Canada’s track cyclists take rough Olympic days on the chin and look forward

Athletes know that there will be hard days in their career, but it’s been a rough few days as Canada’s medal hopefuls in track have faced disappointments. Kris Westwood, director of high performance services with Cycling Canada shares some post-mortem thoughts on how the week has gone so far, as the athletes head into the final days at the velodrome on the weekend.

A stomach bug swept through part of the team

In the week leading up to the track events, a few members of the track cycling team came down with a stomach bug that was going around the athletes’ hotel. The Canadian Olympic committee dealt with the situation swiftly, disinfecting the hotel, making sure the team doctor was able to identify the bug. Luckily it was highly treatable and everybody got the antibiotics they needed in a timely manner, but did it have an effect on the outcomes of the races? “It’s really hard to say—obviously you can’t prove a negative, but obviously it was a bit of a stresser for everybody,” Westwood said, who mentioned that it was fortunate the athletes were given an antibiotic that has very limited side effects. “Everybody bounced back really fast, but the stress doesn’t help,” he said. “But we’re at the same hotel as New Zealand—they had a couple of cases—and they’ve been having some great results here, so I really don’t think we can say that that had a ton of effect on the outcomes.”

The women’s team sprint wasn’t prioritized

In a statement through Cycling Canada, Lauriane Genest mentioned how the women’s team sprint wasn’t prioritized as an event. “We decided to really give it our all on the second run, and that’s what we did. The track is fast, we’re just not competitive in that event,” she said after the race.

Westwood explained that the women’s team sprint was a qualification pathway, but the team had never performed at a high enough level in that event to be realistic medal contenders. “That meant that when it came to preparing for the games, the training focus switched to the sprint and the keirin,” he said.

Strategic issues affected some race outcomes

In an Instagram post, Cycling Canada alluded to the fact that there were strategic issues that played to the athletes’ disadvantage on the day of the women’s keirin and the men’s omnium.

“I debriefed with the sprint coach Franck [Durivaux] and they both just waited a little bit too late, tried to go around the outside and just didn’t have the guts,” Westwood said. “It’s really hard to pass at this track. The finish line is quite a bit closer to the banking than it is to other tracks, so you can’t really wait until the last minute. We saw with [Lauriane’s] last ride here in the repêchages you have to take the initiative.”

Persevering on a bad day

Westwood couldn’t confirm if Dylan Bibic, who came 19th in the omnium was afflicted by the bug, but he had this to say: “What really impressed me with Dylan was you could tell that he was very upset, right from the scratch race, but he still did all the races and he finished. A lot of athletes in those circumstances would have just pulled out and he went right through to the end and to me that speaks a lot to his character, his perseverance, his ability to push through when things are going badly and that’s going to stand him in really good stead in the future.”

Looking forward for the final days of competition

Westwood explained that there is no time to wallow, it’s always focus forward. “Every sport, every event you go to, you have days like this, where things do not go your way and you might get one, two or three punches in one day and it’s tough, but all you can do is pick yourself up and think about the next day and think about the next event and move forward,” he said. “We’re all fighters and that includes staff as well as athletes. The message that I always give to staff is it doesn’t matter how well or poorly the athletes do, we treat them the same. We do our best job for them, we make sure they get to the line prepared and make sure they feel well supported after they finish their competition.”

Officiating mistakes don’t seem to have affected anyone from Canada

After the women’s team pursuit qualification, team member Maggie Coles-Lyster posted to Instagram: “We’re through, we’ve qualified, we’re on to the rounds tomorrow, which is great, we can all sleep easy tonight. But we’re also going to apply and take this as our official application to the world record book for longest team pursuit at an Olympic Games. Team pursuit, usually 16 laps, we did 18 laps because they messed up. Love a four-and-a-half-kilometre team pursuit, that felt great.” Sarah Van Dam added: “Love it when they ring the bell wrong.” There have been a couple of other errors, including in the elimination race.

Westwood doesn’t think these blunders have affected the Canadian team at all, but said they have been a topic of conversation. “It could have affected the outcome [of the women’s team pursuit], but it didn’t; we were fortunate in that way,” he said. “I think we still finished a couple of tenths of a second ahead of the next team, even though the riders saw five laps to go twice and so they adjusted their pacing accordingly. So it did slow the team down, but not enough to have actually affected the finishing order in the qualification.”