In the minutes before Emma Finucane became sprint world champion, she stood inside the toilets of Glasgow Velodrome, crying. The situation was overwhelming. One more race, one more win, and the gold medal would be hers. “I’d never been in that position before,” she tells Cycling Weekly. “I was so nervous, but I wanted it so bad. It was such a weird emotion. I felt all week, actually, that I had something weird in me.”
She took a deep breath and staggered back through the pens in the track centre. There, she sat on a chair and waited for her race, an arm’s length from her opponent, Germany’s Lea Sophie Friedrich, the eight-time world champion, who was trailing the Brit 1-0 in a best of three.
“I remember sitting there,…
