Emma Finucane: Team GB's Olympic gold cyclist
This week, Emma Finucane won Olympic gold in the track cycling 3km team sprint alongside her teammates Katy Marchant and Sophie Capewell.
It was the first time Team GB had qualified for the race since London 2012, and each of their individual laps broke the existing world record, setting a new best time of 45.186 seconds in the final. Monday night's race also marked he first time Britain has won a women's team sprint medal of any colour at the Olympics.
Emma also topped her heat in the women’s Cycling Keirin to advance to the quarter-finals on Thursday night.
So who is Emma Finucane (pronounced 'Fin-NOO-cun'), the sprint world champion?
Towy Riders
Growing up on an army base in the Welsh town of Carmarthen, Finucane was not always interested in track cycling, as her mum was a runner and her dad played rugby. She started cycling in her local velodrome aged just 6. Here, she and her younger sister Rosie would do cyclo-cross, a form of bike racing, initially riding with pink tassels hanging from her handlebars. Soon, she was riding and training with her local club, Towy Riders and began idolising two-time Olympic medallist Becky James.
Robyn Davies, her first coach, told Keighley News that Emma learnt about racing by taking part in Cyclo-cross competitions, which were supplemented by four-hour road sessions to and from Newport.
She said: 'That’s what we got the kids racing when they were really young as their first taste of racing. Every weekend across Wales, they used to trot off with their bikes through the mud.
'It is quite slow-paced racing but quite hard and Emma has actually been Wales Cyclo-Cross League champion. We encouraged them to do a bit of road racing and that’s when her speed became a lot more apparent. Anything that ended up in a bunch sprint, she would win.
'It was pretty obvious very early on that she had a bit of talent. We used to do two-hour sessions and finish with races. Her racing head used to switch on and she wasn’t just racing everyone her own age, she wanted to race the older age groups, the boys, the girls, anyone.'
Emma then started training at the National Velodrome of Wales in Newport, and won scratch races (a bike race where riders begin at the same time and the winner is whoever completes a certain level of laps first) in her age group. However, in 2019, aged just 16, she also won the 500m trial and the sprint one year in nationals, and former GB sprinter Matt Crampton advised her to focus on the sprint events.
Heeding his advice, she applied to join the GB programme, moving up to Manchester to live with other upcoming riders like Millie Tanner and Lewis Stewart. Now, she lives in Bredbury, Greater Manchester, with another Welsh cyclist, Jess Roberts.
Pedal to the metal
In 2020, she won two silver medals at the British National Track Championships, and then took home gold in the team sprint at the same Championships in 2022. Later that year, she won bronze in both the individual sprint and team sprint at the Commonwealth Games.
She had a sensational 2023 - at UCI World track cycling Glasgow championships, she won gold in the women's track sprint competition, the first British woman to win the accolade in over a decade, since Becky James in 2013, and the third British female ever to take home the crown. Finucane also took home four national titles at the British Cycling National Track Championships.
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