Individual race gives Clancy best chance to complete set

Double Olympic champion Ed Clancy competes in three disciplines over the next two days.

Clancy, 29, from Huddersfield, is still chasing a first Commonwealth title – the only one out of the big four, which also comprises Olympic, world and European, to elude him – after he and the team pursuit squad could only manage silver on the opening day of competition in Glasgow.

He goes in the time trial and the points race today, with the scratch race his final event of a busy track meet.

Clancy’s best chance of winning a first Commonwealth Games gold medal comes in the time trial at 5.07pm today, a 1,000m race against the clock.

This non-Olympic discipline is one at which Clancy excels, given his speed against the timesheets, and combines the skills of both the flying lap of 250m and the individual pursuit of 4,000m which take place in the multi-event omnium. Clancy was first and second in those two races en route to a bronze medal in the omnium at London 2012.

The 40km points race – where points are scored for leading finishers every 10 laps – earlier in the day, and the 20km scratch race – a straight race to the line over 80 laps – tomorrow, are ones Clancy has struggled with in the past.

In the Olympic omnium he finished 11th and 10th respectively, with the bunch races historically not suiting him.

But it is a testament to his ambition and versatility that he has included both of these on his Glasgow programme.

Otley’s Lizzie Armitstead, meanwhile, has pulled out of the track disciplines at Glasgow 2014.

The Olympic road race silver medallist of two years ago was planning on combining both disciplines at the Commonwealth Games, with the scratch race this afternoon and the points race tomorrow.

However, Armitstead will line up instead at La Course in Paris tomorrow, a one-day road race that precedes the final stage of the Tour de France through the French capital.

The athletics programme begins at Hampden Park tomorrow.

The absence of Mo Farah, the double Olympic champion who would have contested the first medal of the athletics events in the 5,000m, may have diminished the standard, but it is still an important competition for a number of Yorkshire athletes, two of which get their involvement underway tomorrow.

Richard Kilty of Stockton-on-Tees, who shocked the world by winning the global indoor 60m title at Sopot in Poland in March, goes in the 100m heats, the standard of which suffers for the lack of six-times Olympic champion Usain Bolt.

Cleckheaton hammer thrower Satah Holt begins her campaign in the afternoon as one of 17 athletes bidding to qualify for Monday’s final.

Doncaster’s Olympian Barry Middleton captains the England hockey team against Malaysia tomorrow (9pm) as they look to build on their 6-1 defeat of Trinidad and Tobago in their opening Pool B game on Thursday.