The New Zealand women’s cycling team pursuiters turned in an astounding effort in the qualifying round today.
The quartet - Bryony Botha, Emily Shearman, Nicole Shields and Ally Wollaston - smashed the national record by 3.8s and qualified fastest for tomorrow’s first round, blitzing all the other big names in world cycling.
They lit up the velodrome and became a major talking point of the session.
New Zealand will meet the fourth fastest qualifier, Italy, with the winner to go through to the gold medal race. The USA and Great Britain race off in the other semi-final.
The New Zealanders rode seventh of the 10 in the field, but their fantastic time – 4min 04.679s (just a whisker outside the world record) - held up against the three big teams who followed, USA, Great Britain and defending champions Germany.
It was noticeable that the New Zealand team finished fastest on the night – their strength and ability to maintain rhythm under pressure was great, and no other teams could sustain that pace over the closing stages.
The second-fastest team were USA, with 4min 05.238s, so quite a distance (in team pursuit terms) behind New Zealand.
The previous New Zealand record, set early last year, was 4min 08.440, so today’s effort took the team into uncharted territory.
Botha, a double world championship medallist in the individual pursuit, said the team were very pleased with their effort.
“We were trying to be very process focused, stay calm and look after each other and we managed that.”
She said they were aiming for a time of about 4min 07s, but when they started hearing the lap times and realised how fast they were going “we decided to run with it and ended up holding it, so we were really happy”.
Botha said the team would definitely be looking to go even quicker tomorrow. “We’ll have another team to race against, so we’ll be looking for a faster time and will be going for the world record.”
In the men’s team pursuit, New Zealand, who’d been timed at 3min 45.616s for sixth place in their qualifying round the previous day, faced Belgium.
The New Zealand team – Aaron Gate, Campbell Stewart, Tom Sexton and Keegan Hornblow – uncorked a really quick time to overpower the Belgians. New Zealand’s 3min 43.776s was nearly two seconds faster than what they recorded in their heat.
The New Zealand men will ride off for fifth place against France tomorrow.