“I remember, when I was seven years old, coming here with my brother and sister. We lived just across the road. I would go round and round the track on my little pink bike with tassels on it. That was it – I was hooked.” Emma Finucane is once again at Carmarthen Velodrome, which first opened almost 125 years ago, but today her life is very different. Overlooking the historic oval track where her journey began she is now a celebrated athlete recognised as one of the world’s best cyclists.

In 2022 she came home from the Commonwealth Games having won two bronze medals – team and individual sprint – for Wales. In 2023 she won gold in the women’s sprint event at the World Championships – a feat she repeated earlier this year at the 2024 championships in Denmark where she also won the team sprint gold. But it’s what happened in between that which has changed her life.

“Everything happened so fast,” she says. Fast is the key word in Emma’s remarkable young career. She went to her maiden Olympics in Paris this summer and returned home with a gold medal in the team sprint event and two bronze medals for her efforts in the individual sprint and keirin events. For the latest Welsh news delivered to your inbox sign up to our newsletter.

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“It has changed my life”, says Emma, sat in Carmarthen Park next to the track where she started pedalling towards Olympic glory. “I’m still me, I’m still the same old Emma, but you are kind of in a bubble at the Olympics so you don’t really see what’s going on around you. But then you come back home and I’ve been asked for pictures in Tesco a couple of times and people say: ‘Ooh, I’ve seen you on the telly!’

"I love it. I love being home and coming back to see everyone. I’m very honoured to be asked to attend events. I don’t come home often and to be recognised for what I’ve done at the Olympics is amazing. Me and Jess (fellow Carmarthen cyclist Jessica Roberts, herself a world champion who won a bronze medal at the Paris Olympics) were honoured with a plaque at the local fireworks night in November and it’s very humbling. It’s very exciting."

Emma, still only 21, joked that the fact her sport requires a helmet is a bonus because even when dominating she can still preserve a level of anonymity compared to other Olympic champions. “Someone said to me: ‘You look so different on TV’ and I thought: ‘Well yeah because on TV you can only see my chin!’” To describe Emma’s rise to the top of the cycling world as meteoric would be an understatement. It was only in 2022 at the Commonwealth Games that she “found her feet” as an international cyclist. “It was the Commonwealth Games that showed me that I belonged in that class of athlete and competing there gave me the confidence and the self-belief. That was my first big competition and I loved it.”

Having started cycling for Carmarthen-based Towy Riders cycle club when she was a young girl Emma soon began whizzing around the Wales National Velodrome – now the Geraint Thomas National Velodrome – in Newport and took part in her first competition in Pembrey at the age of 10. She was spotted by British Cycling at the age of 16 when she was still in school and moved to Manchester two years later.

“When I was 16 I became European Junior Champion and at that stage people started to notice me,” says Emma. “But never in a million years did I think things would happen so quickly. I thought the LA Olympics in 2028 would be my first games, not Paris 2024, and then I went to the World Championships in 2023 and Paris all of a sudden became 'the talk' and I was like: ‘Wow okay’. In a way I think that helped because I didn’t have four years to think about the Olympics. But when I won gold at the World Championships all of a sudden I wasn’t just going to the Olympics – I was going as the favourite, which was weird. I always thought my first Olympics would be a case of just being there to race, to take part.”

She did more than merely “take part”. She became the first British woman in 60 years to win three medals at the same Olympic Games and the first Welsh athlete to ever do it. Immediately after finishing the team sprint event which secured her gold medal as the third rider (P3 in cycling terms, the equivalent of the last sprinter in a relay) she wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself.

“My acceleration is probably my weakest point,” she admits. “But my endurance is stronger and that’s why I’m the P3 in the team. I didn’t think about what it all meant. I was just pedalling my heart out to get to that line and then I looked up at the screen to see if we’d won gold. And then you just celebrate. I had dreamt of that moment since I was 10 years old. Moments like that are rare so I was just going round and round the track with my hands up in the air, waving at my family who were there cheering me on.”

Emma and her GB teammates – England’s Katy Marchant and Sophie Capewell – won gold by smashing their own world record (they had set new records twice in previous rounds) with a time of 45.186 seconds. It was a case of days, weeks, months, years of training boiled down to a combination of speed, strength, fitness, concentration, and precision all played out in three-quarters of a minute. “If you crash, if you slip slightly, one mistake, it’s over,” Emma says. “I don’t have hours to make decisions or to get back into a race if something goes wrong. You prepare for years and it all comes out in 45 seconds and it’s crazy how much time and preparation goes into those seconds – training, nutrition, psychology – and everything has to come together.”

In terms of nutrition the average person probably thinks the world’s best athletes live a rigid and disciplined life 24 hours a day with no respite or leeway to loosen the handbrake in a world where every millisecond counts. It can’t be that strict can it? Almost, Emma admits. “I’ll be in the gym between 9am and 11.30am and then on the bike at the track between 2pm and 5pm three or four days a week plus I’ll do a turbo session on the bike on a weekend. I’ll eat porridge, protein yoghurts, an omelette, maybe a ham and cheese wrap, some chili....but no booze. I don’t drink at all. I know where I need to be and what I need to weigh and I know I can’t eat chocolate every day. But I can have a pizza from time to time. I can have an Indian takeaway tonight if I want one.”

As for what the future holds for Carmarthen’s Olympic gold medal-winner one could argue that reaching your sporting pinnacle before your 22nd birthday could mean taking your foot off the pedal. Even at 21 what more is there to achieve? 'Plenty' is the answer Emma provides, ambition pouring from her eyes. “I feel like I’m in the best shape of my life but cyclists don’t tend to peak until their mid-to-late 20s,” she says. “I want to win three gold medals in LA [at the 2028 Olympics] so I’m starting to look ahead to that but you can’t obsess about it four years out. My ambition is to be the best British female sprinter ever. Victoria Pendleton is at the moment – she won two Olympic golds, one silver, and nine world titles. She has always been and continues to be such an inspiration and I would love to dominate like she did.”

Along with adding to her burgeoning medal haul in the track cycling world Emma has hopes and dreams of inspiring others to get on their bikes to ensure that a whole generation of children can follow in her footsteps thanks to clubs like Towy Riders which is still going strong in her hometown. Carmarthen and the wider county of Carmarthenshire is also becoming known as something of a cycling hub in Wales having hosted events such as the Tour of Britain in recent years. Emma and Jessica Roberts’ success can only provide a further boost to cycling in this part of the world – as too can the opening of a multi-million-pound cycle path connecting Carmarthen and Llandeilo which is expected to open next year.

“As athletes we obviously have our own ambitions in terms of winning but I want people to watch us and get on their bikes,” says Emma. “I want to inspire people to get out there and cycle – it’s a healthy way of life. Sport is amazing, it gives you energy, and I want to use my platform to help young girls and boys get into sprint cycling.”

Emma’s appetite for winning is certain to have a huge impact on the next generation of Welsh cyclists who are just now enjoying their first few slow laps of their local track or park. Not so long ago Emma was doing the same. Not much more than a decade later the tassels have been shed and she’s a European, world, and Olympic champion.