An untried Australian combination rode one of the fastest team pursuit times to beat arch-rivals Britain in the Melbourne World Cup round yesterday.
Cameron Meyer, Rohan Dennis, Michael Hepburn and Luke Durbridge clocked 3 minutes, 59.599 seconds to win the gold medal ride-off.
The British, who broke Australia’s world record to win the team pursuit at last year’s Beijing Olympics, fielded three members of their outstanding team squad — Steven Burke, Edward Clancy and Andrew Tennant —= with Andrew Fenn coming in for Geraint Thomas. They had qualified fastest ahead of Australia, but in the gold medal ride their pace line was broken at the 3km mark of the 4km distance.
They were down by just under a second when the second man briefly lost touch with the leader, ensuring they would lose, and they finished in 4 minutes, 1.935 seconds. It was the second gold medal at this Cup round for Meyer after Thursday’s win in the points race.
Australia won two gold medals on the second day of the World Cup, with Scott Sunderland winning the 1km time trial. The home nation leads the medal tally with five gold medals.
German Carsten Bergemann won the the keirin final and New Zealander Tom Scully took out the men’s scratch race.
In the women’s events, China’s Gong Jinjie and Lin Junhong won the team sprint in 33.500 seconds from the Netherlands and Australia, while Italian world champion Giorgia Bronzini won the 20km points race.
Doping fears prevented former US Open champion Emma Raducanu from treating insect bites on the eve of the Australian Open, she said, with players increasingly wary about ingesting contaminated substances. The British player was speaking in the wake of high-profile doping cases involving Iga Swiatak and Jannik Sinner. “I would say all of us are probably quite sensitive to what we take on board, what we use,” the 22-year-old said, recalling an incident on Friday. “I got really badly bitten by, I don’t know what, like ants, mosquitoes, something. I’m allergic, I guess,” she added. The bites “flared up and swelled up really a
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