Olympics: Ellesse Andrews cements untouchable status as she flies to gold

There's a photo of Ellesse Andrews when she is young, she couldn't be more than five or six, sitting on her BMX bike at the top of a dirt pile at her home in Luggate near Wānaka.

Her father, Jon, holds on to the back of the seat, keeping her steady, hoping when he lets go, she will fly.

He's thinking, "I don't want my daughter to get hurt", but he knows too the reward that comes from the freedom of tearing up the dirt on your bike.

On Thursday night at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines National Velodrome in Paris, here the pair are again - Andrews perched on her bike on the startline of the women's keirin final at the Olympic Games, her dad holding her seat, keeping her steady.

Then, after a few final words of encouragement, the gun sounds and, with one last push, he sends her on her way to a fate unknown.

By the time the bell rings for the final lap in the frantic sprint event with Andrews in front controlling the race, he knows it.

Jon, who heads up Cycling NZ's women's sprint programme, is so confident his daughter has the gold medal in her grasp, he turns away from the action and boosts it to the back stretch to be the first to celebrate with his daughter at the side of the track.

It was an unbelievably dominant performance from Andrews.

The highly tactical discipline, in which cyclists sprint for victory following a speed-controlled start, is known to throw up drama and chaos.

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Andrews, an instinctive rider, loves the chaos. She thrives on the chaos. She was ready for the chaos. But it never came.

For all but a brief moment when the derny left the track, Andrews was in front. She pushed the pace early, confident her endurance background gives her the length to her sprint few riders can challenge.

When the bell sounded for the final lap, she upped the pressure again. She looked untouchable.

"I could feel the other riders on my hip going into the final lap, but I knew I needed to give it my absolute all. I had a chat with my coach slash dad Jon before the race, and he said when you go 100 percent, you need to go 100 percent," a beaming Andrews said after the race.

"So that was my moment when I decided I'm emptying the tank and I'm not leaving anything out there."

Andrews finished 0.062sec ahead of Dutchwoman Hetty van de Wouw, while Emma Finucane of Great Britain took bronze, fading after she couldn't get past Andrews at the start of the final lap.

Andrews has already stood on the podium at these Games, after claiming silver in the women's team sprint alongside relative newcomers Rebecca Petch and Shaane Fulton on the opening night at the track - a result that shocked the cycling world.

Thursday night was different.

A silver medallist at the Tokyo Games in the kierin, Andrews went into the event as the hunted, having cemented her place as the top woman in the discipline over the intervening three years, claiming gold at the 2022 Commonwealth Games, and taking out the world championship title in Glasgow last year.

The Cambridge-based rider absorbed that pressure, and delivered the performance of a lifetime to claim New Zealand's first Olympic gold at the Velodrome since Sarah Ulmer at the 2004 Games in Athens.

The platform for Andrews' dominance at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines National Velodrome was built on a French reconnaissance mission during a Champions League event - a new global racing competition for track cycling - last season.

At the 2022 world championships, which were also staged at the Olympic venue, Andrews had not performed well, in part due to poor preparation after the team only arrived in Paris three days before the competition.

Jon convinced Andrews to return for the Champions League event, where she got further opportunity to study the devilish curves of the track.

"We got an idea of what the track was like and the shape. It sounds crazy … we always race on Olympic standard, but they're all different. Here the bends are quite wide. The black line [on the inside of the track] is always 250 metres, but if you're riding one rider wide or two riders wide, and the bends are bigger, then you're travelling much further," said Jon, who took over as national sprint coach in October last year.

"So we figured out that it's really hard to ride around the field here, and that's what you saw when we raced from the front tonight. Ellesse was strong enough to do that, and everyone else had to ride a lot further."

Jon believes Andrews, now a three-time Olympic medallist at just 24, still has a lot more growth left in her as she develops further raw speed and power.

He says he's privileged to be able to witness it all from the inside of the track, where he can give Andrews a steadying hand, and then watch her fly.