Theo Bos

Is Theo Bos old news now? Everybody has been talking about Chris Hoy for the past year or so, but before that, it was all about Theo Bos, this young Dutch rider who seemed indominitable in the sprint. Just how powerful was he? Take a look at this keirin from the 2006 worlds - when he also won gold in the sprint (against Gregory Bauge, looking a lot less muscular four years ago than he does these days) and the kilo. Later that year he set the record for the Flying 200 (a flying-start 200 meter sprint time trial) clocking 9.772 seconds.

However, in the Beijing olympics, he came up empty-handed. Word on the boards is that he's working on transitioning to be a road racer. An odd transition - conventional wisdom says that track endurance riders, who specialize in the madison or the points race, would make good road sprinters (see the road circuit's Golden Boy du Jour, Mark Cavendish, as an example), but that track sprinters are too specialized and too muscular to survive much road racing.

Bos has a different physique than today's all-star, Chris Hoy. Take a look at that picture above - one of the reasons why I like watching Bos race. He's lithe, graceful and predatory like a panther. He's speed compared to the muscular Hoy's sheer power.

If his road career doesn't really take off and he never returns to his brilliance at the track, well then, at least we'll have our memories, right? Few things in bike racing have come close to the sight of Hoy spinning so smooth, so fast, opening up huge gaps on world-class sprinters as he's flying through the corners.