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Following in the footsteps of their male counterparts, the US women’s basketball team began their Olympic campaign looking like a team with a point to prove. The Americans now have a 56-game Olympic winning streak that dates to the 1992 Barcelona Games. It means 42-year-old Diana Taurasi is on track for a sixth consecutive gold medal.
Watching Tom Pidcock deal with a flat tyre and win the cross-country cycling was much easier to enjoy.
It was a ride of pure, thrilling instinct: a welcome reminder that in the chaos of competitive cross-country biking, sometimes the best plan is no plan at all. And Pidcock, who has won on the snow-flecked peaks of Alpe d’Huez and the dandruff-white roads of Strade Bianche and now the verdant woodland of Paris, is in many ways a cyclist of the romantic imagination, of a time before strategies and specialisation and four‑year plans, when the essence of the sport was simply to get on your bike and thrash the hell out of it.
Specialisation will surely come for Pidcock too in the end. With a second gold safely in the bag, and with his peak years approaching, all the incentives seem to point towards a proper tilt at the Tour with Ineos Grenadiers, the laborious process of chiselling and sanding himself down into a pure mountain machine. But here, amid the tree stumps and the dirt, is where his bold and breathtaking range of skills finds its most vivid and spectacular expression.
