Reade pledges to return stronger

Ian Chadband|Chief Sports Correspondent|In Beijing

13 April 2012

Shanaze Reade had thought she would go back to Crewe with an Olympic gold medal. Everyone else presumed it too. Instead, we found her outside the BMX track here at Laoshan forlornly listing the only visible souvenirs of her trip to Beijing.

"I've cut my leg, I'm sore up there (tapping her outer thigh), I think I might have done something to my hand, maybe broken it, I've done something to my sciatic nerve and I've cut my shoulder open," she said. Who was it that called BMX a kids' sport?

The bedraggled, battered figure standing before us had given everything - and a bit too much more - chasing the gold medal which everybody had been hanging around her neck for years.

So the great irony of the Olympics embracing the cool dudes and the Californian punk ambience of this most modern of events was that it saw the return of a good old-fashioned British tradition - that of the heroic loser.

Poor old Shanaze. It was too cruel that after 14 days of almost unremitting golden success, the double world champion who you'd have staked your life on before the Games should miss out in such dramatic circumstances, especially just a couple of hundred yards from the velodrome where her track cycling mates had cleaned up.

Actually, there was nothing too old-fashioned about the 19-year-old's attitude as she came off the last 180 degree turn of the undulating 350-metre course in her final. Beaten just once in six years, Reade had forgotten how to lose and, with her great French rival Anne-Caroline Chausson still ahead, she had two choices. One was to accept the gold was gone; the other was to adopt the attitude that Baron de Coubertin had got it all wrong. "Why settle for silver? It's all about the gold or nothing," Reade growled. "I don't train as hard as I've done for a silver medal."

Thus she attempted to execute a reckless, practically impossible final turn to cut inside Chausson, thus only clipping the Frenchwoman's back wheel. Reade paid the price by spinning off - her third heavy fall of the competition out of five rides - but would probably have been disqualified even if the move had worked. Fortunately, Chausson went on to win, otherwise the good Baron might have been spinning in his grave.

What would the Olympic founder have made of today's extraordinary spectacle, though? Dancing girls on the track, hiphop blaring out, a ludicrous Australian who's changed his name by deed poll to Kamakazi - not only couldn't he spell but he rode like a hell's granny - and a fat Californian announcer called Mike trying to whip the sun-soaked crowd into a frenzy. Welcome to the 21st century Orange County Games.

"Pump it up, ladies and gentlemen. We're here at the 29th running of the Olympic Games here in Beijing, Chiiiina - and this is the main event!" boomed Mike, sounding like the MC at a Las Vegas fight night. He told us: "Wow, we got guys here from Australia - and a whole bunch of other countries!"

He made Shanaze - "Coming out of Great Britain!" - sound like a superstar and, of course, in this world she is. Her nom de plume is 'Shindog' and ever since she bought her first BMX bike for a quid as a 10-year-old, this daughter of a Jamaican father and an Irish mother has been a phenomenon, winning world titles for fun and beating the boys with the taunt: "I love kicking their booties."

A shame, then, that the young legend couldn't win the inaugural crown. But she probably paid for those two tumbles - in yesterday's time trial and today's first semi-final - which gave an indication of the mayhem which can be wreaked when eight riders are blasting shinguard to shinguard down an 8ft ramp, round the sharpest turns and over undulating terrain at speeds nearing 40mph. Reade calls it a cross between the 100 metres and ballet.

Maybe her crashes just instilled a fraction too much caution because, although fastest out of the gate in every race, she was too circumspect on the first turn, allowing Chausson to sneak by. Her gold was lost there and then but, with yet another crash going on behind her - think of it as the rule not the exception - the frenetic action made you realise that BMX is going to be a big hit when it arrives at London's Olympic Park in 2012.

Reade, as courageous and resilient today as she is normally bubbly and charismatic, vowed to be back. "A true winner always comes back stronger and come London, I'm going to turn it round and show everyone just what I'm made of," she said.

Let's hope so, if only to silence the Australian journalist who was today taking the mickey out the English media army for following a kids' event worth a "quarter of a medal". It's comical how upset these Aussies are getting about their mauling. And I'd still take our Shindog to beat their Kamakazi any day.

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