Katie-George Dunlevy and her pilot Linda Kelly have won two gold medals at the UCI Road and Para-cycling World Championships in Zurich, successfully defending their titles from last year’s event in Glasgow.
The pair earned their first victory on Sunday, September 22, in the women’s B individual time trial. They finished the 29.9km route in 43 minutes and 14.47 seconds, followed by Great Britain’s Sophie Unwin and Jenny Holl, and Lora Fachie and Corrine Hall.
On Wednesday, September 25, Dunlevy and Kelly stormed to victory again, winning the women’s B road race. The course spanned 84.7km, with the duo crossing the finish line in two hours 22.46 seconds.
Sophie Unwin and Jenny Hall once again took the silver medal, while Ireland’s Josephine Healion and Eve McCrystal claimed third.
They’ve done the double!
2 x 🥇🥇 for Katie-George Dunlevy and Linda Kelly in the Women B Para-cycling Road race in @zurich2024 #Zurich2024 pic.twitter.com/zmGI6Hgytd
— UCI Para-Cycling (@UCI_paracycling) September 25, 2024
After Wednesday’s race at the World Championships, Dunlevy said: “I’m absolutely over the moon…To have two Irish bikes on the podium, us and then Eve and Josie, it was just textbook. It was what we were hoping for, what we were dreaming of.”
The wins come just a month after the 42-year-old athlete earned a gold medal and two silvers at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. While she admitted to being “disappointed” by one of the second-place finishes, she said that winning now at the World Championships makes her “so proud”.
“It was an amazing race, really enjoyed the course, it was a bit of everything. It’s just really exciting, it’s great to have these courses for tandems and I just hope that in the future they’ll be more challenging like this, with hills and descents and everything technical, because you know we’re well able for it.
“Just to have a combined championships is amazing, it’s been fantastic and hopefully there will be more like these,” she concluded.
Pilot Linda Kelly added: “We did play to our strengths up the hills, and also going very fast down the descents as well. We were hitting 70 to 80ks per hour, a lot of turns. We are just so happy to come back and do the double two years in a row.”
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