Great Britain’s women’s team pursuit squad, so dominant from the inception of the event in 2008 until their last World Championship title in 2014, staged the comeback of the 2023 UCI Track World Championships on Saturday, delivering a crushing blow to their gold medal rivals New Zealand to take the rainbow jerseys.
The team overcame serious hardship en route to their victory at the Chris Hoy Velodrome in Glasgow, and not just in a series of frustrating second and third places at Worlds and at the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.
Katie Archibald helped propel the team to their title in Glasgow despite a year of grieving the loss of her partner Rab Wardell. Elinor Barker came back from maternity leave and found her best form. Josie Knight, Anna Morris and Megan Barker, who raced round 1, all stepped up to put in the rides of their lives.
Knight became a key part of the team in 2021, while Morris and Megan Barker stepped up in 2022, but Elinor Barker and Archibald have been in the team since their last success in 2014 and endured the pressure of living up to the previous era of British dominance.
Elinor Barker spoke to the media after the medal ceremony on Saturday on the long journey to replicating their last success in 2014.
“It’s just a totally different scenario because I think when Katie and I joined the programme, 2013, and 2014 were our first Worlds,” she said. “We were at the back end of this huge success story where mostly Dani [King], Laura [Trott] and Jo [Rowsell] had won everything.
“And every time they got on the track, they broke a world record. If you didn’t do phenomenally, it was awful, it felt like, and that was quite a lot of pressure. We wanted it as much as we wanted it this year, and it’s just never really quite panned out.
“It’s really hard to get four or five of you in that really peak form and condition at the same time, all firing and hope that it’s better than the other team that’s also got that happening. So to do that at a home world feels pretty phenomenal.”
Barker chalked up her performance to putting the stress of elite competition into perspective during her maternity leave.
“It’s really changed the perspective on everything, really. I don’t get so nervous – it’s very easy to see the silver linings of any potential disappointment,” she said.
“The difficulties of trying to raise a child will always be very grounding. But I thought a lot about how I used to get so stressed in these situations, and there’d be so many ‘what if this…
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