Track World Cup Day 2: Australia dominate pursuit, Germany wins men's team sprint

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Australia dominated the pursuit events, winning both teams titles on the second day of competition at the UCI Track World Cup in New Zealand.

Alex Edmondson, Jack Bobridge, Michael Hepburn and Luke Davison rode a blistering time of 35:53.010 to take the gold medal in the men’s event and in doing so set a new Australian record. The New Zealand quartet of Cameron Kawowski, Regan Gough, Alex Frame and Pieter Bulling started strongly but the Australians were able to pull away to eventually win by more than four seconds.

“New Zealand has the world champion bands on and they’re in their home town. Of course it was going to be a big ask, but we had to back ourselves and know that we’ve done the training,” Edmondson said.

“We wanted to go fast. In round one we went 3:55 with catching Switzerland, so we knew we wanted to go fast, but to ride 3:53.00 is an Australian record for us. We’re pretty rapt that we’ve come away with a very fast time and the gold medal. I don’t think we could do much better than that so it is just making sure that we can do that for the big dance in Rio.”

Team Sprint and Keirin

Women’s team sprint world champions Jinje Gong and Tianshi Zhong of China continued their World Cup dominance. They beat the Australian pair of Stephanie Morton and Kaarle McCulloch.

Results