Once again, she will be the first to point out that the queen of her category, the British Sarah Storey, was absent. But that will not prevent Heïdi Gaugain from enjoying the pleasure of having retained her world title in pursuit. After the coronations of Alexandre Léauté on Wednesday (C2) and Dorian Foulon on Thursday (C5), the specialty seems very French.
But for the 19-year-old young woman, she had to strip down: “It was super close with the New Zealander Murray. She left very quickly, me in my stride. But I was instructed in the last six laps to turn off the brain and be at full strength. They didn’t even give me my times but just “advance/delay”, and they gave me a lot of delay… The last two laps, I went early but I continued to be miserable until the end. It was really a good battle anyway. »
And it will probably not be the last in Brazil. “Even if, in terms of time, I would really have preferred to do much, much better, it’s anecdotal,” she convinces herself. What I remember is having fought with my mind and with what I had. I still have the scratch, I’m going to try to do the same thing. And trying to get a little podium in the omnium would be nice. »
Le Cunff and Le Rousseau helped each other
To make the day even more beautiful, the French team achieved a nice double in the scratch (C4), with the victory of Kévin Le Cunff ahead of Gatien Le Rousseau. “With Gatien, we came to an agreement,” reveals the 36-year-old, who adds a fifth world title to his collection, the 2nd on the track. We let the Englishman work, we saw that he was losing his cool. He won last year, and you could see he didn’t want to let anyone out. So we let him do the job for the first 15-20 laps before taking turns attacking with Gatien. At one point, he gave in, it fell on me, it could have been Gatien. I was able to put a lap in the peloton. And I was then able to let myself go and watch the finale from afar. When I saw Gatien passing by, it was great! »
