Lee Howard spent five days basking in the "relief" of being selected for his first Olympic team before the Tokyo 2020 Games were officially postponed a year due to a coronavirus outbreak.

The 30-year-old was named to Australia's track squad for the Games on March 19, four days before the Australian Olympic Committee announced it would boycott the Games if they were held as planned and five days before the International Olympic Committee cancelled the event. [This news comes after Denmark set a new men's world record of 3:44.672 at the track world championships in Berlin, dominating their traditional team pursuit rivals, Australia and Great Britain.

Howard, interviewed by phone from his home in Adelaide, was understandably sounding tired as COVID-19 had us all on our heels.

"We in sports, especially cycling, are often in our own little bubble. But then we go through a pandemic, and we realize that, like what's happening now, that bubble has burst, and there's a lot more going on. So in a way, it's really good that we see it and realize it," Howard told Cycling News. [But] just like everybody else, we have a job to do, and a job needs a goal. It's really hard not to see the goal, and everybody works at it in different ways."

"The goal is ...... got when the Olympic timeframe was announced, but there is no great stress about having to gear up yet.

"For me, I just maintain a certain level of fitness for now and work on what I can. I go away a little bit, but I stay home most of the time. It's mentally hard."

Cycling Australia has not announced a specific training regime as the Velodrome closes and elite sports worldwide deal with mass cancellations and postponements of major competitions.

"It's up to us to decide if we prefer a structured program. I'm somewhere in between," Howard said of his structure.

"I just got an extra year, so I think it's good right now to relax my head a little bit.

"But at the same time, I don't want to get off the bike and lose all the fitness I've gained in the last six weeks.

Howard realistically describes his election to the Olympics after 21 years as "a relief."

After seven years competing in the top class of road cycling, the journey to being selected to represent Team Pursuit is a story of perseverance in itself.

The Australian was an accomplished track athlete who won world titles in Madison and the Omnium in the formative years of his career. Although he was unable to join the Australian Team Pursuit team led by Jack Bobridge and Rohan Dennis, Howard had more lucrative options.

He turned pro with HTC Colombia in 2010, but had made a name for himself as a sprinter who had won the National Academy's Continental Squad, so expectations were high.

When HTC went bankrupt, he spent four years with Mitchelton Scott before moving to IAM. The latter dissolved at the end of 2016, so Howard signed a contract with Aqua Blue Sports starting in 2017. There he found himself at a crossroads five months into his two-year contract. Howard found himself generally dissatisfied with the game and feeling stagnant, and took some time off before Aqua Blue Sports announced his untimely departure in November 2017 to focus on the circuit.

"I probably wouldn't have made the decision to leave the World Tour if I didn't think I could make the Olympic team, and I would have stayed tough for another three or four years, or however long. Howard said, "It was a confidence booster to make the team. [But that's only half the challenge, the next challenge is to win a gold medal.

"But I'm very relieved. There are many reasons why I didn't do the Olympics before. I started cycling when I was nine years old and I'm 30 now, so it's been 21 years."

The wait has not been without its sacrifices, but it has finally paid off, especially as an older man returning to a young man's constantly evolving sport, as Denmark showed in February.

"Our training methods are not even in the same league as what we do on the road. So mentally, it was a big challenge to switch from what we thought was hard training to hard training on the track," he says.

"On the road, you always think about being as skinny as you can and having more endurance for longer. And now the Team Pursuit trend is not so far removed from what they are doing now, even though they are not track sprinters.

"Instead of losing weight now, they are constantly trying to maintain the muscles they have worked out in the gym.

Howard was part of the quartet that broke the British stronghold in team pursuit at the 2018 Commonwealth Games, setting a new world record, and also set a time of 3:48.012 at the 2019 World Championships, which Denmark demolished in Germany.

"It was an interesting World Championships," Howard recalled. 'There were some huge upsets and some incredibly fast times.' [Denmark is definitely on the rise. They have changed their style of racing now. They have followed very closely in our footsteps from the longer turns and bigger gears that we adopted two, three, four years ago. Just by adopting that, they've obviously shaved a few seconds off."

"It was a shock, but frankly, it was probably a good thing. We started to see what we were supposed to be. It didn't affect our confidence. It just pushed us back to reality and reminded us that we have to run this time or faster at the Olympics."

Howard was practically lined up outside the testing room, about to take the last test of his cycling career. As frustrating as it may be, his awareness of the effects of the coronavirus is perhaps more acute than most, partly because his Spanish partner's family is at the epicenter of the European pandemic.

"Maria is sitting next to me, her family has been evacuated all over Spain. Her sister-in-law is a nurse and is right in the middle of it all.

"In the grand scheme of things, sport is just sport. For that reason, health is obviously of paramount importance."