A deep dive into the bronze-medal-winning ride by the Canadian women’s team pursuit squad

At 1,000 m into the race, Canada was behind. On Friday evening, at the Milton velodrome, the live results showed the U.S. women’s team pursuit squad was more than a second ahead of Canada. For the next 1,000 m, the Canucks started to close the gap. Then, the U.S. team started to struggle. At about 2,375 m, the group’s cohesion started to fall apart. The three remaining riders weren’t together, weren’t making smooth exchanges on the banks like the Canadians. At 3,375 m, Canada was ahead and kept the lead for the next two and a half laps. In a dramatic, nail-biter of a race, Canada had taken bronze.

The team pursuit can seem like a simple test of legs. Sure, there’s the technique of the exchange, where the lead rider finishes with her pull by going high on a bank as the group rides beneath her. The former lead then links onto the back of the group. But Canada’s squad of Sarah van Dam, Maggie Coles-Lyster, Erin Attwell and Ariane Bonhomme, as well as their coach Richard Wooles, had hatched a plan before the bronze medal event that mixed some psychology in with physical ability. Their strategy took into account what they knew of their opponents.

“Generally, we have a plan for the first 2 km,” Erin Attwell said shortly after the podium ceremony in Milton with her bronze medal around her neck. “It’s to stay pretty conservative. You don’t want to blow anyone out of the water quite yet because the race is never won in the first 2 km, but it can definitely be lost. One rotation takes us about 2 km in, so it’s really important that we’re getting the feedback from the coach and responding to the pace—if we’re slow or fast. But as soon as you hit the 2 km mark, you can really put the pressure on the other team. My job was to set everyone else up so that they could have the best recovery possible going into the final 2 km. I just kept it pretty steady.”

Later that evening on the infield, Cycling Canada track coach Richard Wooles explained how coaches communicate with their riders during a race. “There are a couple of strategies,” he said. “You see coaches doing different things. There’s old-school, where we used to stand on the line. The riders would have a pace strategy. If you walk toward them, that’s ‘Oh dear, we need to speed up a little bit.’ Or you walk away from them, which is, “OK. You’re above pace, so you can chill a little bit.’ You can be in the corner and just shout a number at them. If we agreed that we wanted to do lap times of 15.6 seconds, you’d shout, “Five six!’ as loudly as you can, and hopefully they hear it. That steadies the nerves a little bit. For us, once you get into a medal round, we don’t really care about the time. It’s just the first team across the line. So there’s another strategy in that. We had a strategy to try to ride under control for the first 2 km. Since we were racing against the U.S.A., I’d say, there are one or two riders there who have a history of being unpredictable. They’re quite strong riders. After the first 2 km, we wanted to see if we could get them to react. We tried to go quite fast for a lap or two, and see if they’d accelerate super hard, and just break their team in half.”

It’s up to a coach like Wooles to put the plan into motion, but then it truly is a team effort. “The coach has to make those decisions because a rider will usually second guess herself,” Wooles said. “They’ll say, ‘I’m not sure I can do that.’ You just have to say, ‘Well, here’s the strategy we want to try. Have some trust in the strategy. And you can adapt it. It’s not remote control. You can decide if you want to do more or less.’ We lay it out beforehand. And this was lots of fun. It’s nice for them to get onto the podium.”

During the race for bronze, things went almost exactly to plan. “I put a little bit of pressure onto the U.S. because we knew that Chloé, who’s really strong, if she feels the pressure, sometimes she’ll crack her teammates, and I think that’s exactly what happened,” Attwell said. Just before she pulled off at the halfway point, Canada was edging closer to the U.S. It seemed the riders from south of the 49th were a bit rattled. Their cohesion fell apart around a lap and a half later. Chloé, whom Attwell mentioned, is Chloé Dygert. She has eight track world championship gold medals and the world record for the individual pursuit. Dygert was at the front of her squad when the U.S. riders started to get strung out along the track. The Canadians played it just right.

Wooles has been working full-time at Cycling Canada since the start of 2022. He, however, was instrumental in building up track cycling in Canada throughout the 2000s, up to the London Olympics. One rider who Wooles worked with is Laura Brown, part of the team who took bronze in 2012. She was at Milton coaching the men’s endurance riders, but was also invested in the women’s results. Since Brown’s era—which also featured Tara Whitten, Jasmin Duehring, Steph Roorda, Allison Beveridge, Georgia Simmerling and Kirsti Lay—Canada hasn’t been getting on World Cup or world championship podiums regularly. With the current generation, Brown suspects there’s more successes in their future. “I’m so happy to see the women’s team pursuit win bronze,” Brown said. “Just to see that team get on the podium again was so exciting. I’m just so proud of them. It’s a fairly young team, so they’re going to go on to great things. I’m very proud of the legacy of the women’s team pursuit.”