'We've both cried during blocks': Inside the Olympic preparations of GB's track sprinting stars

This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 18 April 2024. Subscribe now and never miss an issue. 

“Flat white please,” say Emma Finucane and Sophie Capewell in unison. It’s a well-rehearsed coffee order, one that GB’s track sprinting duo have made a hobby of placing around the world. They’ve asked for it at competitions in Switzerland and Egypt, Australia and Hong Kong. Today, though, they’re a stone’s throw from home. It’s late February, the morning after the National Track Championships, and we’re in Manchester, sitting in a café in the trendy Ancoats district, north of the city centre. The sign on the door reads ‘Off The Press’ – Finucane has chosen an apt spot for a magazine interview, notes accompanying press officer, British Cycling's Ellie Stott. 

We remove our jackets and assemble at a round, wooden table. “I never used to be a flat white girl,” says Finucane, the Welsh-born world and European sprint champion. “I used to be a cappuccino girl.” Capewell’s a bit of a coffee connoisseur, she explains, and has her own machine at home. “I can do a tulip,” she says proudly, when I ask about her latte art repertoire, “but that’s as much as I can do so far.” 

What Capewell lacks in milk-pouring skills, however, she makes up for in her ability on the track. This August, she and Finucane will go to the Paris Olympics as two of GB’s brightest medal hopes. They’re part of the new wave in the women’s sprint team, a pillar of the GB track squad that has struggled in recent years, but having failed to qualify for the previous two Olympic Games, now looks odds-on for success.

The walls of the café are made almost entirely of glass. Sunlight cascades through, across the countertops, bathing the giant potted plants that are as tall as the ceiling. Outside, the weather is crisp. Like almost every other day, today is a training day for Finucane and Capewell. This afternoon, they’re down to practise team sprint starts, but not without getting their fix of caffeine first. Within seven minutes of their flat whites arriving at our table, their mugs are empty. “The amount of coffee we consume is outrageous,” Finucane says. So intense are their training sessions that the pair are encouraged to take it very easy off the bike. That’s why they know Manchester’s café scene better than anybody else. 

Before Christmas, ahead of their first races of this key Olympic year, the women’s sprint team laboured through a tough block of weightlifting. It’s crucial for their discipline of the sport, which hinges on going fast, putting immense power through the pedals. At the Manchester Velodrome, they share the gym with fellow GB cyclists, something they find highly motivating. 

“When someone’s going for a key lift, people will always shout for each other,” says Finucane. Capewell picks out a recent memory. “Ross Cullen from BMX went for a PB and he picked the time when everyone was in the gym, and everyone just screamed,” she laughs. Spurred on, Cullen managed 155kg for a clean lift – where the barbell is lifted from the floor to shoulder height in one smooth motion. “It was a gym record as well. We have a little tally going of the best lifts.”

Reluctantly, Capewell admits that she too features on the records list, having managed 105kg, also for a clean lift. “The gym’s new,” the 25-year-old adds, “and it’s really good. We’re all currently putting new records up on the board because all the other ones are from our old gym. Everyone’s a bit like, ‘Ah, someone’s just done this, so I’m going to put two more kilos on it.’”

Unlike road riders, track sprinters often have to wait months between competitions. What’s more, their biggest goal comes only once every four years. Camaraderie is key to keeping spirits high through training blocks. “Sprinters pick different music in the gym,” Finucane explains. “We’ve now discovered the jam feature on Spotify. One person is in control, and you can add songs to it.” What sort of music do heavy-lifting riders choose? “Well,” starts Capewell, “you can tell when someone’s going for a lift because a lot of people have a certain song they like to put on. Hamish [Turnball, sprinter] picks Numb/Encore [by Linkin Park and Jay-Z], so you know he’s going for a big lift when that comes on in the queue. It’s always the same one.” 

Not everyone can sing along, though. “Emma’s a little bit younger and doesn’t know all the stuff. It’s always like, ‘Emma, do you know this song?’ We’re trying to educate her. She doesn’t know a lot of the R&B club anthems. She has a very specific music taste.” Finucane nods in agreement. “I’ll know the chorus,” the 21-year-old responds, “but that’s about it. I listen to Katy Perry, Post Malone and Fred Again.” Bashfully, she confesses a soft spot for Katy Perry’s song Teenage Dream (“an absolute bop”). “I don’t put it on in the gym because I’d get ripped for that,” she adds. “It’s one for my headphones only.”  

Of course, it’s not all fun and games for the sprint squad. After winning silver at last year’s World Championships in Glasgow, breaking the world record in the final but still losing out to Germany by seven-hundredths of a second, they set out to go deeper than ever behind the scenes. Their gym sessions have been built around pushing their muscles to the limit, making their legs burn as intensely as they do in races. “I’ve cried,” says Finucane bluntly. “It’s the most horrific feeling ever.” Capewell offers her team-mate solidarity. “We’ve both cried during blocks,” she says. “It would always be at the end of the session, just us two crying at the back of the gym. In the back of your mind, you’re thinking, ‘If I can get past the suffering here, I can do it on the bike’.”

