Olympics: Impenetrable Hoy Joins Greats After Sprinting to Third Gold

For the second time in three days, Great Britain's track cycling coaches had to deal with a conundrum thrown up by their team's dominance: two riders in a major final. This was the most prestigious title on the track, the men's sprint, the blue riband of track cycling because of its tradition going back to the 1896 Games, in which Chris Hoy was bidding to become one of Britain's greatest Olympians by winning a third gold medal in a single Games.

Hoy's victory ahead of his own team-mate, Jason Kenny, crowned an unmatched day for British sprinting with the women's title going to Victoria Pendleton, but behind the win was an intriguing piece of man-management. In the one corner an athlete at the peak of his powers, on the brink of making history, in the other a thrusting youngster in Kenny, one of the surprise packages of the five days racing here. A delicate situation, which might have had lengthy ramifications had it been wrongly handled, if one man felt he had been favored over the other.

"From now on, they are not allowed to talk to any of the coaches, they can give them time checks in the countdown to when they are ready to roll, and that's it," said the team's performance manager, Shane Sutton, after the two men had won into the final, Hoy by beating the Frenchman Mickael Bourgain, Kenny with a straight-rides win in his semi-final against the German Maximilian Levy.

"We'll let them race. There will be a handshake before they start and we will let them go. There will be no camps, no sides," said the sprint coach Ian Dyer. When the time came to choose who pushed off which rider in the final, Dyer and the tactics coach Jan Van Eijden changed over between the two rides so there could be no accusation of favoritism.

"That was the fairest way to do it, because one of them could have said to me, 'oh Jason's riding this gear' or something," said Hoy. "It was very clear they wanted to be level and fair. It was difficult because normally you have a chat about how are you going to beat this guy and we were on our own this time."

Kenny said: "It was exactly the same in one way. You have a plan and a plan B. But you get used to being told what this guy is going to do, so about 10 minutes before the race it was like 'what I am going to do?' So you have to think about it, and you think 'I have ridden a couple of these races in the past.' You just try to do the basic things right."

The youngster was British under-16 champion four years ago this week and is a product of the sport city Velo cycling club, based at the Manchester Velodrome. He proved Hoy's doughtiest opponent after showing astonishing bike handling ability during his first semi-final round against Levy.

His first-round gambit was an early jump which forced Hoy to respond with a lap and a half remaining, while in the second round he attacked at the bell and they raced shoulder to shoulder into the finish straight. Hoy was a clear winner, and he subsided in tears in the arms of his father before he joined Kenny and Pendleton in a clinch in the track center.

Hoy seems impenetrable, as solid as the Mount in his native Edinburgh, but the emotion finally got to him. "From the outside, it looks as if you are all calm and everything is great but there's always doubts you have. You try to push them out and focus on the job you have to do. I didn't think about three gold medals, not even today. I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking purely about the sprint itself, the technical elements because if you break it down, it takes care of itself."

Of all the British track cyclists, only Hoy and Bradley Wiggins had competed on all five days and the Scot had come through with a perfect performance, unbeaten in every round. For a man in only his second major sprint championship - the first earned him a world title in Manchester - it was a supreme effort.

"You're drained mentally but we prepared ourselves for this," said Hoy. "We knew it was a five-day event not just two or three like a World Cup. I've trained hard on my recovery, a lot of hard efforts with short recovery time. It's paid off. Psychologically you know you have it when you come to the tough bits."

Hoy's motivation and his ability to think forward can appear superhuman at times. Within an hour of the national anthem playing, with three gold medals hanging around his neck from one Games, he declared he was already thinking of the next, in London.

Kenny, and others, will push him all the way. He says he may, if all goes smoothly, finish his career at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow in 2014 and if there is any justice in the world by then he will be at the head of a train of young Scottish sprinters who see him as a role model.

But the key to this win may be in his thoughts on the one key factor that made the difference between him and the others here. "The Olympics. The gold medal, that's the factor. If it wasn't for the Olympics, probably after the kilometer was dropped I'd have thought that's it. It's the desire to rekindle that feeling of what it is to be Olympic champion, it wouldn't matter if it was in the team sprint, or the keirin, table tennis, volleyball. I'd do any sport for that."