Ollie Wood interview: New European champion looking to regain British dominance in Olympic team pursuit

To go with the eight bronze medals earned at six European Championships across seven years, Wood also had two silvers and a bronze from previous world championships and two silvers from last year’s Commonwealth Games. There was a pattern to the 27-year-old’s career - damn good at what he was doing, but not the best.

That began to change at the Track World Championships in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines outside Paris last October when he and the British team pursuit squad finally won gold. And then in Grenchen, Switzerland, last Friday night, the young man who used to ride his road bike on the running track at Thornes Park in Wakefield, finally won a major gold medal when he claimed the European Track Championships scratch race title.

Coming off the back of a silver medal in the team pursuit 24 hours earlier - snapping that streak of continental bronze medals - Wood was finally able to head home from a European championships with a different colour draped around his neck.

“I always felt I’d get over the line when luck met opportunity, that one day I’d get one,” Wood tells The Yorkshire Post.

“We narrowly missed out in the team pursuit the day before. I was miffed after that so to get the gold was especially nice.

“When you’re immersed in the whole Olympic cycle, never winning or just focusing on the Olympics, you can neglect these events. But for me it has given me a huge boost. Winning the world team pursuit title last year was a huge boost, winning last week was too.

“I guess deep down it shows you can do it, but also to prove to other people that you can win is very satisfying.”

His victory in Switzerland owed much to opportunism. In a race full of attacks, Portugal’s Iuri Leitao and Austria’s Tim Wafler appeared set to battle for gold after building a gap on the bunch. But Wood launched a blistering attack around the outside on the bell for the final lap which saw him race clear.

“I always fancy the scratch race,” says Wood, who punched the air as he crossed the line.

“It’s a race that’s a total lottery, there’s many different ways you can win the race. I knew going in I was competitive. I just tried to play my cards right. It doesn’t always work so it’s nice to come together.”

If there is a minor downside, it is that the scratch race is no longer part of the Olympic programme, meaning it is the team pursuit that holds the key to the freshly-minted European champion qualifying for his second Olympics.

Great Britain has a glorious history in the team pursuit. They won gold in three successive Olympics from 2008 to 2016. Sir Bradley Wiggins rode in Beijing and Rio, Yorkshire great Ed Clancy rode in all three.

By the time Tokyo came around, Clancy was 35 and nursing a back injury that not only forced him out after the qualifying rounds, but prompted his sudden retirement. Wood, who had been building towards the moment since moving to Manchester to join the national squad as an 18-year-old in 2014, and his team-mates finished way down in seventh.

Now one of the senior men alongside Dan Bigham, Ethan Vernon and Great Ayton’s Charlie Tanfield the rebuilding project is well underway.

The response has been positive and there have been plenty of highs: a bronze in the first world championships after the Olympics was followed 12 months later by the reclaiming of the world team pursuit title.

Wood’s reaction to losing to Italy - the nation they had beaten in the world final - in the decider at the European Championships, augers well for the mindset that is developing in the flagship team pursuit squad. “We were disappointed we didn’t win gold,” says Wood, even if silver was an upgrade on the five previous bronze medals he’d won at the Europeans.

“We thought we could have the Italians in the final but it turned out we couldn’t. But it’s a good battle 18 months out from Paris, it’s good for the sport and it’s good for both teams.”

As well as a changing of the guard in the British team - “since Ed has gone there’s no one left from when I first joined,” says Wood - Britain’s dominance was also ended because they were caught and passed in the arms race.

The marginal gains that were the hallmark of the Sir Dave Brailsford era at the velodrome in Manchester - technological and aerodynamic advancements that gave Team GB the edge at each Olympics - were replicated by rival nations, tinkered to their benefit and improved upon.

In the past, Wood has spoken of the need for regulations from cycling’s governing body to even the playing field. Using last week in Switzerland as an example, he says: “It’s very still much about equipment. Obviously performance, you need the best guys out there. But you could have sent two teams to the Europeans last week, they’d both be producing the same power, riding the exact same tactic in the race, but if they rode in a different skinsuit and on a different bike and that would be the difference between first and fourth. As stupid as it sounds, that’s the reality of it, which is good and bad.”

He adds: “Everyone catches up and overtakes you. I don’t know why it took everyone so long, but after Rio, it became a fashion thing to do the whole aerodynamic thing in cycling.

“It didn’t take long for other nations to catch up and look at smaller things and maybe things they’d missed out on in the past. Now it’s the other way around, we’ve now got to catch up.”

They are still good though, second in the medal table in Grenchen, fifth in Saint-Quentin last October, although no one won as many medals as the 10 Great Britain claimed.

There is also a difference to the mental approach. In the Clancy-Wiggins-Brailsford era, it was all about peaking for the Olympics. Great Britain would turn up at the annual world and European championships a work in progress and their results would reflect that.

“We’re trying not to be like that,” says Wood, his performance in Grenchen last week underlining how important it was to him on an individual level.

“As a squad we’ve figured out that by doing that you’re helping the other teams. It’s not good for your own mental health. It’s better for theirs because they’re winning and you’re always getting beaten and putting pressure on the need to pull it out of the bag when it matters.”

The next dual with Italy comes at the next world championships in August in Glasgow, a huge multi-event cycling jamboree when track, rode, mountain bike and para-cycling events converge for one big global championships.

Then it’s downhill to the Paris Olympics next summer, at the same track in Saint-Quentin where they won the world title.

The team pursuit offers Wood’s best hope of making it to a second Olympics and having better experience than the one he did in Tokyo, when they finished seventh and were three hours from the Olympic hub in a Covid bubble.

“I was extremely privileged to have been there in the first place,” he says. “It was what I left home for, what I moved to Manchester for in the first place, that was my dream. It just wasn’t the best experience because we didn’t get to live the Olympic experience to the full, we were in some old style Butlins accommodation in the mountains in Japan.

“The experience might not have been the best because of the result. But it’s not the be all and end all, we didn’t get the result but we’re still all mates.”

If he can get in that team pursuit squad it also opens the door on the possibility of competing in the two-person madison, which he won a silver in at the world championships last year alongside Ethan Hayter.

“My aim for Paris will be madison and team pursuit,” says Wood, whose cycling journey began on the grass track at Roundhay Park and took in Wakefield Triathlon Club and then Aire Valley Wheelers in Keighley.

“There’s four to five of us who will be in the running for madison - the selection is a minefield. Gone are the days when you could take six riders, it’s now just four.”

At least in Grenchen last week, Wood finally stood up and proved himself to be a winner to the Team GB selectors.