For Dame Sarah Storey, the individual pursuit final at the London Paralympics amounted to a comfortable victory.
Significantly faster than her rivals, the British cyclist, a poster girl for the 2012 Games, made short work of catching Poland’s Anna Harkowska to win the first of four gold medals.
In qualifying Storey had covered 3km in 3min 32.170sec, a world record for the C5 category that applies to cyclists with the least impairment. But the final lasted less than two minutes because Storey caught her opponent just beyond the halfway mark, the equivalent of a knockout in a boxing match. “It is all over,” the television commentator Phil Liggett declared. “It was a formality.”
Storey celebrated in familiar fashion, waving to an ecstatic home crowd as
