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From Izu to Shanghai: What the Asian Games Revealed Before the Track Worlds
The Asian Games were always going to leave China and Japan with an unusual problem. Twelve days after the final races in Izu, the Track World Championships begin in Shanghai. What happened over the past week suggests that, rather than managing quietly through that problem, both nations have reached the end of the Games with performances that materially alter how several events should now be viewed.
By the time Luo Xuehuang, Yuan Liying and Jiang Yulu stopped the clock at 45.370 seconds in the women’s team sprint final, the Asian Games had become more useful than the awkward pre-Worlds scheduling exercise they appeared to be beforehand.
China winning was not unexpected. It had already established itself as one of the strongest women’s sprint programmes in the world and arrived in Izu with considerably greater depth than anything else in the regional field. The progression through the competition was more revealing: 46.672 in qualifying, 45.825 in the next round and then 45.370 when the title was decided.
Britain’s world record is 45.186, which makes any immediate China-versus-Britain comparison tempting, although the different tracks, conditions and competitive circumstances make that too simple. Shanghai will provide the comparison that matters. What Izu has already provided is a Chinese ride within 0.184 seconds of the fastest women’s team sprint ever recorded.
Earlier in the season its Hong Kong World Cup victory had come in 46.223. Whatever part track conditions played in the difference, 45.370 is too fast to be treated merely as another regional record.
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Performance Analysis
Shanghai 2026: The Men’s Team Pursuit Has Already Changed Since Paris
Australia left Paris with the Olympic title, Denmark have since taken the world record below 3:40 and the fight for only eight places at LA28 now begins in Shanghai. With Britain and Italy changing, the United States and China improving, Switzerland deliberately rebuilding and AIN riders returning to team competition, the men’s team pursuit is becoming as much a battle of programme choices as outright speed.
Australia spent much of the previous Olympic cycle trying to rediscover the men’s pursuit that had once been one of the foundations of its track programme. There were very good riders and occasionally very good performances, but little of the sustained dominance that normally identifies an Olympic champion long before the Games arrive. Paris changed that. Oliver Bleddyn, Sam Welsford, Conor Leahy and Kelland O’Brien lowered the world record to 3:42.151 in the first round and then beat Great Britain in the final, ending a twenty-year wait for another Australian Olympic men’s team pursuit title
Australia had not needed to control the cycle because it controlled the race that mattered most.
Denmark’s recent history has been almost the inverse. Its pursuit has become one of the most reliable high-performance systems in the event, surviving changes of personnel without losing the ability to produce speed. A third consecutive world title arrived in Santiago last year before Konya pushed the programme, and the event itself, through another threshold. Tobias Hansen, Frederik Rodenberg Madsen, Rasmus Pedersen and Lasse Norman Leth rode 3:39.977, becoming the first men’s team below 3:40, before returning later that day to win the European title in 3:42.330
By then there was already overwhelming evidence that Denmark knew how to build an exceptional pursuit. The world record changed the limits of what everyone else was chasing, but the more interesting Danish question remains unchanged because Olympic gold is still missing.
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