Berlin (AFP)

Four gold medals in three days, including that of the kilometer Friday: the Netherlands dominate without real surprise the World Track Cycling Championships in Berlin for men.

On the 1000 meters standing start, Sam Ligtlee, a 22-year-old athlete, won before the reigning world champion, French Quentin Lafargue.

The younger brother of Elis Ligtlee (Olympic keirin champion in Rio) completed the four laps in 59.495 seconds, while Lafargue had the best qualifying time earlier in the afternoon, also below the minute in 59.324 seconds.

The kilometer, formerly the benchmark discipline of track cycling, has not been on the program of the Olympic Games since 2008, any more than the individual pursuit won by the Italian phenomenon Filippo Ganna, 23 years old.

Already winner of the world tournament in 2016, 2018 and 2019, Ganna broke her own world record for the 4 km in qualifying, in 4 min 01 sec 934.

The tall (1.93 m) size native of Piedmont, who runs on the road for the British team Ineos, then easily dominated in the final the American Ashton Lambie.

In the points race, a 19-year-old New Zealander, Corbin Strong, won the race on Friday with great audacity.

The race was not included in the program of the Tokyo Olympic Games this summer, the Dutch title holder Jan-Willem van Schip had given up defending his property, to focus on the omnium and the American, two Olympic disciplines.

- Hinze, 22, queen of Berlin -

In the ladies' field, the German Emma Hinze won her second world gold medal, winning in the queen event of individual speed.

Carried by a burning audience in the Berlin velodrome, it won the final in two rounds against the Russian Anastasia Voinova. Two years after the fourth and last title of her compatriot Kristina Vogel, made paraplegic afterwards by a serious accident.

"I can't believe it," she said after the overwhelming emotion, "I had never cried in a win before. It's so special, I don't didn't expect it. "

Voinova, her opponent in the final, was a tough client: silver medalist in speed at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, and gold at the World Championships over 500 meters in 2015 and 2016.

In the semi-final, Hinze had also eliminated in two rounds the Hong-Kong veteran Lee Wai Sze, 32, double world champion last year in speed and keirin.

Lee won the bronze medal, defeating Canada's Kelsey Mitchell in her first world championships in the small final.

Finally, in the women's omnium, a discipline on the program of the Tokyo Games, the Japanese Yumi Kajihara (22 years old) gave her country the hope of an Olympic medal. The Asian champion won ahead of the talented 20-year-old Italian Letizia Paternoster, and the Polish Daria Pikulik.

In this combined discipline, which offers four different races disputed on the same day, the objective is first of all to make no mistakes at the start to arrive well placed at the start of the last and decisive test: the points race .

The picture became clear from scratch, the first race, with the zero point of two of the favorites: the Briton Laura Kenny, Olympic champion in 2012 and 2016, was caught in a spectacular fall shortly before the finish and the Dutch Kirsten Wild, victorious in 2018 and 2019, was downgraded.

© 2020 AFP