Double Olympic Gold medallist Ellesse Andrews (left) with coach and father Jon. Photo / Getty Images
How did one of our greatest-ever Olympians emerge seemingly fully formed from an organisation that had seemed to be in perpetual crisis? And what’s her dad got to do with it?
It was the feel-good moment of the 2024 Olympics. Ellesse Andrews was the star, but it was her dad Jon who stole the show. He was fizzing, stoked, rapt, over the moon, could barely contain himself. It’s unlikely a dad’s pride has ever been so perfectly captured on camera in the moment of its fullest blooming.
His daughter had just won her first Olympic gold medal, New Zealand’s second-ever gold in Olympic cycling, and the country’s first since 2004. He was, in that moment, the proudest dad in the world and he didn’t care who knew it.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited in my whole life!” he told the Sky Sport reporter at the finish line immediately after the race. “I didn’t even watch her finish!” Then he either forgot he was on live television or remembered that the reporter was the least important person there, and started talking directly to his daughter: “I saw you come through the bend and I was like ‘there’s no way you’re being beaten from there’. I just turned and ran for the track.”
He was there not just because he was her dad, but because he was her coach – and not just her coach but the coach of the entire New Zealand sprint cycling team. And he was elated not just because his daughter had won Olympic gold but because her win had delivered a redemption story for a sport that desperately needed one.
Three years earlier, one day after the Tokyo Olympics, top Kiwi cyclist Olivia Podmore had died in a suspected suicide. It was not the first time the culture of governing body Cycling New Zealand had been put in the spotlight, but it was by far the most damaging. Hardly a week went by when it wasn’t in the headlines. Nine months after Podmore’s death, an independent inquiry ripped into the organisation, saying, among many other criticisms, that it prioritised medals over wellbeing and had “pervasive gender biases”.
“More needs to be done to meet the need and ensure equitable treatment and therefore opportunities for female cyclists,” the report read. “The issue is exacerbated by the overall male dominance within the HPP [high performance programme] and the DTE [daily training environment]. We consider that this directly impacts performance and potential.”
A little over a year after that, Jon Andrews found himself the key coach in Cycling New Zealand’s high performance programme, leading a team made up almost entirely of women.
From the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Jon Andrews was himself a world-class track cyclist. He claimed a bronze medal in the 1km time trial at the 1990 Commonwealth Games in Auckland, finished seventh in a field of 32 in the same event at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona and was fourth at the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria. It’s hard not to look back and wonder what might have been.
“I would do anything to wind back my time and to be a competitive cyclist again,” he says now.
“We really didn’t have great sprint coaches. We had good coaches but they were very amateur when I was riding in the late eighties and early- to mid-nineties – very amateur about what we did and we really didn’t understand sprint cycling particularly well. Some of the stuff we did was awesome, actually, really good, but some of the critical stuff we just didn’t have a good handle on. And there was no one really in New Zealand, I felt, that could properly advise on that.”
After retiring from racing, he built a successful IT business while helping raise Ellesse and her younger brother Eddie. In 2016, he returned to cycling professionally, as head coach of the New Zealand Under-19 track team – a job he kept for three years. On Linkedin, he wrote of his pride in that role, “helping to develop some young New Zealanders with not only amazing physical skills but more importantly, great personal qualities that will help set them up for life”.
After leaving that job to take up a coaching role in Australia, he was forced to watch the riders he’d developed here as juniors, including his daughter, move on without him. “I really hated being on the outside of the fence watching as a spectator,” he says, “because quite often I didn’t agree with what was going on on the inside of the field. But there was nothing I could do about it apart from voice my opinion in some sort of polite way that tried not to offend people.”
When he was appointed Cycling New Zealand’s lead sprint coach in September last year, it had been five years since he’d last worked with Ellesse. He might have had strong ideas about coaching, but so did she.
At “work” she would refer to him only as Jon. “I don’t want to be calling him dad,” she says now, “and I really also didn’t, and don’t, like it when other people refer to him as my dad. I like to keep that really nice and professional and straight. She also wouldn’t let him use any of the nicknames he has for her: “Ellesse is a really hard taskmaster”, he says.
“I think Jon’s sometimes a little bit more relaxed than me,” she says. “He would definitely be happy to just go with the flow... but I wanted to set down my expectations that I wanted to stay professional while we were at work.”
