British Cycling’s head coach has hit back at other nations who have questioned Team GB’s dominance in the velodrome, accusing them of simply not being good enough.
Iain Dyer, who leads the Olympic track coaches, was responding to criticisms from former gold medal winners who have lost out to British riders this week.
“It’s a shame,” he said. “I can only point to the fact you can look at athletes here who are simply not at their best, not at their best of the last four years, not at their best this year.
“If you look at some of the times that have been done here, some of the teams simply haven’t shown up. That’s the bottom line … Some of the people here are not even performing at the level of the world championships,” he added, of the event staged in London in March.
Victoria Pendleton’s old Australian rival, Anna Meares, who won bronze in the keirin at the weekend behind GB’s silver medallist, Becky James, before finishing 10th in the individual sprint, told the Sydney Morning Herald: “The British are just phenomenal when it comes to the Olympic Games, and we’re all just scratching our heads going: ‘How do they lift so much when in so many events they have not even been in contention in the world championships?’
“It’s been tough because you come in here with hope, and you come in here with strong performances at world level for a number of years and then at the Olympic Games it seems like you’re just not in competition with that nation. So they’ve got it together, and to be honest I’m not exactly sure what they’ve got together.”
On Tuesday evening Meares clarified her comments, saying she did not insinuate that the British team “are cheating or doing anything suspicious”.
She tweeted: “What I said was, it makes me scratch my head to think how we can be better competitive with them at the Olympics. That’s what great rivals, champions and teams like GBR do. They’re an amazing team and their athletes and staff deserve the success that’s come their way.”
Kristina Vogel, who won gold with the German team sprint squad in London in 2012, told German media: “I don’t want to accuse anyone of anything, but it’s certainly questionable. They come en masse at this high level and I have no idea how they do it.”
At previous competitions since London 2012 the Brits were “cannon fodder”, she said. “I don’t know if they didn’t train for three years. They must be doing something right.”
Vogel won the world championship keirin title in March but was slightly slower in Rio, coming in sixth.
The British Olympic cycling team are thought to be the best funded squad at the Olympics, receiving £30.2m from UK Sport. The bulk of that money is spent on the track, where the variables can be controlled and where most of the medals are on offer. They also partially benefit from membership subscriptions paid by British Cycling’s 123,500 lay members, costing between £21 and £72 a year.
In comparison, the Australian Institute of Sport awarded its cyclists just AUD$34.1m (£18.6m) for the current four-year Olympic cycle.
Dyer said the British squad was all focused around the Olympics. “While we peak athletically for the Olympics, we also peak in our research and innovation for the Olympics … The helmets we are using here, for example, we used in 2012 but haven’t used them since 2012 until now. The bikes obviously are new, the first time. And no end of different components and strategies are only appearing for the first time,” he said.
“I think what we have got to bear in mind is over the last 16 years since the Sydney Olympics, when Jason Queally won the kilo and we won medals in the team sprint and in the team pursuit, I think we’ve just tried really, really hard to maximise our medal effectiveness in the Olympics.
“We’ve got a really great team of people doing a fantastic job and who will go to the ends of the earth looking for that final marginal gain. It’s all about marginal gains, isn’t it? That’s what we have become famous for. The low-hanging fruit disappeared years ago. There was a lot of talk of people catching up because they just saw the gains that we had started to make was stuff they could copy and emulate. Now the devil is in the detail. The marginal gains have never been more marginal and aggregating that together has never been more important.”
The French cyclist Michael D’Almeida, part of the sprint trio who came third to Jason Kenny, Callum Skinner and Philip Hindes in Rio, said he couldn’t understand why the British were so much better than everyone else. He suggested it was particularly baffling given the poor British performance in the run-up to the Games. At this year’s world track championships in London, the British team sprint men came in sixth, with the Kiwis winning gold. Yet in Rio the New Zealand squad had to settle for silver.
“We are human beings like them, we are made of the same stuff, we have a bike like they do, so why are they better?” he said to the press in French.
Skinner, who also won a silver in the keirin in Rio, suggested the British dominance was simply down to a monomaniacal focus on the Games. He said: “For us it’s all about the Olympics. All the competitions are all processed in order to get to the Olympics in the best shape possible because ultimately to us that’s what matters most.”
The Great Britain sprint coach, Justin Grace, said there was no secret behind his team’s success. He told L’Equipe . “When I was in New Zealand, I used to ask myself: ‘What’s special in Manchester?’ I can tell you: we do everything in every department a little bit better than the others, and that’s all. Don’t look: there’s no secret, no magic. Only some good training and great athletes.”
Great Britain won seven of 10 track events on the London Olympic program four years ago. Of the eight track events contested so far in Rio, Team GB have won golds in both men and women’s team pursuit, the men’s team sprint and the men’s individual sprint, where Skinner won silver. Mark Cavendish and Becky James won silver in the omnium and keirin respectively. Britain did not qualify for the women’s sprint.
