Team GB’s Matt Hudson-Smith missed out on a 400m gold medal yesterday by just four-hundredths of a second. The bittersweet finish was magnified by the fact it would’ve been the first British gold in the men’s 400m since “the Flying Scotsman” Eric Liddell in 1924, a race made even more famous by its depiction in the 1981 classic Chariots of Fire.

While it was a golden Day 12 for Australia, Team GB enjoyed a day of silver linings.

That victory was all the more special for the incredible odyssey endured by the Australia team’s coach Tim Decker who has overcome more than most to steer the cyclists in his charge to great heights on and off the track. Tim told Kieran Pender:

For me, coaching has always been about more than writing a program on a bit of paper. Coaching is the connection and belief you instil in your athletes. Coaching is not shying away from challenges, making a result happen that an athlete thought wasn’t possible.

One of the great boilovers of these Games came at the velodrome yesterday when the Australian men’s team pursuit pipped Team GB for gold in one of Olympic cycling’s greatest events. As Kieran Pender so vividly described, both teams traded millisecond-long leads in a high-speed, high-pain duel to the finish that ultimately delivered Australia’s first track cycling gold since 2012.

It is a race of extreme endurance, across 4,000 painful metres. It is a race where man and machine combine – with the aerodynamic benefits of equipment as closely scrutinised as individual training plans. It is a race where seconds are measured to the third decimal, to the single millisecond. And it is the race where, at long last, Australia are Olympic champions.

One of the great things about Olympic Games is how they inspire fascinated spectators like you and I. Amidst all the gold medal-winning journalism and elite photography, the champions at The Crunch gift us amazing data visualisation about the Paris Games.

Much is made of the athletic feats of competitors at these Paris Olympics. Not so much about the mental agility and psychological resilience required to scale such heights.

Jess Thom, the lead psychologist for Team Great Britain, told the Guardian’s Madeleine Finlay how she prepares her athletes for failure and success – and the challenges that arise when the games are over and they have to return to normal life.

Simon Burnton reckons these are the other Day 13 highlights to look for…

• Climbing
  This is the last day with men and women in action. The women’s boulder and lead semi-final will be followed by the men’s speed final (the one event for each gender in Tokyo, combining all three disciplines, has since fissured into two). Since 2021 speed climbing has got a lot, well, speedier: the men’s world record has been broken 11 times since then, with Indonesia’s Veddriq Leonardo becoming the first person to go under five seconds last year and the USA’s Sam Watson bettering that mark twice on a single day in April.

• Track cycling
  Two of the great velodrome events conclude today, with the quarter-finals, semis and final of the women’s keirin – where riders follow a speed-controlled electric bike for a few laps before launching a wild sprint for the line – breaking up the four events of the men’s omnium, each of greater drama than the last, concluding with the brilliant, chaotic, bewildering and wonderful points race. The schedule is reversed, with men’s keirin and women’s omnium (plus the women’s sprint finals), on Sunday.

• Athletics: women’s 400m hurdles
  The anticipated showdown between Femke Bol of the Netherlands and Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone of the USA, the two fastest women of all time over this distance, could be one of the highlights of this year’s athletics competition. The American spent 2023 focusing on the flat and returned to the hurdles in Atlanta in May with the fastest time of the year so far, a mark that Bol beat 12 days later. Bol has also impressed on the flat in the last couple of years, breaking the world indoor record twice, but this is where they are best.

The medal tally shows 72 nations have stepped onto the podium at the Paris Games.

So what can we look forward to on Day 13?

Here are the medal events in play today (all times AEST)

15:30
🥇 Open Water Swimming Women’s 10km
🥇 Open Water SwimmingWomen’s 10km

20:54
🥇 Climbing Men’s Speed Small Final

20:57
🥇 Climbing Men’s Speed Big Final

21:30
🥇 Canoe Sprint Men’s C2 500m Final A
🥇 Canoe SprintMen’s C2 500mFinal A

21:40
🥇 Canoe Sprint Women’s K4 500m Final A

21:50
🥇 Canoe Sprint Men’s K4 500m Final A

22:00
🥇 Hockey Men Bronze Medal Match: India v Spain

23:00
🥇 Diving Men’s 3m Springboard Final
🥇 Weightlifting Women’s 59kg

To be rescheduled – Sailing Mixed 470 Medal Race & Mixed Nacra 17 Medal Race

Preamble