Prior to Sunday, Olympic team sprint gold medallist Katy Marchant’s last track race ended in her lying among the fans, her arm broken in two places, having crashed over the fence at London’s Lee Valley Velodrome. Now, 15 months and another child later, she’s back chasing the Olympic dream again.
Marchant returned to competition on the final day of the British Track Championships last week, where she raced in the individual sprint. The 33-year-old was ultimately knocked out in the quarterfinals, but the result mattered little; she came off the track smiling, walked to her paddock, and sat with her two sons, Arthur and Walter, the latter she gave birth to just six months before.
“I’m really happy to be back racing – earlier than expected, I think, but things have been going really well and relatively smoothly,” Marchant told Cycling Weekly.
The sprinter’s previous last race came in late 2024 at the UCI Track Champions League (TCL). The event ended up being abandoned so Marchant could receive urgent medical care, after crashing into the front row at the top of the banking in the keirin final. She now races with mementos of the incident: a dark purple scar down her right forearm, and small metal plates holding the bones together.
“It’s been a whirlwind. It was just a bike race and it was just a freak accident. It was a bit unlucky on my part: wrong place, wrong time,” she said.
How much of the crash does she remember? “I totally remember all of it,” she said. “I knew what was going on. I could see the fence coming, but I didn’t quite anticipate going over it.
“I’ve been really lucky in the last 12 years I’ve done this; I’ve never really had many accidents, [only] a couple of slip and slides. It was a little bit unfortunate for the Track Champs to end like that, especially because it was the last race of what had been an incredible year in 2024.”
The European sprint champion Emma Finucane pins Marchant’s numbers on ahead of her racing return.
(Image credit: Olly Hassell/SWPix)
Recovering from injury was just one part of Marchant’s year off racing. After having her first child, Arthur, in 2022, and coming back “better than ever”, she and her husband Rob added another son, Walter, to their family last August.
“Crazy to think I grew and birthed a human only six months ago,” Marchant wrote on Instagram following her racing return on Sunday.
She told Cycling Weekly that being a mother of two has been “full-on, [I’m] not going to lie – but it’s been great.
“Physically it’s harder to have two children than it is to have one, and obviously my body has taken a bit of a hit from having another baby, but I’ve recovered really well,” she said.
“I’m back training and I feel great. I’m not where I need to be – I’m a million miles away from where I was when I left the sport in 2024 after the TCL – but I feel more confident this time. When I had Arthur [in 2022], there were days were I was like, ‘Am I flogging a dead horse?’ Whereas this time I have more confidence. I know that the bad days will probably make the good days worth it.”
Those good days, she hopes, will come in major competitions this year. Marchant is eyeing a spot in Team England for July’s Commonwealth Games. She also wants to be part of the Great Britain squad at the World Championships in October, with a longer term goal of defending her Olympic title in LA in 2028.
“I’m here to eke out every last bit that I can. It’d be really nice to just maybe have one last dance at the Olympics,” she said.
“I could retire tomorrow with the most amazing career and more than I could have ever dreamed of, but I never want to retire and say, ‘What if?’ I want to push every boundary that I can. The girls have got a great team going on, and I really want to be in that team.”
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