Cundy 'no spring chicken' but nears 20-year unbeaten run
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'I'm getting older and the competitors are getting younger' Four laps, flat out, from a standing start.
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Legs and lungs screaming, lactic acid building. The kilo, track cycling's one-kilometre time trial, has a punishing reputation.
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And yet Jody Cundy has been putting himself through it for decades.
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"At the end of it, your legs don't want to pedal.
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You're fighting everything," he tells BBC Sport. "But when you get it right, it's really cool." Cundy is king of the kilo.
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At the Para-cycling Track World Championships, he has been unbeaten in the event since 2006. If he wins again at this year's edition - which starts on Thursday in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands - it will mark his 20th straight year in the rainbow jersey.
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Not bad for someone who has just turned 48 years old.
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"It's a fairly dominant run," he said.
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"There have been some moments where I thought it wasn't going to happen and somehow I've pulled something out of the bag. "But I am getting older and the competitors are getting younger.
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It's going to be very hard to keep that unbeaten run. "As much as I would love to do it, the people I have to race this year...I'm in trouble."
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Some of that "trouble" comes from within the Great Britain squad.
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Archie Atkinson, 22, was eight years from being born when Cundy won his first Paralympic gold medal - as a swimmer - at Atlanta 1996.
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Atkinson was just two when Cundy first became world champion as a cyclist, after switching sports. "One of my first races was against him," said Atkinson.
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"That felt pretty special. "This guy was Paralympic champion, world champion and held a world record at the time."
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But Atkinson is catching up.
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Last year he beat Cundy at the National Track Championships, only to be beaten in turn by Cundy at the World Championships a few months later. "I want to win," Atkinson said.
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"But if he wins, it's historic. There aren't many people who can win for 20 years." In addition to his world titles, Cundy is a six-time cycling Paralympic champion - two of those victories coming in the kilo, which he won at the 2008 and 2016 Games.
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Such is Cundy's standing in the squad that his team-mates call him "captain".
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"It feels like I've earned a bit of respect from being here for so long," he said.
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"I try to be the person everyone looks up to. "But I know at some point somebody's going to have to take my place and I'll be walking away from the sport."
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Cundy won his first Para-cycling world title in 2006 When Cundy will walk away is anyone's guess.
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He says he doesn't have a plan for his retirement, but he knows that qualifying for the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles will be difficult.
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"If I'm still performing at the very top level and that means that they want to take me, because I can go win in LA, then I shall be there and I'm there to be counted," he said.
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"I'm realistic in the fact I'll be 49 when it comes to LA and I'm no spring chicken any more.
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"What we do afterwards I really don't know, whether it's in sport in some way, shape or form.
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"It's 31 years I've been in elite sport.
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If I go away and take all of that knowledge away with me, I feel like I'm kind of cheating the system a bit.
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"So there's part of me that wants to come back and help - whether it's in a coaching role or a managerial role, or even further up in governing body roles and trying to influence the UCI [cycling's world governing body] and the IPC [International Paralympic Committee] - to make cycling better than what it actually is." The UCI, Cundy says, has "let the sport down" by the lack of Para-cycling track competitions it hosts outside of the World Championships and Paralympics.
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At the upcoming Worlds, Cundy and Atkinson are among a 24-strong Great Britain squad - but it is the first time the team will have raced at a UCI track event since the last edition of the Worlds in Brazil last year.
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"When it comes to track cycling we have one race a year, the World Championships, and then every four years we have a [Paralympic] Games.
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That's really not good enough," he said.
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"When I first started we used to have competitions, we used to travel and go race in places. Now you go 12 months without seeing anybody.
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"You see a start list and you don't know who half of the names are on it. You don't know whether they're going to be fast, slow, whether they're any good.
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There's not really any results or rankings to follow." The UCI did not respond to a request for comment. Cundy wins 22nd world track title in Rio Jody Cundy: Sweating, Swearing and Superhumans
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