By james art
County Durham cyclist Josh Charlton set a new world record at the Track Cycling World Championships in Denmark this week.
But then Charlton, nicknamed the Durham Dynamo, lost his record and gold to Italy’s Jonathan Milan in the final in Ballerup later in the day.
The 21-year-old from Sherburne Village, near Durham, who rides with Hatton Hawks, broke the men’s kilometer individual pursuit record during qualifying on Friday and was only the third man to break the four-minute mark.
Charlton finished in a time of three minutes 59.304 seconds, beating the previous world best of 3:59.636, which was set by Filippo Gana at the world championships two years ago when the Italian won his sixth gold medal in the four-kilometre event.
Charlton, the former national under-23 clocking champion, said: “Not bad, is it? It’s really a complete shock. This is an individual pursuit, so you have to give it full throttle in the stage. You don’t know what everyone else is going to do.
“It’s unbelievable. It hasn’t really sunk in yet and I think it will be a while before it does.
“For the last nine months, I’ve been training terribly. For the past month I have had the best legs of my life. I got pretty sick in March, April, I gave myself chronic fatigue and it was really hard to come back from that. Since then, it’s been a really slow, methodical process.
“Over the last month, I just feel like I’m getting stronger in my training, in my numbers, and it’s worked out really well when I needed to.
“Conditions such as atmospheric pressure and temperature are average. The track itself is quite slow and quite hard to ride because there are really long straights and tight gradients and in a velodrome the straights are where you slow down and the corners are where you make up for that speed. It’s not built for speed on this track.”
In the final, Italian rider Milan, who clocked a personal best of 4:00.296 to qualify for the final race, took gold, leaving Charlton with two silver medals from his debut championship.
The former Belmont Comprehensive School pupil in Durham had already won a silver medal in the men’s team pursuit when Great Britain finished second to Denmark on Thursday.
Although Milan was always in command in the finish, having outscored Charlton by more than a second for the first three kilometres, the Brit pushed hard in the final quarter and slowly closed the gap, forcing Milan to work to break the world record set-and-take title.
British team-mate Daniel Bigham beat fellow Briton Charlie Tanfield in the bronze medal race before announcing his retirement.
Earlier in the day, Emma Finucane defended her individual sprint title in back-to-back wins; becoming the first British woman to do so since Victoria Pendleton in 2010.
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