LONDON: Denmark's Lasse Norman Hansen won the men's inaugural Olympic omnium crown here Sunday to break British dominance of the track cycling at the Velodrome.
Frenchman Bryan Coquard finished second to take the silver with Britain's Ed Clancy forced to settle for bronze.
Britain's unstoppable track squad had won four of the five gold medals disputed over the three previous days of competition.
But in the omnium, in which Clancy was heavily tipped to give them more gold, the hosts came up short as Hansen capped his solid campaign with a couple of stunning rides.
Hansen, competing in his first Olympics after a third place in the omnium at the Melbourne world championships in April, won't forget his campaign in a hurry.
The tall 20-year-old from Faaborg crashed in the penultimate event of the scratch race when Clancy cut inside him on the track.
Sitting in provisional third place and well within sight of the gold prior to the race, the Dane got up gingerly to finally rejoin a peloton that was attacking and counter-attacking its way over the 60 laps.
To the applause of a 6,000-capacity velodrome that seemed to have eyes only for Clancy, the Dane eventually fought his way back into contention and crucially closed his one-lap deficit.
The sixth and final event was the 1 km time trial.
And while that was dominated by Clancy in a stunning time of 1min 00.981sec, only two tenths off the Olympic record set by Chris Hoy in Athens eight years ago, Hansen stopped the clock at 1:02.314 to secure second place.
The omnium winner is the rider with the least points accumulated across the six events and Hansen finished on a total of 27.
Coquard amassed 29 while Clancy was third on 30.
German's Roger Kluge was fourth on 33pts, with Australia's world champion Glenn O'Shea fifth on 34.
The only other team to beat Britain so far to gold was the German women's sprint team on Thursday, after Victoria Pendleton and Jess Varnish had been relegated from the competition.
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