Jody Cundy driven by Team GB’s cycling heroes

Great Britain’s Jody Cundy has taken inspiration from the success of his Olympic cycling counterparts over the last few weeks as he makes his final preparations for the Paralympic Games.

Including Bradley Wiggins’ time trial triumph, Team GB came away with a mighty haul of eight cycling gold medals from the London Olympics, the squad handling the significant weight of expectation upon them impressively by truly rising to the occasion.

The spotlight and high hopes of a watching nation now transfer to the Paralympic cycling team, who won 17 golds at the 2008 Beijing Games.

The task of following up that effort on home soil brings a considerable degree of pressure, something one might imagine can only have increased now the Olympic team have built upon their own achievements in China – where they also won eight golds – so spectacularly.

But while double Paralympic cycling champion Cundy acknowledges all eyes will be upon him and his team-mates in London, his main feeling is one of inspiration after watching GB’s Olympic riders, whose performances he sees as a good omen for his own prospects.

“For me, the Olympics were pretty mind-blowing,” Cundy told Press Association Sport.

“Normally it is a good motivational tool before you go to the Paralympics – you sit and watch the most amazing athletes in the world do their thing, and then you try to emulate them and create your own bits of history a couple of weeks later.

“But watching the cycling team take most of the medals in London really sets it up nicely for our team to now go there and keep the ball rolling.

“To see some of those performances was pretty special, and it has inspired me to do bigger and better things when we get to London – not that my ambitions were small anyway!”

Cundy – a former Paralympic swimming champion who switched to para-cycling in 2006 and is aiming to defend his Beijing titles in the team sprint and one kilometre time-trial in London, as well as compete in the individual pursuit – has been watching the Olympic action on television, fitting it around his training schedule at the Manchester velodrome.

And with that facility, often dubbed the “medal factory”, being the same base for the friends and colleagues he has seen ride to glory this summer, the 33-year-old is heading south full of confidence about what he will be able deliver. “I train alongside those guys and do the same efforts, so if they are going well, ultimately we are all in the same ballpark and should be coming into some good form,” Cundy said. “Training at the moment is indicating that we are on the right track, and it is just now getting to that point of race day, getting in there and really attacking and seeing how it all comes together. The world is going to be watching. Everybody knew the cycling team (at the Olympics) was going to be the one to watch and now they have performed, it’s like ‘right - next team on the boards is the Paralympic team, and can they deliver that golden performance they have been promising over the years?’

“With the performances we had at the World Championships earlier this year and in previous years since Beijing, I think we are in good shape to do that. From what I see in training everyone is on song at the moment, so look out the rest of the world.”

Cundy, who was born with a deformed right foot which was amputated when he was three years old, was speaking today at the unveiling of his new customised prosthetic leg for London 2012. The leg features a Union Jack design, incorporating a list of names of the people the Wisbech-born athlete wants to thank for helping him during his career, and of the world and Paralympic titles he has won as a para-cyclist.

It was manufactured by Ossur, the Icelandic company which also produces prosthetics for South African ‘Blade Runner’ Oscar Pistorius, who made history this summer by becoming the first amputee sprinter to compete in the Olympics.

He made the 400m semi-finals, as well as being part of the team that competed in the 4x400m relay final, and referring to the 25-year-old multiple Paralympic champion, Cundy said: “He did an amazing job and the crowd really responded to it. They just saw him as another runner, which is the key of it all.”

Cundy travels with his fellow GB riders to Newport this weekend for a training camp before they move on to London, with the Paralympics officially getting under way on 29 August.