Rio Olympics 2016: Team GB cycling aces struggling to prove they are still the wheel deal after poor results, rows over drug tests and friends clashing
BRITISH cycling’s feel-good factor is deflating like a tyre with a slow puncture.
And someone better find patches and a pump pronto before it all goes totally and unfixably flat.
GB has so far bagged one bronze medal from four men’s and women’s races out on the road.
Tour de France winner Chris Froome, courageous third place in yesterday’s Time Trial or not, looked weary and out of sorts in both.
Lizzie Armitstead was allowed to compete in the midst of a global doping purge, despite having missed three drugs tests.
Oh, and then there is the ongoing soap opera of seven-times Olympic champ Sir Bradley Wiggins and former bosom buddy Mark Cavendish supposedly turning their backs on each other in a very public fall-out.
Right now, it is all one bust spoke away from being an official omnishambles, because just about everything that can go wrong in what should be one of our blue ribbon events IS going wrong.
All of which piles enormous pressure on the shoulders of the Team GB riders, who carry the flag indoors to Rio’s soaring Velodrome tonight.
Jason Kenny, Philip Hindes and Callum Skinner lead the way at 8pm UK time, springing out of the traps in the heats of the Men’s Team Sprint.
Soon after, though, dawns an even more crucial moment for the team’s wobbling reputation.
Team Pursuit quartet of Wiggins, Owain Doull, Ed Clancy and Steven Burke go into action at the expense of Cavendish.
Cav is named as first replacement, but in truth he only has his specialist Omnium event to look forward to.
So after the fuss he made about his exclusion, that foursome better perform — or the WD40 really will hit the chain.
Who knows, maybe they will cruise it. Maybe then the sprint team, having cantered to their final, will have golds round the necks by bedtime.
And maybe Cavendish and Wiggins will run hand in hand across Copacabana Beach to celebrate!
The way things have gone so far, though, it’s a big old maybe.
Caretaker team boss Andy Harrison, the man parachuted in after starmaker Shane Sutton was forced out of his role as Technical Director just four months before these Games, did his best to paper over the cracks yesterday. But at best that, to be frank, was not that good.
His suggestion that “Brad and Cav” were great pals, who only say silly things because they have big personalities was hardly a denial that there ARE tensions in the camp.
But even if he is right and all the headlines are just a silly misunderstanding, it will take some serious medal winning to put things right.
That is doubtful in the wake of Cavendish’s interview on Sky Sports the other night, when he claimed Wiggins was “super stressed out” by “needing to be the hero”. While a bit of back-biting and bitching might well make good copy and sexy TV, it is of absolutely no help to the cause.
I mean, what happened to the old maxim that ‘what goes in the dressing room, stays in the dressing room’?
It cannot be healthy. Talking of which, there was mystery in the wake of Froome’s bronze here yesterday — 62 seconds behind runaway Swiss winner Fabian Cancellara — over just how healthy he was.
Harrison bigged up the Tour de France champ for doing so well, despite having had a tight chest since before Saturday’s punishing road race.
But Froome said repeatedly that there was no problem.
On a day when Rio was enveloped in threatening clouds and battered by rain and gales, all this confession and denial only added to the air of confusion.
It is even up for argument whether or not Froome’s medal should be a glass-half-full or half-empty scenario.
Had Rohan Dennis not lost vital seconds when he broke a handlebar and had to switch bikes, chances are the Aussie rider would have come home third.
As for Britain’s other two hopefuls, Geraint Thomas and Emma Pooley, they trailed home ninth and 14th in their respective packs.
For Poole, 33, the conditions were simply too much for her slight frame to handle and her time of 46:32 for the 29.7km course was more than two minutes adrift of American winner Kristin Armstrong.
Thomas, 30, at least came away from it all with his sense of humour intact. He only found out on Tuesday night he would be included.
He laughed: “I was eating in McDonald’s with the boys on Sunday but then, Usain Bolt eats McDonald’s, so why not?”
