Track cycling: European Championships 2024: Track cyclists on the hunt for European Championship medals and Olympic tickets

There are just under seven months left: the Olympic Games in Paris open on July 26th. A week later, the first decisions in track cycling will be made in the velodrome in St. Quentin-en-Yvelines, almost 25 kilometers west of Paris city center. Twelve competitions will then be on the program over seven competition days – and as it currently looks, all with German participation. That wasn’t always the case recently.

For the 2024 Olympics, the Association of German Cyclists has created a very good basis before the start of the second half of the Olympic qualification to be able to take part in Paris with the maximum number of athletes. At this week’s European Championships in Apeldoorn, which will be held from Wednesday to Sunday, as well as the subsequent Nations Cups in Adelaide, Hong Kong and Milton, this strong starting position will have to be defended until April. “Everything is going according to plan,” says national coach Jan van Eijden, whose sprint division has the greatest hopes – now at the European Championships in the Netherlands, but also at the Olympic Games in the summer.

The only problem children are the sprint men, who have lost touch with the international leaders. This is also evident in the team sprint. Here the Germans dominated the international level for a long time and won Olympic and World Cup medals. Recently, however, the yield became increasingly narrow. In the current world rankings, Maximilian Dörnbach & Co. are in seventh place – only eight teams buy a ticket to Paris. »So we can’t afford any mistakes. If we succeed, we can definitely maintain our position,” says the Cottbus native confidently.

While the men are fighting for an Olympic ticket, the sprinters Pauline Grabosch, Lea Sophie Friedrich and Emma Hinze should continue to collect medals. At the European Championships anyway, and also in Paris – if possible made of gold. Even if no one wants to say it so openly in public. The Cottbus women have been determining the international level for years, winning World Cup gold in the team sprint in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023. The “Brandenburg-Express” also made it to the top of the podium twice in a row at the European Championships.

Hinze and Friedrich are also a bench in the individual disciplines, most recently with advantages for Friedrich, who won in the sprint and keirin at the 2023 European Championships. Hinze has therefore been relying on a new coach for a few weeks now: Maximilian Levy, himself a very successful sprinter, now national junior coach and Hinze’s life partner for almost two years. “Training with Max gives me a lot of energy – I needed that,” says the 26-year-old before the European Championships.

In the endurance disciplines, Olympic qualification takes place via team pursuit. The women’s foursome of national coach André Korff – who raced to Olympic gold with a world record in Tokyo 2021 – is clearly on track even after the resignation of Lisa Brennauer (Durach). An Olympic medal is the declared goal for the remaining trio around Franziska Brauße (Eningen), Lisa Klein (Erfurt) and Mieke Kröger (Bielefeld) as well as Laura Süßemilch (Aulendorf) and Lena Reißner (Erfurt). For last year’s European Championship third-place finishers, the strongest competition comes from Great Britain and Italy – Apeldoorn will now be the first place to be determined.

After a few difficulties, the men are going into the Olympic year with a new national coach. Sven Meyer, who had been in this role from 2011 to 2021, succeeded Tim Zühlke from Erfurt, who resigned in November. “It felt like I had never been away,” says 38-year-old Meyer, describing his return. Under Zühlke, the team has created a very good starting position for Paris. It is still doubtful whether Meyer will be able to lead the quartet close to a medal. In Apeldoorn, Felix Groß (Leipzig), Tobias Buck-Gramcko (Göttingen), Nicolas Heinrich (Zwickau) and Tim Torn Teutenberg (Cologne), who returned from the World Tour, should initially continue to score points and thus also qualify Roger Kluge and Theo Protect Reinhardt in Madison. After their European Championship successes in 2022 and 2023, they could achieve a European Championship hat trick. And this will certainly spark some euphoria for the Olympics. “We want to show that we are ready,” says Kluge.