Too good to be true: Emma Hinze and her “Emma-Express” duped the competition at the start of the Track Cycling World Championships and set two world records at the same time. But the cycling professionals are far from satisfied after the team sprint gold – because an important revenge is still pending.
Emma Hinze is slowly threatening to run out of space in her closet at home. Five rainbow jerseys were already hanging there, and the sixth example of the most coveted textile in the cycling world was added at the glittering start of the Track World Championships just outside Paris – and others seem reserved: the legendary team sprint triumph with a double world record on the side her friends Lea Friedrich and Pauline Grabosch are said to have been the start of a golden week on the Olympic oval in 2024.
“I’m just super happy to be able to wear this jersey again,” said Hinze after she had brought the German trio to the finish in both knockout rounds as the final sprinter with her incomparable turbo on Wednesday evening – the Chinese had no chance in the final. “We were an incredibly good team, we worked great together. I’m really proud of us,” said Hinze (26) beaming at the side of her equally overjoyed colleagues – and Hinze wants more: “Of course we’re hoping for more gold medals here .”
And because the gold mission of the three exceptional sprinters is far from over, the joy after the opening coup was extremely warm, but also short – the first two laps in the individual sprint were already on Thursday. “Coming to rest now is an art. I always have trouble sleeping after such evenings,” said Hinze, who was the first German to triumph in the queen’s discipline for the third time in a row.
It is very questionable whether anyone can prevent a German gold – if the appearance in the team sprint is the benchmark. In the final, the German trio won there in a fantastic time of 45.967 seconds and undercut the world record from the semi-finals, which was just under an hour old. There the “Emma-Express” remained 81 thousandths below its own mark from the 2021 World Cup triumph in Roubaix (46,064).
“I can’t describe it at all. Nobody expects a world record, certainly not a second one,” said Hinze after the third world title for the German team sprint trio in this line-up: “The pressure was great, and it gets bigger and bigger when you have to defend the title. The first time. And even more so the second time.” The clearly inferior final opponent China had prevented German Olympic gold last year, but Friedrich didn’t want to know anything about a successful revenge: “It won’t be until two years from now when we win against China at the Olympics.”
For Hinze it was the sixth World Cup gold of her career. This means that the German short-term drivers have been unbeaten at world championships since 2019. In 2020 and 2021, all four world championship titles on the short distances (sprint, team sprint, keirin, 500 m time trial) went to Hinze, Friedrich and/or Grabosch – the recent “sweep” is a logical goal.
