Katie George Dunlevy and Linda Kelly have completed the double at the paracycling world championships, adding victory in the tandem toad race to the time trial success they achieved on Thursday.
The duo dominated the 78km event despite a puncture, finishing one minute 44 seconds in advance of silver medallists Otylia Marczuk and Ewa Bankowska of Poland. British bronze medallists Sophie Unwin and Jenny Holl were four minutes 16 seconds back.
The latter outsprinted the second Irish tandem of Josephine Healion and Eve McCrystal, who took a fine fourth place. Healion had been ill earlier this week, causing the duo to miss the time trial.
“I can’t believe we’ve done that,” triple Paralympic and multiple world champion Dunlevy said at the finish in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland. “It was quite a hard race, hard roads, really wet. We were out the back a little bit. It was just the cornering, we were struggling at times. And then realised on the second lap we had a slow puncture. I ended up thinking, ‘okay, it’s not my legs.’ The bike was heavy.
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“We pulled in, we got a change of the wheel on the second lap, coming on to the third lap, and we were then I think 40 seconds back behind the main group.”
The Polish team had attacked at this point and had a gap, leaving the duo with a lot of work to do. “Once the wheel was on we just time trialled, a nice steady effort, every time there was a drag we just pushed up the drag as hard as we could,” she said. “We bridged across to the main group.
“We attacked, GB [Great Britain] tried to close us down, and they couldn’t. The gap just got bigger. We just kept pushing, we were just so determined, we didn’t give up. We just kept our heads up and then we bridged across to Poland on the second-last lap and attacked them, got a gap and just TT’d [time trialed] to the line.”
Dunlevy normally partners with McCrystal for the tandem events, winning those Paralympic and world championship titles with her. However this time around she partnered with Kelly for the road events at the world championships, with McCrystal joining Healion in order to secure extra qualification slots for Paris 2024.
