Ally Wollaston, Bryony Botha, Emily Shearman and Nicole Shields claimed silver in the team pursuit. Photo / Photosport
By Kris Shannon in Paris
When the week began, Ally Wollaston and her teammates were surprised to learn a historic first was within their sights.
Now silver has been secured, the New Zealand women’s cycling pursuit team believe this momentous result is just the beginning.
The Kiwi quartet were no match for the United States in the gold medal race at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Velodrome, maintaining their own consistently rapid speed but well beaten by a team who threatened the world record.
In sweltering conditions, New Zealand made their opponents sweat on the last couple of laps, cutting into a deficit that stood at more than a second for much of the race.
But Wollaston, Bryony Botha, Emily Shearman and Nicole Shields couldn’t quite close the gap to gold, leaving instead with a couple of significant achievements.
The silver was this country’s first in the women’s team pursuit, sitting alongside the two bronze medals won by the men’s squad in 2008 and 2012.
And with the previous national record standing at 4m 8.440s, they went well under that mark on all three of their rides.
Stopping the clock between 4m 4.679s and 4m 4.927s, a team featuring three Olympic debutants converted the potential long-talked about within the group, into a groundbreaking performance.
“To come away with the first ever women’s team pursuit medal is amazing,” Wollaston said.
“We were looking back at all the medals that had been won by Cycling New Zealand and were shocked that team pursuit hasn’t been up there more often.
“It’s something I actually didn’t think about until the last few days, to realise how monumental of a thing that it is to win the first ever medal for Cycling New Zealand and the New Zealand team as a whole. So we’re really proud.”
The pride was tinged with initial disappointment at missing a spot at the top of the podium, but that was nothing that couldn’t be fixed by the consoling embrace of family at the top of the track.
“You want to win gold, but you can also be proud with a silver,” said Botha, the sole rider with previous Games experience.
“Thinking about our journey and reflecting on it, we can be proud of what we’ve done.
“It’s really cool that we can back ourselves each round like this – it’s not often that many teams can pull out a 4.04 again and again and again. So I think we can only really go up from here as a team.”
The Americans set an almost untouchable pace in the gold medal race – as the chants of ‘USA, USA’ made clear while the Kiwi team were conducting media duties – while their winning time of 4m 4.306s was only 0.64s outside the world record.
The team was led by Alaska native and Harvard graduate Kristen Faulkner, who in 2020 quit a career in investment banking to try her hand at professional cycling. This gold on the track came three days after Faulkner won the road race.
Pursuit victory also followed a series of near-misses for the US women, who claimed silver in London and Rio before adding bronze in Tokyo. With the four New Zealand riders aged between 23 and 26, they seemed primed for a similar ascendance in the Americans’ backyard in four years.
“The word potential has been thrown around with our group a lot, and you can see from the result today that we’ve really started tapping into that,” Wollaston said.
“There’s definitely more to come from this team – I think it’s left us really hungry for more. There’s really exciting things to come.”
Kris Shannon has been a sport journalist since 2011 and covers a variety of codes for the Herald.
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