{"id":443924,"date":"2025-03-17T03:58:39","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T04:58:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/?p=443924"},"modified":"2025-03-17T22:14:50","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T22:14:50","slug":"cyclist-who-ditched-australia-stripped-of-world-record","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/?p=443924","title":{"rendered":"Cyclist who ditched Australia stripped of world record"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cycling<\/a> defector Matthew Richardson, the\ufeff athlete who last year won Olympic<\/a> medals for Australia in Paris before sensationally switching his allegiance to Great Britain<\/a>, won his first gold medals for his country of birth at the weekend.<\/p>\n

But the 25-year-old was stripped of a world record at the UCI Track Nations Cup in Turkey after an investigation found he'd strayed into an out-of-bounds area.<\/p>\n

Richardson teamed up with \ufeffHarry Ledingham-Horn and Harry Radford to set a new national record in the qualifying segment of the men's team sprint, before clinching gold in a showdown against Japan.<\/p>\n

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Richardson also conquered the men's individual sprint\ufeff with a 2-0 victory over Ledingham-Horn in the gold-medal match.<\/p>\n

However, he posted what was originally accepted as a world record when he clocked 9.041 seconds for 200m in qualifying, before losing the world record when it was deemed he'd ventured beneath the blue band.<\/p>\n

Despite\ufeff having his world record voided, he was allowed to retain the top qualifying spot.<\/p>\n

\"Matthew<\/p>\n

He then proceeded to win 2-0 in each of his finals fixtures: his quarter-final, semi-final and gold-medal match.<\/p>\n

"A dream comes true," Richardson said.<\/p>\n

"My first official outing for Great Britain here in Konya [a city in Turkey] for the first and only World Cup of the season. A dream of mine for a long time."\ufeff<\/p>\n

Richardson encountered similar misfortune in his pursuit of the sprint world record at the Paris Olympics\ufeff, clocking 9.091 seconds in qualifying to shatter a mark that had stood for five years only to lose it a few minutes later<\/a> to the Netherlands' Harrie Lavreysen.<\/p>\n

The Dutchman then defeated Richardson 2-0<\/a> in the sprint gold-medal match.<\/p>\n

Richardson collected Olympic silver medals in the sprint and keirin events as well as a bronze in the team sprint.<\/p>\n

\"Aussies<\/p>\n

The Kent-born star then rocked the Australian cycling fraternity with his shock announcement just days later.<\/p>\n

In November, AusCycling banned him<\/a> from ever representing the country again.\ufeff<\/p>\n

"I thought it was pretty obvious that, by wanting to ride for GB for the rest of my career, that would mean I didn't want to ride for Australia for the rest of my career," Richardson said in a spicy retort<\/a>.<\/p>\n

"It's almost like you leave your job, and three months later, they go, 'Well, you're fired!'.<\/p>\n

"It's just words on a piece of paper, really, and they don't really carry much weight for me."<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cycling defector Matthew Richardson, the\ufeff athlete who last year won Olympic medals for Australia in Paris before sensationally switching his allegiance to Great Britain, won […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":443926,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443924"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=443924"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":443929,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/443924\/revisions\/443929"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/443926"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=443924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=443924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sportinfo.pro\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=443924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}