Track World Champs news from Women's races

The championships have started and the British sprint women have already won gold in the first event, the team sprint.

This is the first time GB have fielded a team of female sprinters at a world championships, previously Victoria Pendleton has been the lone female representative on the sprint squad. She is joined this year by Anna Blythe, who has moved up from junior ranks, and Shanaze Reade, a BMX specialist who has been spending a great deal of time training on the track to hone her speed and skills.

This is also the debut for the women's team sprint event in a World Championships and the British team went into it confident in the knowledge that they had already set the world's fastest time during qualifying at the World Cup in Manchester. At that event, the team made up of Shanaze Reade and Anna Blythe, just missed out on gold in the final after a false start, which went unnoticed by Reade who rode a full lap at maximum power before having to restart.

For the World Championships, the two lap (500m) distance saw Shanaze Reade once again riding the first lap, but this time with Victoria Pendleton on the anchor lap in Blythe's place, a combination which on paper prior to the championships, was already faster than the world record setting team of Reade and Blythe.

The final was however a nail biting affair between Great Britain and the more experienced pairing from the Netherlands. In fact, the team from the Netherlands was up by two thousandth's of a second at the half way point but the GB team pulled this back to win by just over three tenths of a second, clocking a time of 33.361. An awesome start to the championships!

And let's not forget the men; Bradley Wiggins, the Olympic Champion from Athens, took the pursuit title in devastating style, qualifying fastest by over 5 seconds and then taking gold by catching his opponent in the medal ride off. The men's team sprint, consisting Craig MacLean, Ross Edgar and Chris Hoy also qualified fastest, but had to settle for silver, after they lost to France in the medal ride off.

We will be bringing you updates as the championships progress and the schedule is as follows:

Programme of Events for Women