#tbt – Back on Track (Jan 2008)
In 2008, we relaunched Derailed as a monthly magazine. Every issue would feature a headline article and then a scattering of the essays and silly nonsense that had made us popular. Back on Track was the first issue, and it was an apt subject matter: my part was written from the Zesdaagse Rotterdam. I was there alone running the live broadcast for Cycling.TV, lugging a desktop computer and monitor across the city each day so that I could plug it into the AV truck.
It was a pretty good gig. The race put me in an expensive hotel with all the riders and teams (I even remember texting Rebecca Charlton a discrete 2008-era camera photo of Theo Bos grabbing breakfast). I got all day to myself in Rotterdam. And I mostly had to press Start on the encoder, watch cycling in the velodrome for a few hours, then press Stop.
TOWARDS THE end of the 19th century, European road cycling was experimenting with the long, tough courses that have gone down as part of the sport’s famous heritage; battles of the strongest will and toughest legs, a time when men were men and women died in childbirth. At least, that’s the myth. In truth, road cycling events only ever attracted attention the first time a landmark distance was completed — the sport of cycling had almost completely migrated to the boards of the velodrome.
The prospect of the developing sport providing a spectacle wasn’t lost, however. Crowds flocked to view the latest demands placed on riders, especially in the fast, custom built tracks in England, where races would last for a whole 24 hours and whoever could cover the greatest distance would be declared the winner. And it was a British journalist, Harry Etherington, who finally took the wearisome concept of a six-day walking race and applied the model to track cycling.
Such was the success of track racing that road racing drew from it to attach prominence to its events. Cycling’s bastardisation began almost as quickly as the sport itself — the English track riders insisted that races only be held available to amateur (middle-class) riders (as opposed to their working-class “professional” counterparts), and utilised the symbiotic channels of the media and sponsors to manufacture unfair advantages over their continental rivals.
When European road cycling finally gathered mainstream attention, it was by reproducing the lessons learned from track racing — namely, taking the format of multi-day endurance events. The Paris-Brest-Paris was the race that first encapsulated the “Tour fever” that would eventually take over France, and the Frenchman Charles Terront emerged as the eventual winner. He became one of the most famous men in France as a result, and his admirers noted with excitement how he had cycled for three days and nights without any sleep.
Riding for such a long time was not an unusual feat for Terront, who was familiar with crossing the channel to ride six day events, but he had returned with more than just experience. By making full use of stimulants on the sport’s then grandest stage, Terront had brought the doping culture of British track cycling into continental road cycling.
Fast forward a hundred years or so. Britain leads the world in track cycling performance and also administers just about the only campaign for clean racing that isn’t sickeningly sanctimonious. Dave Brailsford cites his realistic expectation the team will be competitive for gold medals in 12 different cycling events at the 2008 Olympics. It’s an impressive target, but the fact remains that the Olympics mean very little to a pro cyclist, and provide star status only in countries that will allow it — compare the fate of Bradley Wiggins to Amir Khan in Britain following the 2004 games.
So why do the Olympics matter? Because medals mean government funding. Track is, in simple terms, carrying the weight of British cycling’s future. And the system isn’t one that we can even find any fault with — it’s focused on more than just perpetuating its own means of survival, actively funding both road and track at all levels. As a feeder into the sport, the model works perfectly, providing a safe environment for kids to ride in a country where only around 0.08% of all drivers aren’t inconsiderate arseholes.
At the moment, there’s a new rise in optimism surrounding track racing that extends far beyond the British model. Indeed, it’s six-day racing that’s seeing the greatest revival. The Zesdaagse van Rotterdam — six times longer than Revolution, with five times as many people and four times as many letters in the street signs — is notable for its immediate success coming out of a 15-year hiatus. More notable is the revival of US events, albeit far from Madison Square Garden, with a three-day in Las Vegas. And even London isn’t going to be left out, it seems.
Track cycling’s future is no more certain than its chequered history. A return to the golden ages when the velodrome’s boards were the domain of cycling’s heroes rather than the niche of specialists is unlikely, yet the revival itself is hard to deny. The same is true of the British model of youth development, which provides enviable results but whose long-term value cannot yet be evaluated. One thing is for sure, however: Track is back.