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MONTIGNY-LE-BRETONNEUX, France (AP) — World champion Ellesse Andrews of New Zealand won the Olympic title in the women’s keirin at the Paris Games on Thursday night, holding off Dutch rider Hetty van de Wouw and Britain’s Emma Finucane at the finish line.
It was an especially gratifying victory for Andrews, who survived the repechages and made it all the way to the finals at the Tokyo Games, where she wound up with the silver medal behind Shanne Braspennincx.
The keirin is a sprint race involving six riders who begin by pacing for three laps behind a motorized scooter. When it pulls off the track, the riders are left with three laps to conduct an elbow-to-elbow, high-speed sprint to the finish.
Andrews went quickly to the front as Finucane gave chase, but she was comfortably clear coming out of the fourth turn of the steeply banked velodrome. Van de Wouw came through on Finucane’s inside to snatch away the silver medal.
Missing from the finals was Germany’s Lea Friedrich, who won her second world title in the event two years ago on the same track at the Vélodrome National de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Friedrich was trying to swing around the outside of her semifinal when Steffie van der Peet moved up the track, forcing Friedrich to bail out of her sprint to avoid a crash.
Friedrich was out of the medal hunt, while Van der Peet was edged by Finucane in a photo finish for a spot in the finals.
It was a particularly tough end to a painful night for the Dutch rider. In the quarterfinals, Van der Peet had crossed the finish line when Chinese rider Yuan Liying crashed into her, taking both of them down and leaving her with bloody floor burns.
The session had to be delayed while workers repaired gouges the crash had taken out of the Siberian pine track.
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AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games