St-Quentin-en-Yvelines, FRA (Aug. 7, 2024) – Canadian athletes used strategy on the second day of track competition on August 7 at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Adopting a brand-new strategy, the men’s team pursuit team wanted to give it their all for their final race of the day. After a reshuffle of rider positions, the quartet of Quebec’s Mathias Guillemette and Ontario’s Dylan Bibic, Carson Mattern and Michael Foley earned themselves a seventh-place finish, ahead of Belgium with a time of 3:54.517.
“We were happy with what we were doing, but it wasn’t fast enough,” said Foley, who finished fifth in the event at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. “We needed to try something new to try and get back on Belgium, so we talked about it and came up with a new strategy, we changed it completely. It didn’t really work, we kind of blew up, but it wasn’t a bad idea.”
Australia won gold with a time of 3:42.067, ahead of Great Britain, while Italy took bronze.
This was a young team, with three of the four runners making their Olympic debuts. Only Foley had been part of the Canadian team at Tokyo 2020.
Affected by a virus in the days leading up to the competition, the team pursuit quartet of Ariane Bonhomme (Gatineau, QC), Erin Attwell (Victoria, BC), Maggie Coles-Lyster (Maple Ridge, BC) and Sarah van Dam (Victoria, BC) finished eighth, losing out to Australia.
“It’s been a rollercoaster, for sure, but I wouldn’t want to share this experience with anyone other than my teammates,” said Attwell. Teammate Van Dam added: “It’s not the result we were hoping for, we came here with the hope of fighting for a medal and I really, really think that if we’d had an easier run before the Games, we would have fought for that medal, but with the cards we had, we came here today and yesterday and gave what we did and that’s really all we can do on the day.”
The team, of which only Bonhomme, 29, had Olympic experience having finished fourth in the event in Tokyo, set their best time of the Games in the first round, with a time of 4:10.471. The United States took top honors, followed by New Zealand in silver and Great Britain in bronze.
Having failed to qualify from the women’s keirin qualifiers, sprinters Kelsey Mitchell, of Sherwood Park, Alberta, and Lauriane Genest, of Lévis, Quebec, holder of the bronze medal at the Tokyo Games in the discipline, were forced to go through the repechage stage, where they both won their heat, earning their ticket to the quarter-finals to be held on Thursday, August 8.
“I’m feeling good – I think this morning in qualifying I was maybe a little too stressed, I took things too seriously,” said Genest. “After the race, the stress disappeared, and I was able to concentrate on the task at hand. I had an easy draft; I took it to my advantage. I tried to make it as easy as possible.”
Ontario’s Nick Wammes of Bothwell and Tyler Rorke of Baden ended their day early, as they were unable to get past the qualifying stages of the men’s sprint, bowing out in the round of 32. While both Canadian riders were in the same repechage start, pitted against France’s Rayan Helal, Rorke, who had achieved a personal best in qualifying, kicked off hostilities with two laps to go, but was unable to hold on. It was the Frenchman who slipped through to the next stage.
Further information, including results and the full schedule of events, is available at olympics.com. Competition for Team Canada cyclists continues on August 8, when athletes will be in action in the individual events, including the women’s keirin and men’s omnium.
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