Members of the Canadian women’s track squad have expressed their concern and frustration after Cycling Canada pulled the women’s team pursuit from its 2028 Los Angeles Olympics program.
The federation said it will not field a women’s team pursuit squad at this October’s UCI Track World Championships in Shanghai, China, nor will it look to qualify one for LA. It will continue, however, to fund the men’s team pursuit squad throughout the Olympic cycle.
The decision has drawn indignation from members of the women’s program, who have described it as “gut wrenching and infuriating”.
“What has happened this past week is not something I am willing to stand for,” wrote Fiona Majendie, a reserve member of the squad at the Paris Olympics in 2024, on Instagram.
“People will always try and put a ceiling on you. Cycling Canada is not only putting a lid on the women’s program right now, they are burying it beneath the ground, and they are destroying years of equality as well as the future of the sport in Canada for all our developing juniors,” Majendie continued.
“To rip away our chance to qualify for the Olympics is both gut wrenching and infuriating.”
In a statement shared with Cycling Weekly, Cycling Canada CEO Mathieu Boucher explained the decision was “performance-based […] informed by objective, evidence-based analysis. While difficult, it was made in the best interest of the program’s long-term success.”
Boucher said the squad’s results since Paris 2024 “were not trending towards medal winning potential” in LA. He added that recent performances, both in competition and training, “did not indicate these gaps were likely to be closed in time” for the 2028 Games.
The Canadian women’s team pursuit squad won bronze medals at both the Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020 Olympics. In Paris two years ago, they placed eighth, while the men’s squad were seventh.
More recently, the women’s squad finished ninth at the UCI Track World Championships in Santiago, Chile last October. The men’s squad were 11th.
No Canadian man has won an Olympic medal in track cycling since Curt Harnett took bronze in the men’s sprint in 1996.
(Image credit: Alex Whitehead/SWpix)
Last week, members of the women’s track squad addressed an open letter to Cycling Canada, funding provider Sport Canada and not-for-profit organisation Own the Podium, voicing their concerns of a “disparity in access to high-performance opportunities based on gender”, in particular an “unequal pathway to Olympic participation”.
The squad requested a formal review of the decision to curb the program, and asked for it to be reinstated in time for the 2026 UCI Track World Championships in October.
“None of this happened because the athletes stopped caring or stopped working hard enough,” wrote Lily Plante, a squad member for the last six years, on Instagram.
“Like many others on this team, I sacrificed financially, physically, mentally, and personally to represent Canada on the international stage. I paid thousands of dollars out of pocket to race across the world, qualify spots for Worlds, and keep this program alive because I believed in what it could become.
“Behind every result were athletes doing everything they could with what they were given. And that’s exactly why this hurts so much,” Plante continued.
Ariane Bonhomme, a two-time Olympian who won four team pursuit titles at the Pan American Championships with the squad, said she retired in January, aged 30, after receiving an email saying her Sport Canada funding was being withdrawn.
“The decline of this program has nothing to do with the strength, talent, or commitment of the riders. It has everything to do with how the program has been managed over the past several years,” Bonhomme said.
Canada’s women’s endurance squad funding for the LA Olympics will instead go towards the individual events – Omnium and Madison – as well as the wider development pathway.
“We remain committed to the development of the women’s team pursuit program,” Cycling Canada CEO Boucher said.
“We are taking deliberate steps to strengthen athlete development moving forward. Targeted investments, in collaboration with the cycling ecosystem, will support future growth through key opportunities, including the Junior Track World Championships (August 2026), the Apeldoorn Next Gen Track event (January 2027), the Pan American Championships (February 2027), and the Milton World Cup (April 2027).”
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