Diminutive Pooley wins Beijing hearts and silver in women's time trial

It took an American cyclist named Armstrong to deny the diminutive Emma Pooley a women's cycling time-trial gold medal to match that won so heroically by her Great Britain teammate Nicole Cooke in the road race.

Kristin Armstrong, to be precise. A world time-trial world champion, no less. It was Pooley, though, who stole the sympathies of the Chinese crowd packed around the Great Wall.

At 5ft 1in and barely seven stone, the 25-year-old hardly looks capable of cycling down the local shops, never mind mixing it with the world's best. Her bookish appearance fits perfectly a post-graduate student in soil technology whose studies include work modelling landfill sites for redevelopment.

Silver streak: Pooley crosses the finish line

Yet here she was, sprinting up a seven-mile climb in fierce humidity faster than anyone else in the field. Had she carried a few extra ounces on her spindly frame to help on the descent back to the finish line in Juyongguan, she might even have held off Armstrong's charge.

Her preparations for yesterday's race began in earnest last December when she and the British team came to China to road-test the course. When they arrived, it was covered in deep snow, but so important is the climb from Juyongguan to Badaling as a tourist route, that the snow was fully cleared by the following morning.

Having tackled the climb in mid-winter, Pooley even asked for special handlebars to be custom-built for her bike to allow her to attack the climb more aggressively than a traditional time-trial bike allows.

She said: 'I thought I'd be scared about today, but I wasn't at all. It was like flying. It helps being positive-nervous because I had been waiting four years for this. I was enjoying going fast. It was fun.

'I just kept saying: "Faster, faster." There's no secret. You just have to make it hurt. Imagine a friend sitting on your wheel, shouting at you.'

Miffed at being sent out as early as fifth of 25 starters, Pooley was forced to endure a 40-minute wait until her silver medal was confirmed. For a while, it seemed that gold would be her colour until Armstrong stormed down the descent to eclipse her time by 24 seconds.

The British girl added: 'I just tried to distract myself from thinking about it, to do something else other than watching the others come in one by one. The disappointment would have been huge if I had thought I was going to get a medal and then didn't.'

One of the first to congratulate her was Cooke, whose effort on Sunday had sapped the energy from her legs. The Olympic road race champion trailed in 15th, but there was no disguising the warmth in her hug for Pooley, nor the golden aura that will light up her world for years to come.

Celebration time: Cooke (left) and Pooley

Just as Pooley's work at the head of the peloton and her attack on the final climb of the road race had positioned Cooke perfectly, so it was Cooke in 2006 who helped persuade Pooley to continue cycling when thoughts of giving up had flitted across the Cambridge graduate's mind.

Cooke said: 'We were living 30 miles away from each other in Switzerland, so we met up and I just told Emma that she could succeed. It's one thing to be encouraged, though, and another thing altogether to get on your bike and do it. She has worked so hard and she rode so selflessly for me on Sunday. She deserves a medal in her own right. It really is perfect.

'Now we can celebrate. I have had a bottle of champagne chilling in my fridge since Sunday, courtesy of the British Olympic Association. I don't know whether Emma will get one now, but I will be sharing mine regardless.

'One bottle on its own for me would do a lot of damage. I'll be staying in Beijing for a couple of days, then I'll be going back to share my gold medal with everyone back home.'

There was another stirring British performance in the men's time-trial with Steve Cummings finishing in a creditable 11th place behind Switzerland's specialist at the discipline, Fabian Cancellara.

Cummings: Creditable finish

With the road races complete and the Great Wall left behind shrouded in haze, history and now heroics, the focus will switch to the Laoshan Velodrome and the track events beginning tomorrow.

British expectation was sky high before the Games. With a gold and silver already banked from the road disciplines, there will be genuine disappointment if the final medal haul from the cycling doesn't include at least six golds.

Performance director Dave Brailsford was adamant yesterday that while throroughness, planning and funding have all helped to bring about unparalleled success in British cycling, the real stars are the riders.

He said: 'We've got to be very careful as a team that we don't draw any credit away from the riders. They are the ones who, like Emma last night, had to get their sleep, who had to get up this morning and had to go all out up this climb. It's not about us. It's about what they do. We're just in the team car watching.'