The Canadians won bronze in the team sprint

Lauriane Genest, Kelsey Mitchell and Sarah Orban, who replaced Jackie Boyle for the final, won a bronze medal in the team sprint on Thursday, behind world champions Germany and the Netherlands, European champions.

Canada defeated Great Britain.

Shortly after Orban’s round, Mitchell put Canada back in front and Genest held that lead.

We were happy to walk away with bronze, especially in front of our fans, ”Mitchell said. They definitely helped us tonight, we needed it.

You want to always be on the podium and thrive. It was fun to see that we four riders were able to push each other and fight for medals.

It’s a bit difficult now, for his part Genest has indicated. The legs are heavy, but as the competition progresses, I feel better. The last race was our best.

The silver team also won the inaugural Nations Cup in Glasgow in April.

These two medals in the two Nations Cups are very encouraging, because we don’t have much experience together, she added. We are not yet at our best as a team. For us to see that we can climb the podium when we don’t have the perfect team, the perfect training, we know we can be better.

Ryan Dodyk, Tyler Rorke and Nick Wammes were eliminated in the first round of the Great Britain B team, which slipped to 4th place. The Canadians finished in 7th place.

In the team’s pursuit, Team Canada A, consisting of Arianne Bonhomme, Ngaire Barraclough, Sarah van Dam and Devaney Collier, finished only on the podium, covering the distance in 4: 21.946, just 777 thousandths of a second with bronze medal.

This young team is in their first competition together. This 4th place is therefore promising.

It was also my first race since the Olympics, said Bonhomme, the group’s veteran. We would have liked to land on the podium, but we rode really well. We are proud of what we have done.

We are in contention for a medal, nothing should fail. We still don’t have enough time to be together. We need to develop a more solid strategy, knowing who can do what exactly during the race. (…) Between now and the World Championships in October, we have plenty of time to improve.

An absence that reacts

Hugo Barrette is not in the Nations Cup this weekend. In fact, he hasn’t been anywhere since the start of 2022, a situation that annoys head coach Franck Durivaux.

I heard nothing from Hugo. I left him a few messages, on several platformshe said on the side of the track at Mattamy National Cycling Center.

Barrette asked Durivaux to take a break to participate in the reality show Big Brother: Celebrities, at the beginning of the year, which the coach accepted, because of the schedule it allowed. But it has been silence on the radio ever since.

When he left Kuya, we hoped we would see some news from him. (…) Under the season calendar, I thought it was entirely possible (for him to participate). So I gave him permission to go there, thinking that then he would come back to prepare for the season with the team.

It went well for us at the end of the season, especially in Cali and at the World Championships, in Roubaix, so that gave us a glimpse into the good things. But we had no news: no reply, no message, no text message, nothing.

Without closing the door on Barrette’s return to the troops, we feel that Durivaux will have some conditions to which the cyclist from the Magdalen Islands will have to comply.

It depends on how it goes. We welcomed him in 2020 after his fall and after he decided to work with other people. I was clear at the time: I needed to know what he was doing; I am not responsible for results that I do not care about. I don’t know what he looks like on a bike today.

It’s so simple now: no news, I do nothing. This is the way I work. I can’t wait for an athlete: we have to keep going. The athletes who are here, they are young, they are hungry, their performance is good. So I work with people who are motivated and want to go far.