Past student Emma Finucane celebrates gold medal at Paris Olympics 2024
Past student Emma Finucane has celebrated Olympic gold in Paris by winning the team sprint at the velodrome and her olympic wins are expected to increase.
Emma has gone from strength to strength during her career as a track cyclist, at just age 16 she was a junior European champion and at age 18 a national champion in the senior National Track Championships.
Emma studied sport and exercise science at Coleg Sir Gȃr and was supported by the Elite Performance Programme at the college. Due to her sporting commitments, Emma received a ‘fast track’ educational programme, teaching that worked around her training at Manchester’s British Cycling National Centre with the GB team. This kind of study meant Emma achieved the highest-grade profile of a triple star distinction.
Emma started taking an interest in track cycling in 2011 at eight years old, when she joined her local club, Towy Riders at Carmarthen velodrome. From starting out with pink tassels hanging off her handlebars to becoming a superstar in the sport.
It was in 2022 she won bronze at the Commonwealth Games before an amazing success in 2023 winning sprint gold at the World Championships. Earlier this year, Emma won the European woman’s sprint title - along with silvers in team sprint and keirin - becoming the best performance by a British sprinter at a European Championship. A star to keep your eye on.
Emma, now 21-years-old, entered the olympics with the goal of becoming the first British athlete to win three gold medals at a single event, the first british woman to do so. Her team including Katy Marchant and Sophie Capwell won gold at the team sprints in record time. Winning gold was her childhood dream come true.
When it was time to take the track in the keirin, Emma finished in third place winning a bronze medal, ending her dreams of a gold olympic hat-trick. Far from disappointed, the athlete was ecstatic, she said to BBC Sport: “To get a bronze medal, it literally feels like gold to me because I left everything out there on the track.”
On the final day of the Olympics, Emma made British history by winning a bronze medal in the individual sprint, marking her third medal of the Games. The last time a female British athlete achieved a hat-trick of Olympic medals was in 1964, making Emma’s accomplishment truly historic.
