Day 2, Thursday, October 4th

Today's races are the 4000 meter pursuit, 200 meter match sprint, womens' keirin, and scratch race.  I'll be doing the match sprint and scratch.

MATCH SPRINT

The match sprint starts with a qualifying round to pick the 12 fastest guys in the country.  They do that by having everyone ride a 200 meter flying time trial--"flying" because you get to take a running start at it.  It's not from a standing start.  The fastest 12 times advance to the sprint tournament, which is a single-elimination tournament of one-on-one races over three laps.

So the issue for me, Ted, Chris, and Taylor is whether we can get top-12 in the 200m time trial.  At the nationals qualifying races, Taylor was fastest with an average speed of around 40mph over 200 meters--11.4 seconds.  Chris and Ted rode comparable times, about two-tenths of a second slower than Taylor, and I rode another two-tenths slower than them.

The flying 200 has a lot to do with technique.  You are negotiating two corners at 40mph (the track is 250 meters), so the more tightly you cut the corners the sooner you hit the line.  You can build up a head of steam however you want as you approach the 200 meter-to-go line, so the main strategy is to ride up as high as you can on the track's banking, using the altitude (about two stories in the air from the pole line) to store energy, dropping down the banking of the track leading into the timed 200 meters.  The top riders will hit the timing tape going 43mph or so, and hold it to the line.  I'll hope to hit the tape at 40mph and hold it.  If I can do that, I could make the top 12.  But our hopes are really riding on Taylor here--we'll be screaming our heads off for him.

When we get to the match sprint tournament--the top 12 riders--I'll write more about how tht works, and how it goes.

SCRATCH RACE

The scratch race is the easiest race to understand.  20 or 30 riders on the track all together, whoever hits the line first wins.  The heats will be 30 laps, and the final will be, I think, 60 laps.

There will be three scratch heats today to see who makes the medal round.  The top 8 from each heat advance to the final.  There are about 25 guys in each heat.  I feel very good about the scratch, and the goal naturally is to make the final.  In theory, 8th place in the heat is the ideal result--just good enough to make the final, without wasting too much energy.  I can do it, so it's just a matter of whether I will.  I'm one of the relatively few riders riding both the sprint and endurance events--for better or worse, I have moderate talents in both areas, which makes it hard to excel in sprinting, but for the longer mass start races--especially scratch--I can do well if I can avoid using too much energy early on.  The goal in today's scratch race is to hide in the field for the first 28 laps, and then pin it for the last two.  If I can do that, I will make the final--I've got more of a sprint than the long-event riders, whose strategy will be to make it hard for guys like me to 'hang in' and rest in the field before the final two laps.