Trott's hot in pursuit of another world title

 
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The superlatives have already flowed about Laura Trott but tonight she has the chance to win a hat-trick of world titles in the team pursuit a good two months before her 21st birthday.

Along with 22-year-old Dani King and schoolgirl Elinor Barker, who does not finish her A-level studies in biology and PE until this summer, Britain clocked the fastest time in qualifying for the gold medal ride against Australia, two seconds quicker than their antipodean rivals.

But Trott was undeniably the star rider of the trio, twice doing one-and-a-half lap turns on the front rather than the customary one as they looked comfortable even with the addition of a world championship debutant in Barker.

The changeovers were far from perfect but the assumption is that, under the tutelage of coach and former team pursuit world and Olympic champion Paul Manning, that they will go faster than their time of 3minutes 18.704seconds tonight and win gold.

Of the 19 events on the programme for the five-day Worlds, this as has been the custom in recent years was the best banker for the top step of the podium. The last time Britain lost to Australia at a major championships was in 2010 in a line-up without any of today's trio.

Hopes of a second team medal tonight, however, were dashed when the sprint trio of Philip Hindes, Jason Kenny and Kian Emadi failed to qualify for either medal race. Despite being twice Olympic champions, amazingly Britain have not won the world crown since 2005, a record that will continue until 2014 at least.

Ahead of Minsk, Hindes had talked about being in the form of his life and clocked an impressive 17.5-second lap, two tenths faster than he had in training and enough to leave Jason Kenny and Kian Emadi, even more so, struggling to keep up.

With Emadi expending his efforts on playing catch-up by the time it came to his final lap, he did not have enough in his legs and the trio could only clock the sixth-fastest qualifying time of the 15 teams, an undoubted disappointment for Olympic champions.

Their coach Jan van Eijden echoed the riders' disappointment when saying "we came her to win" but looked ahead to Rio de Janeiro adding, "we have three years to get it right".

Another Olympic champion to have a tough day in the saddle in the early session was Steven Burke. A rider known as the 'Colne Cyclone' had been going so well in Minsk - in particular the previous night's team pursuit - that he was drafted in to the individual pursuit as Britain's sole representative instead of Andy Tennant at the last minute.

But the move failed to pay off as Burke was lapped in the 10th of 12 heats by Australian Alexander Morgan and was only the 17th-quickest of the 23 riders in action, a surprise result for a rider tipped as a medal contender.

Whether Tennant would have fared any better is a matter of conjecture but the British team coaches replaced him with Burke after he was singled out as the team's wink link in the team event.

For Tennant, it was an opportunity missed. Having just lost out on a place in the Olympic team pursuit line-up in London, staying with the other athletes in the village and watching from the stands as they raced for gold, he had hoped to make amends.

Fellow pursuit rider Ed Clancy had not named names but was honest enough to say "one of us didn't have the legs", while former Olympic champion Chris Boardman took it further saying, "This was Andy Tennant's chance to shine at the front but he didn't quite pull it off".

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