Team GB safe biking SILVER in ladies’s madison occasion

In a mad blur, a medal hung in the balance. The Madison, the wacky relay of cycling, was threatening to chew up British dreams for Elinor Barker and Neah Evans, who a few months ago couldn’t as much walk up the stairs.

Just at the required moment, Barker put in a long, long two-lap sprint and the team came home for silver. It was a fantastic end to a pulsating race as they bagged maximum points in the last of 12 sprints, which counted double.

The Italians took gold on 37 points with Great Britain on 31 and Denmark, with bronze, on 28.

For Evans, a 34-year-old veterinary surgeon from Glasgow, it capped a remarkable recovery from a debilitating illness similar to glandular fever.

‘Basically, the past 18 months have been pretty s*** for me,’ revealed Evans, with Cardiff-born Barker sitting on the floor to recover from her exertions, both wearing ice packs in the boiling velodrome they had pounded around 120 times.

‘There have been several moments when I’ve sat there and thought, “I’m not going to make it”. I had a crash and ripped my hip flexor. I had another crash and did my back.

‘At the end of April, I ended up with EBV (Epstein-Barre Virus), a bacterial infection, that properly floored me. The training plan was out of the window.

‘Honestly, if at that point someone said you will go to the Olympics and get a silver medal I’d have been like, “Not a chance”. I remember trying to walk up a flight of stairs and getting halfway up and thinking, “I can’t get up these stairs”.

‘As an athlete you always try to downplay these things and I said, “I’m fine”. But to be so debilitated was scary. You can’t rush injuries but you can do so much around them. But with this, I just had to recover.’

The pair of them had to contend with all the madness of the Madison — named after the Square Garden of New York fame, where it was first staged — and also the unexpected early lappings of the field by the Dutch and Italians. That delivers 20 points and represented a serious threat to British ambitions.

But the Barker-Evans duo remained at the top or hovering near it after each sprint. Nothing could be discounted but nothing was assured going into that happily successful final tilt. They are now proud possessors of two silver medals each, to go with their team pursuit successes in Tokyo in 2021.

This time, Barker was watched by her two-year-old son Nico. This has turned into Mothers’ Olympics. ‘A beautiful memory on days like this with Nico,’ she said, managing to climb off the floor to speak through her exhaustion.

‘You get the best of both worlds. I get to fit my exercise and social life into one neat four-hour block, which not many parents get to do. Then I get to come home and spend the rest of the day with my little boy. He’s changing so much — it’s such a special time. He provides that distraction.’

A few minutes after the silver, a second medal, this time a bronze for Britain going to Jack Carlin, 27, after a re-run decider in the individual sprint after he had ridden into his Dutch rival, Jeffrey Hoogland, in a race that was abandoned and restarted. Lucky Jack.

But what a tale of success, given that the Scotsman broke his ankle in April. He has 19 international medals, amazingly none of them gold. He apologised straightaway for his error — he seemed to lose grip — at low speed. It was not in the heat of combat. There was no danger in what he did. Nor did there seem to be any malice at play.

But we’d have been complaining like billy-o if the boot had been on the other foot.

Emma Finucane’s quest, meanwhile, to become the first British woman to win three medals at a single Games remains on track after she made it into today’s quarter-finals of the individual sprint.

Her team-mate Sophie Capewell also progressed through the rounds of 32 and 16. The final comes tomorrow.