decorated female Olympian, taking her personal tally to five gold medals and a silver across three Games; for Archibald it was surely a presage of more titles to come. For the other 28 competitors it was 32min 49sec of wondering quite what had hit them.
It is achingly rare in any sport to see this degree of control in a discipline which is so multidimensional, constantly bombarding the senses with physical and mental crossfire: tactics, bike handling, and the need to predict – as best a rider can – what the 29 other riders on the track might be doing and where they are headed. The essence of a madison is that it is barely possible to keep track of what is going on from outside, let alone to keep a grip of any kind on the race from within.
Putting any tactic into place in madison racing is fiendishly difficult but there is one that teams frequently try. When one team changes at any point, they occupy space in front of the other riders, who have to overtake over the top as the duo briefly race hand in hand. The opposition has to travel farther – and thus faster – to get past, while hoping the changing pair don’t wobble or veer up the track, all at about 60-70km/h.
It follows that if a team changes at a strategic moment in the buildup to one of the sprints which decide the race, they have a far better chance of taking the points. The best time to do this is between one and a half, and half a lap before the sprint, because the next riders in line have no time or space to gather themselves. This calls for such precise timing in speed and position that teams might manage it a few times within the race distance but, time and again in Tokyo, Kenny and Archibald engineered themselves into a place where precisely this happened.
That helps to explain why they managed to win 10 of the 12 sprints on offer, dominating the points table to the extent that the race was as good as won by three-quarters distance. But the fact that the other teams would have known exactly what they were doing and were unable to prevent them doing it points to a rare level of physical and psychological dominance. It is another sign of sporting greatness: the ability to find space exactly where it is wanted, and do it so often it is anything but a fluke.
The precise way in which the pair constantly timed their changes for this “red zone” may have been helped by a clever choice of highly visible yellow crash hats, a classic example of the now derided “marginal gains” approach. It also was what Kenny meant beforehand when she said that she and Archibald have become instinctively aware what the other is thinking in the speed and milling bodies, helped by their early nomination as the final pairing for the discipline. And again, she paid tribute to the practice races involving under‑23 and junior men set up by their new coach, Monica Greenwood.
The duo were helped by the mass pile-up 50 laps in, in which their biggest rivals, Kirsten Wild and Amy Pieters were held up, with Wild having to get up after Lotte Kopecky of Belgium had ridden right over her prone body; without the crash, it’s hard to see the Dutch missing the vital lap gain that sealed Kenny and Archibald’s dominance. But in a madison, teams make their own luck. There are often crashes at the back of the field where the riders are trying to change and stay out of the way of other changes through a fog of fatigue. Kenny and Archibald rarely ventured out of the first few wheels, which again suggested they were physically well ahead of most of the opposition.
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The final three laps summed up the story of the whole 120. In an alternative sporting world with the race won by a street, the magic duo might have been expected to kick back, savour the golden moment and let Russia, Denmark and the Netherlands scrap for the rest of the podium. But no, it was time for the cycling equivalent of the star striker popping in a fifth because the goal happens to be open.
Here came Archibald ripping the field to shreds yet again. Here came one final change to Kenny pinpoint on the bell. Here came one searing sprint with the rest nowhere, a final blast of speed for the sheer bloody hell of it. Kenny will have a very large target on her back when she goes for gold No 6 in Sunday’s omnium, but on such form it’s hard to see what difference it will make.