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.
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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 happens, what if that happens'. I think that we were under the most pressure in the whole world.
"But when I had Nico, I was in hospital for about 10 days, and I watched doctors and nurses just going around under the most insane stress every single day. It's really made me think 'this is fine'. Like this is a luxurious problem. It's clear that I have a lot of mental energy that I can put onto the track, which has been really, really nice.
"I didn't ever really think that I'd be here just under 18 months later and that's the fastest I've ever gone in 12 years of focusing on being a team pursuiter. And now I'm a mom and a road rider and a team pursuiter, and it's better than ever. It's very nice and quite freeing."
Archibald has so far isolated herself from media obligations to focus on racing without having to explain the complicated combination of handling intense grief while racing at the top level of the sport. Her teammates have been nothing but supportive and in awe of her fortitude.
"She's unbelievable," Elinor Barker said. "It's really hard to summarise the year that she has had and how she feels about it, and how we feel about it. But the fact that she's here is just insane. I don't really know how she does it."
Knight lives with Archibald and has witnessed her journey through grief first-hand and was motivated to step up her performance in support.
"She's phenomenal," Knight said of Archibald. "I see her ups and downs every day. And she's had a really, really tough couple of weeks. I know her prep hasn't gone how she wanted. Usually, she's the absolute hero of this team and we've had to adapt. I really, really tried to step up and take that role on. I think she is just phenomenal.
"It's really the stuff of dreams to win a world title and to win a world title in front of your home crowd is even better," Knight said. "I have ridden a lot of finals and come second – the biggest one being Tokyo [to Germany]. So I've been wanting to win something big for a while.
"This is my third team pursuit World Championships – we went silver last year [behind Italy]. And honestly, I was just so devastated on the podium last year, and I really didn't want that to happen again."
That determination showed when, halfway through the race, the team started to turn what was at first a slight deficit into a narrow advantage, then a yawning gap that ended up at a 4.458-second margin over New Zealand.
"When we were with a lap to go, I looked up and I could just see them and I felt, even if I blow up completely here, so long as I can still see them, we've got this. I've never felt anything like it, crossing the line knowing we'd won," Knight said.
