Triple Olympic champion Ed Clancy provides the inside story on British Cycling’s track tech, from 2008 to 2024 <\/p>
Ed Clancy has been there, won it and got the Olympic gold medals.<\/p>
Clancy forged a reputation as the best team pursuit specialist in the world, through a career that spanned four Olympic Games. At three of them \u2013 Beijing 2008, London 2012 and Rio 2016 \u2013 he won gold in the team pursuit as part of a Team GB squad that has dominated the past two decades of track cycling.<\/p>
Alongside the likes of Sir Chris Hoy, Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny, Clancy has been one of Great Britain\u2019s leading lights on the track. He\u2019s a rider who has had the full British Cycling experience, having been talent-spotted as a 15-year-old, before graduating from the Academy programme, securing a haul of gold medals and world records that few can match, and ending his career in 2021.<\/p>
Clancy lived and breathed British Cycling\u2019s marginal gains philosophy as the only ever-present member of the team pursuit squad that won back-to-back-to-back Olympic titles from 2008 to 2016. He\u2019s also a rider who describes himself as \u201cmad for it\u201d and was happy to be used as a \u201cguinea pig\u201d when it came to testing and adopting the tech that made him as fast as possible on the track.<\/p>
With the Paris 2024 track cycling programme starting today (Monday 5 August) at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome<\/a>, we caught up with Clancy for an episode of the BikeRadar Podcast<\/a>, to learn more about the tech story that underpinned the 39-year-old\u2019s career. From the world\u2019s best aerodynamic expertise to space-age bike design, tech innovations helped British Cycling set the pace for others to follow for much of Clancy\u2019s career.<\/p> Clancy talked us through his early relationship with British Cycling\u2019s now-famous Secret Squirrel Club. He shed some light on the conveyor belt of tech that helped him get faster with each Olympic gold medal, some of the equipment frustrations that surfaced later in his career, the impact of the change in leadership at British Cycling, and how the team pursuit \u2013 and the tech behind it \u2013 has evolved in the build-up to Paris.<\/p>