French enjoy triple gold on Saturday
France completed an Olympic treble at the Stone Mountain Park velodrome on Saturday, adding the women's sprint and men's team pursuit to the kilometer title won on the opening day.

The French pursuit foursome powered around the 250 meters track, demolishing the Olympic 4,000 meters record they had set earlier in a session delayed by rain for three hours.

Philippe Ermenault, already a silver winner in the individual pursuit, Christophe Capelle, Jean-Michel Monin, and Francois Moreau raced home in four minutes, 5.930 seconds, beating Russia by nearly two seconds.

They improved their semifinal mark of 4:06.880 by almost a second. That was set when they beat Italy who clocked 4:08.460, also faster than the original best of 4:08.785 established by Russia on Friday.

Felicia Ballanger sprinted to gold with a scream of triumph. She beat Australian Michelle Ferris 2-0 in the best-of-three final.

Since Ballanger consulted a sports psychologist about her lack of confidence she has won the world sprint and 500 meters time trial titles, and now Olympic gold.

Her mother named her after Italian cycling idol Felice Gimondi, and he would be happy to be associated with Ballanger after her performances of the past 12 months.

On her way to gold the law student disposed of twice Olympic champion Erika Salumae of Estonia and Barcelona Games silver-medalist Annett Neumann of Germany.

The celebrations may be somewhat muted for French sprinters Florian Rousseau and Frederic Magne. They fell in the men's quarter-finals, but Rousseau has the consolation of being the new Olympic kilometer champion.

German Jens Fiedler became the only Barcelona champion to reach a track final. He beat Australian Gary Neiwand 2-0 in the semifinals and meets American Marty Nothstein in Sunday's final.

Nothstein, double world champion two years ago, beat Canadian Curt Harnett 2-0.

This story written by Reuters correspondents