Irish duo ‘had their backs against the wall’ as they only just qualify for Tokyo 2020 Olympics

The Irish men’s Madison duo narrowly managed to qualify for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, in a tense race at the Track World Championships.

Felix English and Mark Downey went into the Worlds Madison in Berlin needing to beat both Portugal and Hong Kong to be in with a chance at riding in Tokyo this summer, and racing got off to a rocky start.

Both Hong Kong and Portugal scored early in the 50km race, putting the Irishmen on the back foot as their Olympic dreams began to fade.

But Downey and English countered, as the Hong Kong team were forced to retired and Portugal fell a lap behind.

Late in the race, the pair picked up three points with just a handful of scoring opportunities, giving them enough distance to narrowly secure provision qualification for Tokyo.

Downey said: ‘I’m absolutely over the moon. It’s been a long process for two years now and I think we needed 101 things to go our way today.

“We woke up this morning and the two of us were so nervous because we knew we just couldn’t make one mistake and it just goes to show that yeah, we’ve had our backs up against the wall for near a year and a half and we’ve done it in the last race, so that’s pretty special.”

The pair needed to finish five places ahead of Hong Kong and they needed to just beat Portugal to keep their hopes alive.

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English added: “It was just mad.

“We knew those top-five teams were just going to be untouchable essentially, and then we had two teams we needed to look at.”

One team that didn’t manage to break through like the Irish team was the Belgian women’s team pursuit squad, who missed out on the Olympics by two tenths of a second.

The Belgian TP squad needed to beat the French team to make it to Tokyo, but fell just behind their rivals.