Britain won the exciting first Olympic mixed relay and won the seventh gold medal at the Tokyo Olympics.
In a fascinating game of cat and mouse, Alex Yee defeated French player Vincent Luis in a match with teammates Jonny Brownlee, Georgia Taylor-Brown and Jess Learmonth and won the gold medal.
For Brownlee, he won the bronze medal at the 2012 London Olympics, and fell behind his brother Alistair, who failed to make the Tokyo team at the Rio Olympics, and finally won the gold medal at his third Olympics.
Yee succeeded the individual silver medalist Georgia Taylor-Brown in the last leg, but Luis’s swimming and cycling legs made a strong start to close the gap.
Luis may use two wheels to pull apart, but Yee insists on keeping them level at the end of the cycle. But Lee had a surprisingly good transition, he went straight into his running pace and pulled off Louis’s gold medal earlier this week to increase his silver medal.
Jess Learmonth admitted afterwards that as the only non-Olympic medalist in the team, she was nervous and when she crossed the front line, she provided the quartet with the best start to the game.
Her swimming has always been her strong point and is often beaten by running legs, but she is on a par with the American Katie Zaferes at the end of the first leg. In those two kilometers of running, she put too much energy into it and she had to be taken away in a wheelchair.
Jonny Brownlee’s second leg was less compelling, but equally impressive when competing for the lead with the United States, the Netherlands and Germany.
Taylor Brown was punctured in the individual event, but managed to stay in the saddle to win the silver medal. There is no such problem, because she handed the advantage to Yee with an advantage of more than 20 seconds in the last stop.
Yee’s teammates and British support staff watched the final quarter nervously, but they didn’t have to worry because his performance was far more mature than his 23-year-old implied.
Louis invested so much money in his gold bid that he faded sharply in the last few meters and silver lost to the United States.
Afterwards, Brownlee talked about completing this set of Olympic medals and said: “Olympics, I have completed it. I have been waiting for that. It feels amazing. The third Olympic Games finally walked away with a lot of gold medals. We endured a lot. A lot of pressure. Alex stayed calm and headed.”
