The German cyclists were able to cheer very often in Roubaix – Emma Hinz won two world titles.
Photo: dpa/Thibault Camus
The mask slips down briefly from the nose when pulling on the rainbow jersey. The little mishap at the award ceremony in the Velodrome in Roubaix was the only detail that didn’t go well with Lisa Brennauer’s appearance at these world championships on the track. After gold in the team pursuit, she also added gold in the individual pursuit on Saturday. Brennauer’s colleagues Franziska Brauße refined the great performance of the German endurance women with silver and Mieke Kröger, also Olympic champion from Tokyo and team world champion from Roubaix, with bronze. “In the end, it’s another big team medal with three different colors,” said Brauße, commenting on the winners’ podium. This team strength is also the cause of success for them. »It’s a lot of fun to have so much competition in your own nation. That’s a bit of our secret recipe. That pushes us tremendously as a team, ”she said, adding :. “I am very satisfied with silver.”
Lisa Brennauer was of course even more satisfied. “The focus here was on the foursome. Still, the One’s Pursuit was a goal for us, ”she said. And in view of the protagonists at the award ceremony, she went into raptures: “To be on the podium with three people now is madness.”
This kind of madness also broke out for the Bund Deutscher Radfahrer (BDR) in the short-term disciplines. After the rainbow jersey in the team sprint, Emma Hinze and Lea Sophie Friedrich expanded their respective collections with the striped clothing. On Friday, Hinze defended the title she had won in Berlin last year in the sprint. She looked a little surprised herself. “I didn’t believe in it beforehand because I didn’t feel as good as I did before Berlin,” she said. However, the title in the team time trial gave her the certainty that at the end of the season she had again caught an excellent shape curve. Now she’s looking forward to a year of competitions in which she can show off her jersey. After the triumphs in Berlin – she became three-time world champion there – the pandemic led to a whole series of race cancellations. Now Hinze is more optimistic and hopes for a normal competition calendar. However, even that is not set in stone.
The new Champions League in track cycling, for which Hinze is already qualified, has already been canceled. The second stop of the new racing series starting on November 6th in Mallorca will be canceled due to Corona. Because the Velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines near Paris will be used as a vaccination center until at least the end of the year. The world association has yet to explain why there was no alternative, such as the Velodrome in Roubaix, which is now hosting the World Cup.
In addition to Hinze, Max Levy from Cottbus is also qualified. He was not at this World Cup, will end his great career this year, but will take the premiere of the Champions League with him. Lea Sophie Friedrich also starts there. On Sunday, however, she first set the golden finish: With the victory in the Keirin, she won her third world title.
She had previously challenged Hinze in the purely German sprint final in Roubaix, but then recognized the victory of the better. »I am satisfied with my result. Emma is simply unbeatable in this form. I’m happy for you. She really deserved it, ”she said, looking at her teammate. But she even got another rainbow jersey in the time trial. The circumstances were quite strange: »Actually, I didn’t want to drive the 500 meters. You can’t really tell that now. I couldn’t be deregistered. So I said: Fuck it, Lea, I’ll just defend my title, ”she said – and was still amazed. Because the week before she had been lying in bed with a cold.
The men could not keep up with the performance of the women. After winning bronze in the team sprint, Joachim Eilers won a medal made of the same metal in the time trial over 1000 meters. Thanks to two clever runs against the actually more explosive Nicholas Paul from Trinidad and Tobago, his team sprint bronze colleague Stefan Bötticher qualified for the sprint semifinals on Sunday – and ended up fourth.
In absolute terms, this World Cup is the best for the BDR since 1991. A nice farewell present for Detlef Uibel, the outgoing head coach for Kurzzeit. The 62-year-old, once a successful track sprinter himself, wants to create “space for younger people and space for new impulses” after three decades in the coaching staff of the BDR, as he himself said. The fact that, at the age of 36, the very young endurance trainer and technology expert Sven Meyer is leaving the BDR with him, however, indicates friction despite all the successes. Meyer cited the reason for his resignation that the association had hardly developed in terms of personnel despite increasingly complex tasks. One can only hope that the current success will not whitewash existing construction sites, but will instead be accompanied by fundamentally good personnel decisions.
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