Cycle begins with Euro double

World and continental championships, top class meetings and national finals can be reduced to stepping stones, yardsticks on an athlete’s progress to the one race or event next summer that will define their year, their career, their life.

So when cyclist Ed Clancy reflects on the two gold medals he won at the European Championships last weekend, he does so with a sense of pride rather than the mere nod to a hurdle overcome.

“If somebody had told me at the start of my career that I’d be a European champion at the age of 26 I’d have been very happy,” said the Olympic and world team pursuit champion and former world omnium title-winner of the continental equivalents he won in Holland. “It’s easy to be complacent about winning Olympic and world titles, to then win the European title by five seconds and question whether we want to get better, which of course we do.

“But it’s by no means a terrible start to the season. Yes, getting the Euro title under our belts is a stepping stone towards the end game, because no matter what happens throughout the season, everybody will be judged on the big day, the one race that matters.

“But for now there’s no harm in putting our feet up and enjoying the European results a bit.”

Encouragingly for the start of the Olympic season, Clancy believes there is much more to come, particularly from himself and the team pursuit squad of Pete Kennaugh, Steven Burke and Andy Tennant. “We know we can do better than that,” he said.

“Nobody was expecting too much because we’d all only just come off the road season two or three weeks earlier and hadn’t had much time on the boards. So one way to look at it is that we’re still winning races on 60-70 per cent performance. It’s a good sign.”

Clancy will have to leave reflections on his exploits in Holland until after his career, as he boarded a plane yesterday for Kazakhstan to ride the omnium in the first leg of the World Cup season which culminates in London in February. The track cyclists also have the World Championships in Australia in April to shoe-horn in.

And Clancy is yet to decide, or learn from Dave Brailsford, whether he will race the omnium on August 4 and 5 on top of the team pursuit on August 2 and 3 at next year’s Olympics.

He will do both if he can but his heart lies in the team pursuit.

“I’ll give the omnium a go,” he said. “I’ve got a good history in the omnium. But it’s a sport where lots of youngsters are peaking and you don’t know what will happen between now and London.”