Para-cyclist Devon Briggs has won gold for New Zealand at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, taking out the men’s C1 to C3 1000m time trial at the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome and setting a Games record along the way.
Briggs stopped the clock at 1min 5.536s on day eight of competition, the fastest ride over the distance in Commonwealth Games history. 1News reported the record time from the velodrome, where the para-cycling and able-bodied track programmes have been run through the same sessions in front of the same crowd.
The 22-year-old from Cambridge has been one of the most decorated New Zealand riders of the past four years without much of the public attention that goes with it. He is a two-time world champion on the track, winning the C3 time trial at the 2024 world championships in Rio de Janeiro and the C3 scratch race at the same venue in 2025, and he has collected a long list of silver and bronze medals at world level since 2022.
He is best known outside cycling for what he did in Paris. Briggs was hit by a motorbike while training in Grenchen, Switzerland, weeks out from the 2024 Paralympic Games, fracturing his sacrum and dislocating his coccyx. He spent about six days in hospital and still made the start line, finishing fifth in the C3 3000m individual pursuit and seventh in the 1000m time trial before withdrawing from his two road events. Two years on he owns the Commonwealth record over the same 1000m distance.
Briggs was not the only New Zealander on the podium. Sami Donnelly picked up her second silver medal in as many days, this time in the women’s 10km scratch race, and she got there the long way round. The 24-year-old was initially placed third before a disqualification elsewhere in the field lifted her to silver. Australia’s Georgia Baker won the race and Scotland’s Erin Boothman took bronze.
Three New Zealanders started the scratch race final. Prudence Fowler finished 16th and Ally Wollaston, a double Olympic medallist, came home 18th.
Donnelly is at her first Commonwealth Games. Her first medal came from the women’s 4000m team pursuit, where she rode in the qualifying round for a squad that went within a couple of seconds of gold. The New Zealand combination of Bryony Botha, Emily Shearman, Wollaston and Fowler led Australia for most of the final before losing a rider at about the 2800m mark and being run down late, the Australians clocking 4min 10.658s to New Zealand’s 4min 12.775s, according to the New Zealand Olympic Committee. New Zealand had qualified second, just 0.229s off the Australians.
For Wollaston the medal closed a loop. She would have ridden at the 2022 Birmingham Games but was injured at the inaugural Tour de France Femmes shortly beforehand. “I’m super-happy to be here, fit and healthy and safe this time,” she said.
The night was harder for New Zealand’s biggest name on the boards. Olympic champion Ellesse Andrews was knocked out of the individual sprint in the quarter-finals, beaten in consecutive races by Welsh rider Emma Finucane in a best-of-three. Andrews had already been part of the New Zealand team sprint that went out in qualifying. Rebecca Petch and Olivia King both failed to get past the round of 16 in their sprints.
Botha’s individual pursuit turned into one of the odder sequences of the Games. She placed fifth in qualifying and appeared to be out, with Shearman eighth, but officials then disqualified two Australian riders. Felicity Wilson-Haffenden, who had finished fourth, was ruled to have breached protocols because strapping on her shoulder “altered her morphology”, while Sophie Edwards was disqualified over a non-compliant helmet, RNZ reported. Botha was handed a ride-off for bronze but was beaten by Boothman in front of a home Scottish crowd. On the men’s side, Marshall Erwood, Daniel Morton and Tom Sexton all missed the cut in the individual pursuit.
It followed an opening night of track finals that had already delivered four medals. Emma Foy and pilot Jessie Hodges won New Zealand’s first track cycling gold of the Games in the women’s tandem para sprint, and did it after being knocked to the floor. The Australian pair of Jessica Gallagher and Jacqueline Mengler-Mohr won the first ride, then lost control at the start of the second and crashed into the New Zealanders. Foy and Hodges were patched up, won the second race in a tight sprint, and then took the decider by 2.65s at an average speed just under 62kmh, Cycling New Zealand said. Foy came back to the sport last year after five years in retirement.
Nicole Murray added bronze in the women’s C4 to C5 individual pursuit and set a world record of 5min 6.199s doing it, a mark that lasted only until the gold medal final later the same evening. Murray has 13 world track para-cycling medals and a bronze from the Paris Paralympics. “There’s a lot of noise, a lot going on in the stadium, and you’ve got to really concentrate,” she said.
The men’s team pursuit squad of Erwood, George Jackson, Morton and Sexton took bronze, beating Wales by 1.75s after a slow start, and did it a rider short. Nick Kergozou was ruled out of the Games after a back injury in a training crash and was in hospital when the team raced.
New Zealand’s track programme has now produced medals of every colour in Glasgow, with the para-cycling riders carrying more than their share of the load. The Games run through to the closing ceremony on Sunday.
Were you up early watching the velodrome sessions from Glasgow? Tell us what you made of New Zealand’s track cycling campaign in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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