By Martyn Herman
SAINT QUENTIN-EN-YVELINES, France (Reuters) – Portugal’s Iuri Leitao showed that good guys can finish on top of the podium on Saturday, as he and team mate Rui Oliveira won a frenetic Olympic Madison race at the National Velodrome.
Or perhaps it was good karma.
Two days previously the 26-year-old said after his silver medal in the omnium that winning would have been “super disappointing” if it had come at the expense of rival Benjamin Thomas who was involved in a crash.
Frenchman Thomas ended up winning omnium gold that day.
But the sportsmanlike Leitao, alongside Oliveira, had no qualms on Saturday about delivering Portugal’s first gold of the Games and its first Olympic track cycling triumph.
“You know, I’m still trying to digest the silver medal. I’m not even prepared for gold,” said Leitao, who marked himself as an Olympic threat by winning the omnium world title last year.
“So I’m still trying to figure it out.”
With only 40 of the 200 laps left, the Portuguese duo were well down the leaderboard with eight points, with leaders Italy on 43, and it looked like there was no way they could contend for a medal.
But as the race began to disintegrate and legs began to tire, they made an incredible attack which propelled them all the way to the gold medal.
“We predicted that everyone would be really fatigued. So we knew if we could just keep it up we could break them, and in the end we were right,” he said.
“I knew Rui was well-prepared and I was in really good shape and I saw the opportunity after 160 laps. On the final lap I just grabbed my handlebars with two hands and gave it full power.”
The 27-year-old Oliveira looked in total disbelief at the end, having never won a high-level race in his career.
“I saw we were really with good legs so we just kept going. We put the pressure on and then everyone blew up. We just kept riding. I looked at the board with seven laps to go and we’re in first place. I was like, ‘This can’t be true’, but … in the end we’re Olympic champions.”
(Reporting by Martyn Herman; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
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