Lichfield's Sophie Capewell heeds late father's advice as GB claim brilliant team sprint gold
Sophie Capewell never forgot the advice.
“Don’t go for bronze, go for gold,” her father Nigel, who finished fourth on the velodrome at the Paralympics in both Atlanta and Sydney, once told her.
“We’re not going for bronze, put it that way,” Capewell said in the build-up to her debut Olympics.
There can be no disputing that now. On a thrilling night at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome, Lichfield's Capewell and team-mates Emma Finucane and Katy Marchant took what will be one of the most emphatically won golds at these Games in the women’s team sprint.
Three times they rode, three times they set world records. The last of those came in a gold medal race against New Zealand in which they triumphed by nearly half a second.
After, for Capewell, the tears came, as you suspected they might.
Nigel, who passed away in 2021, had a huge influence on his daughter’s cycling career.
"I wish my dad could have been in the stands watching me, but I know he was proud of me,” said the 25-year-old.
"It didn’t feel real all day, we just did every ride and 'oh faster, oh faster again'. Like Emma said – we stuck to our process."
