Lloyd And Nelson Still Have Eyes On World Bronze

Manon Lloyd and Emily Nelson are still in with a chance of World Track Championships bronze after helping GB finish fifth fastest in the team pursuit in Hong Kong.

The Welsh duo were part of an all-new quartet from the four riders who won gold at last summer’s Rio Olympics.

Laura Kenny is pregnant, Joanna Rowsell Shand has retired while Katie Archibald and Wales’ Elinor Barker are focussing on the individual events.

Cardiff-born Barker lines-up in the scratch race later on Wednesday though she could still called into the team pursuit team for tomorrow’s later rounds.

Carmarthen’s Lloyd, 20, and Newport-based Nelson, also 20, were joined by Eleanor Dickinson and Emily Kay who was drafted into the team for Barker.

The quartet clocked four minutes 21.449 seconds in the final heat of their qualification round, but were beaten by gold medal favourites the USA.

The Americans did lose a rider early on, but always had enough in hand and crossed the line with the mandatory three riders in 4:17.666.

Britain’s time was fifth fastest putting them up against eighth fastest Poland on Thursday as they look to qualify for the bronze medal ride off.

Barker, 22, is also competing in the points race and the first-ever women’s madison at a World Championships with Nelson.

The event could be included in the programme for the Tokyo Olympics in 2020.

Barker said: “It will be a bit of a new challenge for me. I’ve obviously raced bunch races in the past.

“But I’ve never trained for them – it’s always been very team pursuit specific, all the work on the track – and then just done bunch races afterwards so I’m really looking forward to doing it without the fatigue of doing three flat out team pursuits.

“For the last six months, all my track training has been for the bunch racing without the complete focus of team pursuit, so I’ve only been doing team pursuit for the last couple of weeks.

“The women’s team is in such a good place at the moment and there’s such a depth of really really strong riders.

“We’ve been training as a group of seven for this world championships which is huge and any one of us could be in the team pursuit so we’ve almost got twice as many people as we need.
“I just think it’s a really great place to be in and it means we have this big group of riders that we can train with right up until Tokyo and it means we’ll have the best of the best when we get there.”