Four laps, flat out, from a standing start. Legs and lungs screaming, lactic acid building.<\/p>\n
The kilo, track cycling’s one-kilometre time trial, has a punishing reputation.<\/p>\n
And yet Jody Cundy has been putting himself through it for decades.<\/p>\n
“At the end of it, your legs don’t want to pedal. You’re fighting everything,” he tells BBC Sport. “But when you get it right, it’s really cool.”<\/p>\n
Cundy is king of the kilo. At the Para-cycling Track World Championships, he has been unbeaten in the event since 2006.<\/p>\n
If he wins again at this year’s edition – which starts on Thursday in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands – it will mark his 20th straight year in the rainbow jersey.<\/p>\n
Not bad for someone who has just turned 48 years old.<\/p>\n
“It’s a fairly dominant run,” he said. “There have been some moments where I thought it wasn’t going to happen and somehow I’ve pulled something out of the bag.<\/p>\n
“But I am getting older and the competitors are getting younger. It’s going to be very hard to keep that unbeaten run.<\/p>\n
“As much as I would love to do it, the people I have to race this year…I’m in trouble.”<\/p>\n
Some of that “trouble” comes from within the Great Britain squad.<\/p>\n
Archie Atkinson, 22, was eight years from being born when Cundy won his first Paralympic gold medal – as a swimmer – at Atlanta 1996. Atkinson was just two when Cundy first became world champion as a cyclist, after switching sports.<\/p>\n
“One of my first races was against him,” said Atkinson. “That felt pretty special.<\/p>\n
“This guy was Paralympic champion, world champion and held a world record at the time.”<\/p>\n
But Atkinson is catching up. Last year he beat Cundy at the National Track Championships, only to be beaten in turn by Cundy at the World Championships a few months later.<\/p>\n
“I want to win,” Atkinson said. “But if he wins, it’s historic. There aren’t many people who can win for 20 years.”<\/p>\n
In addition to his world titles, Cundy is a six-time cycling Paralympic champion – two of those victories coming in the kilo, which he won at the 2008 and 2016 Games.<\/p>\n
Such is Cundy’s standing in the squad that his team-mates call him “captain”.<\/p>\n
“It feels like I’ve earned a bit of respect from being here for so long,” he said. “I try to be the person everyone looks up to.<\/p>\n
“But I know at some point somebody’s going to have to take my place and I’ll be walking away from the sport.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Four laps, flat out, from a standing start. Legs and lungs screaming, lactic acid building. The kilo, track…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":816556,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-816555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=816555"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/816555\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/816556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=816555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=816555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=816555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}