Nothing will stop Anna Meares from overcoming any obstacle life places in front of her

OUR greatest Olympic cyclist never looks back, only forwards to the next challenge, writes Mike Colman.

A LITTLE under an hour before the start of the keirin final Anna Meares sits alone and statue-still in the Australian pits area in the centre of the track, white towel over one knee, water bottle clutched in two hands, staring straight ahead.

A member of the coaching staff approaches her, says a few words and gets no response. He might as well be speaking to her bike. He backs off and leaves Anna to her thoughts.

What is she thinking about? The long bumpy road that she has ridden to get to this point?

The horrific crash in LA just over eight years ago on a track just like this, in a keirin race like the one she has just ridden — and the one she is about to ride?

What about the breakdown of her 11-year marriage to Mark Chadwick two years ago, which did something that the broken neck in LA couldn’t — made her wonder whether she should ever get back on the bike?

Or that moment in the semi-final, just a few minutes ago, when Hong Kong’s Wai Sze Lee had charged up on her left-hand side as they jockeyed for position.

One moment the other girl was there, a growing blur in the corner of Meares’s eye, a split-second later she wasn’t; sparks coming off the track as she fell at top speed and her pedal slid along the timber.

It was a fall just like that one — maybe not even as spectacular — that left Meares lying in an emergency ward and hearing a doctor behind a screen tell her coach, “another couple of centimetres and she’d never walk again”.

Eight months after she had lain on that track in LA, Anna Meares beat China’s Guo Shuang in the semi-final of the women’s sprint at Laoshan Velodrome, Beijing, in the most absorbing, exhilarating, breathtaking showdown anyone there had ever seen.

After that, the 2-0 loss to long-time rival Victoria Pendleton of Great Britain in the final was an anticlimax, forgettable. Forgettable to everyone but Meares.

That silver medal drove her for four years, and in London — this time on Pendleton’s home track in front of a packed, screaming hostile crowd — she turned the tables, beating the British national hero in the final after again getting the better of Guo Shuang in the semi.

Is that what she is thinking about as she sits there? Of course not. Anna Meares doesn’t look back, only forwards.

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She is thinking about the final of the keiren, about where she wants to be sitting when the pacesetter riding the electric derny pulls off the track; how she prefers second but will be happy with third. How she has to watch the German girl who pipped her in the heat, how the Russian is a threat.

When the race starts every member of the Australian team stops doing whatever it is they are doing, stands and watches, silently.

The coaches and support staff; mechanics, soigneurs, other cyclists warming up for their own events … everyone stops and does what they have done dozens, maybe hundreds of times before: watch Anna go to work.

She is sitting third when the derny rider leaves the track. The German and the Russian are in front, just and she had thought.

As the ordered game of follow-the-leader turns into the Charge of the Light Brigade, she avoids the maelstrom of flying legs and weaving machines and sees off the two leaders.

On the last bend she goes high – maybe a little too high – then flies down and sprints for the finish, crossing the line a fraction of a wheel behind second-placed Brit Rebecca James and the winner, from the Netherlands, Elis Ligtlee.

As Ligtlee and James celebrate wildly with their supporters, she rides slowly around the track and gives a small wave to the Australians in the crowd.

As she comes down the straight she passes the Dutch coach, puts out her hand and gives him a high five.

Then she cruises into the pits and climbs off her bike without emotion. The sprint starts tomorrow. She’s got some thinking to do.

Originally published as Nothing will stop Anna Meares from overcoming any obstacle life places in front of her