Keirin, and The End

Keirin is a great event—I decided to just have fun and ride aggressively.  One way or the other, it was my last ride at Nationals and likely the fastest I would go on my bike for a very long time.  The event consists of six or seven riders sprinting over 2 ½ laps in a tight bunch—the finishes are usually very close, and as a result there tends to be a lot of crashing.  There were no crashes in the mens keirin this year at Nationals, so all was safe, and fast.

In the first heat, I attacked with two to go, and everyone accelerated at that point; I got 5^th out of 7, but it was all together, and looking at the video after the fact, I picked up Gideon Massie’s wheel pretty effectively as he came by, and I generally felt like I had ridden well.  With that placing, my next ride was the repechage, so the best I could do was top-12.

In the repechage, again I rode pretty well, but got third or fourth; you need to win the repechage to advance to the final, so that was the end of my racing this year.  My top speeds in the keirin events were around 40 mph in both rides—65.5kph in one, 65.1kph in the other.  Massie won the event in the end overall, and I’m guessing he was hitting 67 or so.

I’m glad I rode the Keirin.  It felt terrible to have ridden a poor team sprint, and it made me feel better to just get out there and ride hard a couple more times.

On the sprint events, I had gotten 15^th or 16^th in everything.  And in the Keirin, although they don’t give placings lower than 12, it’s probably fair to surmise that I got something like 16^th.

And that was that for me.  The most disappointing event of the day was actually the Madison—we were so excited to root for Brian Crosby, University of Minnesota Gopher-wearing phenom, but his teammate was crashed out of the race on the first lap, and you can’t very well ride a 120 lap Madison against pro’s without a teammate.  So that was the end of it for him—far more disappointing than going a little slower than hoped.  He handled it like a pro, and when I talked with him later I was amazed at how much morale he had.  He’s off to Ontario to race in the London velodrome soon.

As for me, my track bike is already hoisted into the rafters of the garage, and I’m going for a run tomorrow.