Great Britain’s Matt Walls has won track cycling gold in the men’s omnium at the Tokyo Olympics.

The 23-year-old rode smartly throughout the four-discipline event to win Team GB’s first title in the Izu Velodrome of these Games – and 50th medal of the Tokyo Games and 16th gold.

He led the standings ahead of the Netherlands’ Jan-Willem van Schip and France’s Benjamin Thomas going into the fourth and final race of the event.

Wonder Walls 🥇@wallsey_98 is the Olympic champion 🙌#TeamGB pic.twitter.com/Bo2WHxAs02

Walls, a bronze medallist at the 2020 world championships, won the opener on Thursday and closed down an initial four-man attack which included Denmark’s Niklas Larsen and produced a surging finish to take 40 points in the scratch race.

He gained 36 points from the tempo race to put himself level on points with two other riders at the top of the field on 76 points.

Another strong performance saw him finishing second in the elimination race to move top of the leaderboard ahead of the final points race.

He dictated the race from the outset, breaking away to gain a lap on the rest of the field early on, to win with a comfortable final margin of 24 points from Campbell Stewart of New Zealand who took the silver.

“I managed to get a good lead coming to the end. It’s been a hard day. I came into that points race with a bit of a lead which was nice, it gave me a bit of breathing room,” he told the BBC.

“Thank you to all my family and friends, I wouldn’t be here without them. Especially my parents when I was younger growing up, they travelled around the country with me and there’s no chance I’d be here without them.”

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