The embarrassment of Tokyo triggered a post-mortem. The rebirth was glorious

The last Olympics ended in snapped-handlebars ignominy and a post-mortem into Australia’s worst Olympic track cycling performance since 1980.

The current one finished with Matthew Richardson backflipping for television cameras, Matthew Glaetzer feeling “like a bit of a Steve Bradbury” and Australia rejoining the sport’s superpowers on the road to LA 2028 and Brisbane 2032.

A helter-skelter keirin final concluded a surprisingly rewarding Paris 2024 campaign at the velodrome, with Richardson and Glaetzer securing silver and bronze to take their country’s medal tally to one gold, two silver, two bronze.

That it stands as Australia’s most successful in the 20 years since those five golds in the halcyon days of Athens 2004, is more unexpected still given the embarrassment of three years ago still sits fresh in the mind.

The Tokyo Games were most memorable for a major equipment malfunction, the handlebars that snapped underneath Alex Porter during team pursuit qualifying. The bronze medal the team recovered to win was the only one, and a rigorous review found need for major reform within the AusCycling ranks.

Silver medallist Matthew Richardson (left) and bronze medallist Matthew Glaetzer.Credit: Getty Images

The overhaul was exhaustive, and aimed at remedying a tumultuous two Olympic cycles during which Australia ceded their place in an aerodynamics arms race led increasingly by Great Britain and other fast-rising nations. Expectations of the overall squad heading into Paris 2024 were cautiously hopeful at best, and even veteran coach Tim Decker viewed his men’s team pursuit squad as underdogs.

Once they had proved otherwise, breaking the world record in the first round and then overcoming Team GB in the final to win a first Olympic gold in the event for 20 years, a tearful Decker acknowledged the team had “been to hell and back”.

It was an apt summation for not just the team pursuit, but also the overall national contingent who had not brought home a track gold since Anna Meares outsprinted Britain’s Victoria Pendleton in 2012.

”These Olympics, just looking at the spread of medals in Tokyo, the Brits were still dominant and the Dutch joined them,” said Jesse Korf, AusCycling’s executive general manager of performance. “And now it seems like we’ve been able to rejoin that group of superpowers in cycling, which is incredibly encouraging and exciting.

Matthew Richardson and Harrie Lavreysen share a moment after the men’s keirin final.Credit: Getty Images

“We’ve just got to make sure that, as much as we’ve got to celebrate all the amazing things that happened here, we keep stoic, stay critical and keep building.”

Key to that building is Richardson, the 25-year-old sprint ace who tested Dutch master Harrie Lavreysen more than anybody else from anywhere else in the world to date, ultimately finishing behind him with silver in the individual sprint, silver in the kierin and bronze in the team sprint.

Lavreysen clinched gold in all three, becoming the first cyclist since British legend Sir Chris Hoy to sweep the men’s sprint events at an Olympics.

Georgia Baker narrowly missed out on a medal in the omnium on Sunday.Credit: Getty Images

Korf said Richardson was “at the age where theoretically his physical peak should be in LA”. Richardson himself was optimistic, too, given his progress since Tokyo, when he exited in the early rounds of the sprint. It is, at the very least, the early stages of a rivalry with the 27-year-old Lavreysen already separated by mere milliseconds.

“This is the closest anyone’s ever got to him in the last four or five years, when he really started to take off,” Richardson said a few minutes after executing a celebratory backflip for broadcast media. “Normally you do a sprint and go, ‘I’ve qualified well but Harry’s going to beat me by about two or three 10ths of a second’.

“It was three-thousandths of a second [in the sprint event], so I think that’s a bit of a statement of what’s to come. If I can keep progressing the way I’m progressing, that might shift and it might be me on top of qualifying.

“Harry’s not that old so it’s going to be tough … I can see Harry and I pushing each other to the line until we both were retired, to be honest.”

On Sunday, Richardson pushed Lavreysen all the way around the final bend in a keirin final he said was the fastest in history, crossing 0.056 seconds adrift. Behind them, a three-rider pile-up opened up crucial space for Glaetzer to slip through and take out bronze. It was the 31-year-old’s first individual Olympic medal in four Games, and came a few days after his men’s team sprint bronze ended a miserable run of fourth places.

“Good to finish on some good luck,” said Glaetzer, who reconfirmed this will be his last Olympics. “I mean, look, it’s not all luck ... I was just grateful that I stayed upright in that final corner.

“They were bumping me and then I saw them absolutely all hit the deck and was just trying to survive at that point and not crash into them. And all of a sudden I saw that I was crossing a line with bronze and couldn’t believe it. I felt like a bit of a Steve Bradbury, but oh gosh it’s amazing. To finish with an Olympic individual medal is something really special.”

The challenge now will be supporting the women’s side of the program to catch back up. The gap has been particularly evident in the women’s sprint - once a discipline of immense depth led by two-time Olympic gold medallist Anna Meares but now sparse enough that Australia did not qualify a women’s sprint team for the expanded three-rider event.

Georgia Baker came the closest to a medal, sitting second in the omnium heading into the last of the four races but dropping to fifth after an underwhelming points race.

“Pretty upset,” Baker said. “I’m proud of how I rode and the three events prior. I was really happy with being really consistent, and I can’t be disappointed because I didn’t leave anything out on the track. I gave it my all, but I still am disappointed.”

Baker, 29, carried added emotion into her third Games following the death of former teammate and friend Melissa Hoskins last December, from injuries sustained by a car outside her home in Adelaide. Her husband, fellow cyclist Rohan Dennis, has been charged with causing her death.

On the eve of the Paris Games, Baker gifted her team pursuit quartet matching watches to honour Hoskins’ memory.

“Mel was a teammate of mine in Rio and gave me a watch before Rio,” Baker said. “The Olympics in itself this week, it goes so quickly. But the main things I think when I look back on the Olympics is the process and the journey, and I think that was what I wanted the watches to be. No matter how we perform on the track, it’s a moment that you’ll remember regardless of the result.”

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