“Yeah, I am quite calm,” he says. “I had one stage during the Olympics when I think I said to our team psychologist: ‘I actually feel too calm. This is so big. Is there something wrong with me?’”
He was with Ellesse at the start of every one of her races in Paris, physically holding her upright on the bike, as he might once have done when she was a small child on her first two-wheeler. He had spent years doing everything he could to help her fulfil her dreams, and now they were so close, there was nothing more he could do.
“It’s really tempting to say something,” he says. “Especially in those kinds of intimate moments... That’s the challenge, as a dad and a coach, is just to keep it all locked away.”
The last time New Zealand had a genuinely world-class sprint cycling team was when the men’s team of Eddie Dawkins, Sam Webster and Ethan Mitchell dominated the team sprint event in the mid-2010s, winning three world championships and claiming an Olympic silver medal at Rio in 2016.
Prior to this year’s Olympics, there was no indication that the men’s performance was about to be emulated by a team of women from a programme that had, only two years prior, become nationally infamous for its treatment of women. As recently as May this year, the women’s sprint team of Rebecca Petch, Shaane Fulton and Ellesse Andrews were ranked seventh in the world. They only qualified for Paris, as Jon Andrews puts it, “by the skin of their teeth”.
But even then, they were in the middle of a remarkable transformation. Between last year’s world champs and this year’s Olympics, the team improved their personal best (PB) time by 1.7s: “That’s an unbelievable margin to shave off a PB in an event that’s only 750 metres long,” Jon says.
In Paris, three months after they’d nearly missed out on Olympic qualification altogether, they broke the world record and briefly became the fastest team in history. Great Britain broke the record again shortly after, and went on to narrowly beat them in the gold medal race, but it didn’t change the fact something incredible had just happened. Ellesse describes their silver medal performance as “a crazy, crazy result”. Jon says he was “stunned”.
“There are two ways of looking at performance,” Jon says. “Two vastly different approaches”.
The men’s sprint team of the mid-2010s, he says, was a “super successful bunch of guys with a coach that was very focused in his way of doing things” and “probably a polar opposite to the group that is there now under me. A very intensive, no compromises, really high intensity training environment with high standards and probably a bit of ego and a bit of machismo behind it. Whereas what we’ve got now is a real group dynamic. The athletes are a big part of driving the environment. My ego doesn’t show up too often... So it’s a really, really different approach and everyone loves coming to work and training and being in the environment and the results that we’ve achieved, I think, are a really good reflection of that”.
In a sport in which the margins are so fine and the variables so many, it’s impossible to attribute New Zealand’s five-medal haul at the track in Paris to a single one, but when asked to name the most important factor, Jon says “the culture of the team”.
“We have a really great group of athletes, an awesome group of athletes to work with. They’re physically excellent cyclists but they’re also great human beings. They’re really determined, they’re focused and fun to be around.
“We have a great staff as well... but probably what was a little bit lacking before is just the cohesiveness of that group of people. And my role as a coach, as a leader, is to bring everyone together and to make sure that we’re sticking to our values and the environment that we’re working in, or our culture, is what we want it to be. It supports performance, but also is fun and enjoyable to be part of.”
Three days after the team sprint final, Ellesse Andrews lined up for her first individual final, the keirin. She had come from nowhere to take silver in the same event at the Tokyo Olympics three years earlier, and had gotten even better since then, but keirin is a notoriously difficult event to win, even if you’re the best in the world. It’s six riders, sprinting at full speed, in a tight bunch, inches apart. It’s tactically complex and contact is common, as are crashes. And the field, as in every sprint event at this year’s Olympics, was stacked: Jon Andrews describes them as “the strongest women’s sprint cycling fields ever in the history of the sport”.
“In Olympics past, you might have had one or two, maybe three, really strong competitors that were battling it out for the gold medals. It was quite clear-cut. But this year, especially in keirin, there were probably six girls that I thought would make the keirin final and it would have been an absolute battle to win that gold medal,” he says.
At the start line, Ellesse, being held up by her dad, was not worried. “I felt really calm,” she says. “I think probably the most calm that I’ve ever felt in racing, like I could just take a deep breath and really look at it from a really healthy and wide perspective. And that gave me the opportunity to just do what I needed to do to put myself in a good position and not get overwhelmed by any other factors.”
