By Graham Thomas
With five days left, the Olympic Games is now coming off the final bend – but there is still time for Emma Finucane to become a legend of Welsh sport.
The 21-year-old track cyclist has won one gold medal already in the women’s team sprint but still has two further opportunities in the keirin – the weird one, where the riders start by chasing a motorbike – and the individual sprint.
If Finucane – who is the current world champion – can win another gold medal in Paris, she will join sailor Hannah Mills and taekwondo queen Jade Jones as the only Welsh women to own two Olympic golds.
But if she won three, Finucane would make history – becoming the first Welsh female athlete to have won three golds.
More impressive still, she would be the first British female athlete ever to win three gold medals at the same Olympics. Not even Laura Kenny – winner of five Olympic golds – managed that.
Wales-based former Olympic track champion Dani Rowe reckons Finucane is something special and has the potential to become a triple Olympic champion over the next few days.
“She’s got the opportunity to take home three gold medals, and you know what? She’s absolutely got the talent and the temperament to do that,” says Rowe, who won at London 2012.
“She had to deal with the pressure when she became world champion last year and although she revealed she took herself off to the toilet for a little cry, she still managed it.
“Not many people can channel nerves like that into their physical performance, but Emma seems able to do that.”
Finucane began her cycling career as an eight-year-old in Carmarthen. As a little girl, she was walking through her local park and saw the outdoor velodrome that runs around the rugby ground that is home to Carmarthen Quins.
“I want to do that,” she told her mum as they saw cyclists flying around the tarmac of the only outdoor velodrome in Wales.
Build it and they will come, they say. Including future Olympic champions.
Finucane is proof that when you buy a National Lottery ticket, something good happens even after you’ve missed out on millionaire status.
She is one of over 1,000 elite athletes on UK Sport’s National Lottery-funded World Class
Programme, which allows them to train full time, have access to the world’s best coaches
and benefit from medical support.
Since 1994, sports clubs and projects across Wales have been given £377m thanks to the National Lottery – including Towy Riders Cycle Club, where Finucane began. Carmarthen Velodrome is free from pot-holes thanks to £296,000 given as part of a regeneration project.
Finucane goes in the first rounds of the keirin on Wednesday and could have another medal around her neck in the final on Thursday evening.
There won’t be much time for a champagne blow-out as she will be up and at it on Friday, trying to qualify through to the finals of the individual sprint event which is on the final day of the Games on Sunday.
While Finucane will be among the favourites in both events, that is not the extent of Welsh interest over the remaining days of the Games.
On the track, Jeremiah Azu is part of the Great Britain 4 x 100m relay squad, where the young Cardiff sprinter will be desperate to make up for the gut-wrenching disqualification he suffered in the first heat of the individual 100m after a false start.
Welsh swimmer Hector Pardoe will also race on Friday in the men’s 10km marathon – an open water swim in the River Seine.
That means coping not just with the flailing limbs of other swimmers, which caused Pardoe to suffer a race-ending eye injury at the Tokyo Olympics three years ago, but also the pollution levels in the river water that caused a few of the triathletes to throw up.
So, plenty to look forward to from a Welsh perspective as the Games heads down that final straight.
