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Why is track cycling the ugly, more boring step-sister?

Matty Roberts new author
Roar Rookie
26th May, 2013
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Why is track cycling looked upon as inferior to road races? (Image: Supplied)
Matty Roberts new author
Roar Rookie
26th May, 2013
24
1698 Reads

This has been a strange yet burning question I’ve posed to myself of late, and now I’m putting it out there.

By way of precursor, let me say this – I’m not a cycling hobbyist. I’m just curious.

I have an interest that is quite freshly developed due to a couple of cycling projects I have recently created in my profession as a maker of unique sporting stories and projects.

Last year I co-produced an online video content project from a roadside point-of-view during the Tour de France.

We mixed it with the quirky Euro crowds along steep roadsides throughout the jealousy inducing mountain ranges of the French countryside.

I drank Pernot in a strange Frenchman’s front yard as the greatest road race in cycling rolled past my adoring, and at times disbelieving, eyes.

We can all see that road cycling has a solid placing within the Australian sporting ‘mix’. Of course it makes sense, one of our own was its king only a short time ago.

There are those among us that muse over the international road circuit by using words like prestige, endurance, gradient, and egotist.

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We wax lyrical about the landscapes (guilty).

We reel European rider names off as though we are effortlessly fluent in their native tongue.

All of these elements must place the discipline atop the cycling family totem like the glorious, golden-haired, uber-popular better sister with all her hand crafted cheek bones and poetic intelligence.

But what about track cycling?

I am now in a position to ask this because since my experience of Le Tour, I’ve experienced the alleged ‘insignificant other’.

Recently, the world of track cycling (good and bad) has been jammed into my face while I’ve been co-creating and co-producing Ryokou, a documentary project covering arguably Australia’s greatest male track cyclist, Shane Perkins. In Japan.

Yes, that’s right. Japan. Here’s where it gets interesting. Ryokou is the Japanese expression for ‘journey’.

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For the last four years, Shane has resided and trained for large periods of time in Japan – leaving his family and travelling all over the country to race in the mystique that is the Keirin (Explanation of ‘the Keirin’ will be forthcoming. Read on.).

Each year he is selected to join an elite group of international professionals to race in the National Japanese Keirin Championship.

The lure? A chance to win prize money. Big money. Money exponentially greater than is prized to a crowned Track World Champion in a typical UCI meet, for example.

Japanese Keirin is the perfect pin up for track cycling, and a worthy antithesis of the road stuff.

It certainly ain’t ugly. The anatomy of a Keirin race is artful, and strangely beautiful. It’s slow, then fast.

It’s organised, then completely raw. It’s at once peaceful and powerful.

Rider and machine are like linear peacocks as they start tactically, revealing positioning clues but keeping spectators anxious with desire.

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As distance grows so does tension. Nine riders shapeshift with sharp movements over four laps, throwing themselves passionately towards the finish line.

Brakes can’t hinder them, because there are none. Shane Perkins says the best thing to do when in the moment of Keirin is to not think, and just go with your gut. This is my kind of sister.

And so, armed with curiousity, romanticism and an Aussie protagonist, like love drunk Neanderthals we set out to explore the phenomenon that is the Japanese Keirin and its place as a track cycling discipline that shaped a man, and helped to re-shape a broken economy (Keirin re-invests its revenue from mass legal gambling back into Japan’s welfare economy – around $8.3bn AUD to date.).

Like we’ve seen in road cycling years before, our story found its hero. An obsession with competitive track cycling has taken a Shane Perkins through a tumultuous past and shaped a future with no ceiling.

It was all so pretty to me. Rooms full of unique steel framed fixed gear bikes. Afternoon sunlight drenching blue asphalt velodrome banks.

But the reality of this story is that Shane Perkins races the Keirin because there’s a good chance he can’t afford to remain a full-time professional track cyclist if he was to stay in Australia all year round.

Which finally, brings me all the way back to my burning question:

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What about track cycling?

I truly hope Ryokou brings this question a little more into the fray.

I feel that although the experiences written about here, and the project itself are inherently international, it’s obvious that Australia suffers a follow-on effect as far as this love affair with cycling discipline goes.

What’s strange is I recently heard that the very first sport to be seen under lights at the Sydney Cricket Ground was, you guessed, it…track cycling. She’s vintage. That’s on trend. I’m into that.

Of course there are those who do give their support to track cycling in this country, because it either benefits them commercially, because it helps athletes like Shane Perkins, or because they just love it.

Or all of the above. They know who they are. And without some of them, a story like Ryokou wouldn’t have even made it around the first bend.

Ryokou will have its worldwide digital release in five short parts, for five consecutive days, at midday from Monday 27 May each day through until Friday 31 May.

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Tune into Chasing The Glory from midday each day this week to watch each episode as it is published, or subscribe to the channel to be notified.

RYOKOU POSTER FINAL-A4

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