At the far end of the national velodrome in Manchester, where the riders gather before and after sessions, sits a whiteboard. On it is a list of numbers corresponding to the peak power outputs of the Great Britain men’s track sprint team. “It’s our power board, our rankings,” explains Jack Carlin, the Olympic silver and bronze medallist from Tokyo 2020 and one of Team GB’s brightest medal prospects on the track in Paris this week.
“We’ve got a little tiara that you wear if you’re at the top of the board,” he adds. Safe to say, I won’t be getting anywhere near that tiara. I have come up to Manchester to meet the British men’s sprint squad and foolishly I have brought my Lycra with me, which causes some amusement.
The idea is to have a quick head-to-head against one of the British boys before we sit down to talk, all the better to illustrate the vast gulf between amateur and professional. So it is that I find myself sitting on a Wattbike next to Joe Truman, the squad’s travelling reserve here in Paris, preparing to put my reputation on the line. “So we’ll hold 150 watts for 10-12 minutes as a warm-up, which isn’t very hard, and then we’ll do two maximal sprints,” Truman advises.
What would he expect to be hitting power-wise, I ask? “About 2,300 watts on a good day,” he replies. Anyone who has ever ridden a bike with a power meter will know that is insane. And naturally, my attempt falls well short.
I hit 1,343 watts with my first five-secon.