Steve Bate and I hadn’t raced on the track since winning the World Championships in March 2018.

We wasn’t really sure on how our form would be doing our first track race in 10 months. We had done a few track sessions leading up to Christmas but the sessions were mixed and then I got a cold which made us miss a couple of sessions.

We came in to the C1 event in Manchester with some pressure wearing the rainbow stripes and felt we had to win!

I got quite nervous before the qualifying and my heart was beating so hard on the start line. I think it helped and we were flying round in 15 second laps! We finished with a time only 2.5 seconds shy of our world record and beating the competition by 3 seconds to get a ride off for gold with 4.10.771!

We were really happy with our ride and knew we had a good chance of winning the final.
The final came round and we started a lot slower than the Dutch pair, they are really good kilometre riders, this was planned and we got all that time back and went on to win by around 3 seconds!

Next race will be the National Track Championships on 26th January Manchester Velodrome. Come along and watch were we expect to go even faster!!