FOUR: THE RECORD

The individual pursuit may no longer be an Olympic eventbut the race to smash the four-minute barrier has taken on a new urgency, reports Simon Smythe

A way from the spotlight of the WorldTour or the Olympics, in spare bedrooms and on massive spreadsheets, a classic rivalry is brewing. On one side, one of the greatest athletes ever to sling his leg over a top tube, on the other a team of British underdogs with physical talent but more importantly, higher levels of stealth and cunning.

It’ll come to a head soon — in April the Huub-Wattbike team heads to the high altitude Bolivian Cochabamba velodrome with the aim of going sub-four minutes for the 4km individual pursuit — but can Filippo Ganna, the triple world champion and holder of the current world record 4-19 of 4-02.647 get there first when he rides the Track World Championships in Berlin at the end of February?

The race to break the four-minute barrier has taken a long time to catch fire. In other sports, breaking a barrier is an inexorable and inevitable process, with excitement building steadily until an athlete at the top of their game, a Roger Bannister or Eliud Kipchoge, gives it one final nudge.

But in the men’s individual pursuit, the story couldn’t be more different.

Ten years ago it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever go under four minutes. The ‘unbreakable’ record of 4-11.114 had been set in 1996 by Chris Boardman in the superman position. With his arms stretched out in front of him, Boardman had a huge aerodynamic advantage and unsurprisingly the UCI banned the position soon afterwards.

The mercurial Australian Jack Bobridge, now serving a prison sentence for drug dealing, finally crept inside Boardman’s time in 2011 with his 4-10.534. But by then the individual pursuit had been snuffed out as an Olympic event as it had been axed from the London 2012 schedule. The record appeared to sit on the shelf, gathering dust with little interest from international federations, who had minimal incentive and therefore offered no support for any riders to take it on.