Olympic cycling champion Katie Archibald has admitted she struggled to cope with the reality of lockdown life but intends to emerge from the crisis with a fresh perspective.

The 26-year-old, who won gold as part of the women’s team pursuit squad at Rio 2016, said fears of disruption to her training regime have been overshadowed by emerging issues much closer to home.

“My dad runs a bed shop and the kind of changes that have gone on there – for a couple of weeks he was thinking everything was going to go under. He was calmly and coldly saying, ‘we’ll go bust, it’s all over’,” Archibald told the PA news agency.

Archibald has spent the majority of the lockdown period in Scotland where she has been resolutely avoiding the opportunity to make the time pass quicker by engaging in any kind of hobby.

“My hobbies are watching races back and the accompanying spread-sheets,” she admitted. “I can do anything sat down with a big screen – I can watch films or Wikipedia.

“I bought a jigsaw on the wave of enthusiasm that everyone’s having, but it took so long to arrive because everyone’s ordering jigsaws.

“It arrived pre-made, so when the box turned up I thought, ‘oh good, I’ll do it’, but after five minutes of undoing it, it just seemed like so depressing a task.”