The hard work, it’s clear, is paying off. Buoyed by her rainbow bands, Finucane has won three individual gold medals this year. Together with Katy Marchant, she and Capewell also won team sprint gold in each of the opening two UCI Nations Cup rounds, held in Adelaide and Hong Kong. The first was a momentous victory, one that came over a decade after GB’s last success in the event – or precisely “4,095 days” notes a smiling Capewell. “We sat down the Friday before and the coaches had figured out how many days it had been. We kept getting close, but we hadn’t quite crossed that line in terms of being on the top step.” 

With gold medals now in reach, the focus is on getting faster. Not since Glasgow has the squad clocked below 46 seconds in competition in the three-lap team sprint. Helping them get there is their coach, Scott Pollock, who came in as a late swap last year, after four-time world champion Kaarle McCulloch chose to return to her native Australia.

“Scott’s great,” says Finucane. Previously, both she and Capewell have spoken at length about the positive impact McCulloch had on them, as people as much as athletes. There were tears when the Australian left, and a concern of disruption so late in the Olympic cycle. “[Pollock] came in at a weird time for us,” Finucane continues. “It’s hard for anyone to come into a squad and try and change things, but he’s really, really good. I feel like I’ve taken what I’ve learned from Kaarle, and using what I’ve learned with him, we’re working well as a team.” 

A former strength and conditioning coach, Pollock knows what it’s like to be dropped into a high-pressure situation, having been called in late to coach the men’s sprint squad into Tokyo in 2021. “He’s really switched on,” says Finucane. “He’ll go and analyse races for hours, and analyse riders, their strengths and weaknesses. He carries round this big book that I haven’t seen much of, but when he opens it you’re like, ‘Wow, OK.’” 

Together with Pollock, the team takes time to watch their races back. They pore over footage of the opposition, too; the Germans and the Chinese look to be their biggest rivals for the gold medal this summer. Who else is on their radar? “We keep an eye on every team we can,” Capewell says. “Anything can happen when the Games come around, but we can only control ourselves. There’s only so much you can do watching everyone else.” 

Interestingly, some of that competition might come from within their own team. As they sit, sipping from matching GB bidons, both Finucane and Capewell are aware that they could be drawn against each other in Paris in the individual events – the keirin and the match sprint. “I think that’s why we are successful,” explains Finucane, “because we have that in-house competition. We qualified first and second at Worlds, and we’ve raced against each other.” The 21-year-old politely leaves out the detail that, when the duo faced off in the Nations Cup final in Cairo last March, she won 2-0 in a best of three. “I think it’s really cool that we can race against each other internally and at a really high level,” Finucane adds. 

Still, despite there being three sprint events at the Olympics, the squad’s main training focus is the team sprint. It’s in this discipline that they practise the key principles of acceleration, aerodynamic positioning, and holding their line. And yet, they seldom race the full three laps in training. “We do half the distance,” explains Finucane. “Sometimes in flying efforts we’ll do a flying 100m, which is half, and you can kind of gauge, but until you get to race day, you never actually know.” 

One thing they’re both certain of, though, is that it will take a world record to win in Paris. The benchmark in the team sprint currently stands at 45.848 seconds, set by Germany in last year’s World Championships final. As this issue of CW goes to press, there are 109 days – that’s 9.4 million seconds – until the women’s team sprint final on 5 August. “At the end of the day, in Paris, whoever the GB three are, they’ll be trying to find tenths of a second off each other’s laps,” says Finucane, conscious the trio is yet to be finalised. At this stage, Marchant looks likely to be the third name. “When you know the final team, that’s when you start finding tenths in the changeovers and the lines you do, how you execute, how you ride, and how you trust each other. Then it will start to come together.” 

A tenth of a second. That’s what could stand between them and an Olympic gold medal. “It’s not even the blink of an eye,” says Capewell. Scientifically, she’s right, but in track sprinting, a sport fought in the narrowest of margins, a tenth is a big gap to close. “It’s massive,” says Finucane, who regularly hits in excess of 1,400 watts. “Every race is different. You could win by a bike length, you could lose by a hair. We work so, so hard for those marginal gains. It might only be a tenth of a second, but it’s not just a click of the fingers. It’s hard. I think that motivates us every day.”

As the pair stand up to leave, Finucane turns to Capewell and huffs in embarrassment. “Teenage Dream is definitely going in the piece,” she says. They then swing by the counter, order another coffee to go, and set off for the velodrome.