One way to mitigate the risks inherent in the keirin is to ride from the front, but to do so is physiologically extremely difficult and tactically stupid, because it requires so much more work. When the pacemaking motorbike pulls off the track, the riders sprint for three laps of the 250m track. Because of wind resistance, the first-placed rider is using around 30% more energy than those drafting behind them. That would make riding the entire race from the front the equivalent of Usain Bolt running 130m to win the Olympic 100m final.
Ellesse is not stupid. She knew better than to try to beat the strongest field ever assembled by riding from the front for three laps. So she did it for two and a half. Half a lap in, she pulled out from behind Mexico’s Daniela Gaxiola Gonzalez, blasted past her – and that was the last time she was anything but first. Late in the race, several other riders tried to exploit her fatigue, only to discover she had none.
As Jon put it later, she was accelerating while they were going backwards. He knew she wasn’t being beaten from there. He ran for the track.
If the Andrews family has so far come across as chilled-out zen masters fuelled primarily by love and togetherness, it is time to introduce exhibit C: the individual sprint.
A match-race-style event over three laps, the individual sprint is a test of wits – mentally demanding and so tactically weird that riders sometimes come to a complete stop in order to avoid being in the lead. It’s compelling viewing, but the most compelling part is what happens before the start: the two riders sit side by side at the top of the heavily banked track, held steady by their coaches, only inches between them, and have to decide where to look. The widely accepted alpha move is to stare directly into your opponent’s eyes.
“As a competitor, if they’re not looking at you, it gives you a little boost,” Ellesse says. “It’s like having the courage to look your opponent in the eye before you go into battle.”
Jon says: “I get to watch to see what the other competitors are doing and how they respond and it’s really, really interesting between the extremes. If you look in the semifinals and the finals, with one of the competitors not even wanting to engage at all, just trying to block it out and, from my perspective, it looked like she was just shitting herself.”
In the semifinal in Paris, Ellesse raced current world champion Emma Finucane, who was part of the Great Britain team sprint squad who had beaten Andrews’ New Zealand team five days prior. Ellesse turned to stare at her, but Finucane did not want to engage. She stared straight ahead, trying to block it out. It’s impossible to say what was going on in her head, but if she was shitting herself, she was right to. Ellesse never looked like losing. Finucane was crushed 2-0.
In the gold medal race, Ellesse rode against Germany’s Lea Friedrich, an eight-time world champion, the fastest woman in the world and the overwhelming favourite for gold. Ellesse was surprised to even be at the start line.
“I thought potentially I could be pushing for a medal after winning a world champs [bronze] medal in 2023,” she says now. “But again, the gold definitely would have seemed out of reach if I had talked to someone about that pre-race. Those girls at the top, they’re extremely talented and fast and tactically sound.”
Her dad concurred: “She’s not quite as strong in the sprints,” he had told RNZ ahead of the competition. “She’s still learning a lot in that space.”
But if she felt overawed prior to the final, she did a good job of hiding it. She tilted her head and stared straight at Friedrich. It was a look that said, ‘I am not afraid of you’. Friedrich turned and stared back with a look straight out of a horror movie. Her eyeballs rolled almost out of her head. It was a look that said: “I will destroy you.”
As the pair set out on their first lap, the television commentator said: “It would be a huge upset if Ellesse Andrews of New Zealand could win a race against Lea Friedrich of Germany.” For a lap or so, it was cagey and tense and terrifyingly slow and then BANG they were sprinting and Andrews was in front and no longer looked like an underdog – she looked untouchable. Friedrich tried everything to get around her, but she couldn’t even get close. Andrews was gone.
At the start of race two, Andrews again turned to stare at Friedrich. This time, her opponent didn’t return the look. She remained staring straight ahead until just before the gun. When she finally turned, it felt like an afterthought. It lacked all the intensity of her previous look. It was a look that appeared to say: “I’m sorry for the previous look.” She was beaten before she started.
When asked two weeks after this year’s Olympics what he’s proudest of about his daughter, Jon said: “That she’s a good person. I think that’s the thing I’m proud of with both my kids is that they’re good human beings, that they care about other people, that they would both be willing to help other people at the drop of a hat. I think that’s critical. It’s how we live in our family... Anything they do on top of that is just a bonus.”
The second race of the women’s sprint final was an annihilation. By the time Ellesse crossed the finish line and claimed her second gold medal and third of the Games, Friedrich had given up. The eight-time world champion and world’s fastest woman had been beaten by Ellesse, daughter of Jon, a man who might have been proud of raising a good human being, but who also had to acknowledge that, on the track at least, he had created a monster.
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