Tuesday 21 April 2015 17:18, UK
Great Britain’s men had to settle for team pursuit silver after being beaten to gold by New Zealand in a nip-and-tuck final at the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Paris.
Ed Clancy, Steven Burke, Andy Tennant and Owain Doull were behind after both 1km and 2km of the 4km race, but they then turned that into a 0.4-second lead by the 3km mark.
However, Clancy peeled off with three laps remaining and Britain subsequently lost their impetus, allowing New Zealand to fight back and win by 0.6 seconds in a time of 3min 54.088sec.
Despite the defeat, the result represents a major step forward for Britain following their woeful performance at last year’s World Championships, when they failed to reach the medal finals after qualifying only eighth fastest.
Their preparations had also been hampered by injury to Burke, who fractured his collarbone in a training crash less than six weeks ago but rode all three rounds in Paris.
Clancy said: "It was only a month ago Burkey was lying in the road with a broken collarbone, Doull was cut to ribbons [after being involved in the same crash] and I didn't think we were coming here.
"We had a shocker of an event [in 2014]. Understandably we got a fair bit of flack for that. It was a massive improvement. There's more to come. We can't guarantee we'll get out and win [at the Rio Olympics next year], but we have got a chance now and we believe we have got a chance."
Elsewhere on the second day of the championships, Jason Kenny was knocked out of the men's keirin in the first round. He could only finish fifth in his heat and then was pipped into second in his repechage, which wasn't enough to progress to the second round.
Defending champion Francois Pervis, of France, went on to win gold ahead of runner-up Ed Dawkins, of New Zealand, and third-placed Azizulhasni Awang, of Malaysia.
Britain's Matt Gibson finished an impressive sixth in the men's scratch race, which was won by Germany's Lucas Liss, while in the women's 500m time trial, Katy Marchant finished 13th and Victoria Williamson 15th as Russia's Anastasia Voynova took gold.
