CANADA SETS TWO NEW NATIONAL RECORDS ON SECOND DAY OF TRACK CYCLING COMPETITIONS
TOKYO (August 3, 2021) – The women’s and men’s Team Pursuit squads made a comeback on the second day of track competition. Both teams set personal best times and smashed their respective Canadian records. After a difficult start for the women’s team during yesterday’s qualification round, the quartet came back with a renewed sense of focus in Round 1 against France with a time of 4:09.249, a new Canadian record.
On top of beating their opponents, the team of Allison Beveridge, Georgia Simmerling, Ariane Bonhomme and Annie Foreman-Mackey set a personal best time and moved on to the bronze medal round against the USA. The race was neck-in-neck for the first 3000 metres, with Canada ultimately finishing 4th.
“To be able to come back from qualifying in last to riding for a bronze medal was pretty special,” said Bonhomme. “For me, having the chance to step up and show what I knew I could do was amazing. A few years ago, we said that we wanted to ride a 4:09 at the Olympics and to be honest, after the qualifying run I didn’t know if we could do it. To be able to regroup after a bad performance and to go out there and do the time that we set out to do, it’s very special.”
On the men’s side, the team of Vincent De Haître, Derek Gee, Michael Foley and Jay Lamoureux initially qualified in 6th clocking in only a few hundredths of a second off the Rio 2016 Olympic record. They faced Germany in Round 1, where they shaved almost 4 seconds off their previous time to finish in national record time of 3:46.769.
“We knew it was going to be close with the German team just because of qualifying,” said Gee. “We have a really unique strategy with Vince just doing one long pull to start, so we knew with what he’s capable of doing in the Kilo that we could get a little bit up on them and the boys held it together really nicely.”
Tomorrow, the men’s team will tackle the 5-6 Team Pursuit finals while sprinters Hugo Barrette, Nick Wammes, Lauriane Genest and Kelsey Mitchell will be making their debut in the men’s Sprint and women’s Keirin events. All competitions can be streamed on CBC Olympics.
