Lizzie Armitstead's silver in thrilling finish is like gold to British fans celebrating first medal With Emma Pooley and reigning champion Nicole Cook also in the squad, Britain had more than one card to play but the strong feeling was that if the race panned out as expected - a sprint between a very select group of four or five riders - Armitstead was Great Britain's best bet. And she narrowed down all the tactical considerations to just one thought: sticking with the phenomenal Vos. The Dutch rider went in a break with 42km to go and Armitstead responded immediately, along with the American Shelly Olds. Russia's Olga Zabelinskaya was already up the road and when they caught her, they rode as a quartet until Olds had a puncture and dropped back. As the trio pressed on in the torrential rain it was proving impossible to convey accurate time gaps to the women with the whiteboards and pens of the motorbike riders failing miserably in the monsoon. More than once Vos and Armitstead shouted in a vain effort to gain information. As we came through Richmond Park I was doing 56kmph and I calculated that if the peloton were going to catch us they would have to be doing 60kmph on narrow wet roads. That wasn't going to happen, we were away. My problem then was how to beat Marianne, so at 3km I stopped doing my turn at the front to conserve energy. Looking back I should have jumped just a second earlier down the straight but Marianne anticipated my move and just beat me to it and held me off. Armitstead was then whisked off, sopping wet, for the medal ceremony and then her media duties, dominated by a debate about equal rights for women in sport. "I would rather have just taken in the Olympic moment, but I stand by what I said," she said. I didn't really get to celebrate with all my family and friends until a few weeks later when they organised an open top bus for me in Otley. It poured with rain then, too.