Ireland’s Mark Downey and Felix English have rounded off the final event in the Tissot UCI Track Cycling World Cup in La with a gold medal win in the Madison.
The Madison is a new event on the Olympic calendar for Tokyo and the Irish team have made clear their intentions with another dominant performance putting them in first place ahead of Denmark and New Zealand, adding gold to the silver they won last week at the World Cup in California.
The Madison race is a tactical event that involves a two rider team working together to cover 30km, or 120 laps of the track, slinging each other into action.
There are sprints every ten laps, and bonus points for lapping the field. The Irish duo lapped the field at the halfway point before waiting for the perfect moment to launch their final attack on the field which secured gold.
Downey was buoyant afterwards and said: "That was a class race, I enjoyed every minute of that one, for the first time in a Madison we were actually in control. After the fouth sprint we first tried out trade mark move, but it didn’t work and we were caught, but we nailed it again and it worked.
"We picked up sprint points and on the way we got a lap with some more teams so it helped. The race relaxed after that with teams just going for sprints."
Tactics came into it and the Downey and English bided their time before launching the winning attack with 20 laps to go, Downey continued:
"With 20 laps to go the Swiss went for it but it was too early. The New Zealanders who were leaders at the time panicked and brought them back, that was perfect for us, as soon as they brought it back we went, it was all or nothing. We felt good out there, legs to burn. It was such a nice feeling winning with Felix, I’m ecstatic, very happy right now!”
English hailed the input of coach David Muntaner and said: “David’s training over the past two seasons has brought us from making up numbers to being some of the strongest track riders in the world. We really can’t thank him enough, he’s a great coach and friend.
"We won the last sprint and continued on to take the lap – we had the gas to keep going, and were just stronger out there than everyone else. It was a crazy race! We’re both ridiculously happy now.”
In the Individual Pursuit Anna Turvey finished tenth with a time of 3.43.639 and Eoin Mullen finished 21st in the Keirin.
