Head to Head with a National Champ?

One of the things that JP said earlier in the year in his shoes as the club's development director was, "You might be a sprinter with your friends but that's a lot different than being a sprinter in a race." The lesson is that you might have a sprint but in a race there's bound to be somebody bigger and stronger who can apply that pure power better than you can. Most people's best bet is to try to force a selection from which they can try to place, rather than to sprint against the whole field. The difference between a honest-to-goodness sprinter and someone who can occasionally sprint became obvious to me this weekend at the track, my first time out as a Cat 3. Unfortunately, only two other 1/2/3 riders had registered. One of them threw down the track's fastest Kilo time at Opening Weekend in April and a few weeks ago at the State Championships. The other is a Master's National Champion in the match sprint.

Oh well.

I had been hoping that a small field would be combined with others so that we could race some mass-start races, but it was only to be a handful of match sprints.

Oh well.

What played out "sprinting against" Andrew Lacorte reminded me of a scene from The Wire, when McNulty, roughly handled by bosses, and his partner Bunk are working their way toward getting belly-up at a bar. "You know why I respect you, Bunk? Because when it came time for you to screw me, you were very gentle." Bunk - as drunk or drunker than McNulty - replies, "I knew it was your first time. I wanted it to be special." Lacorte wouldn't let me slip away when I hammered from the whistle, so we danced around a little bit, kept the pace high, and when I started sprinting, he just held me on his rear wheel, increasing the pace deftly. He didn't ride away from me, which was either gentlemanly, or kid-glove treatment. Maybe both.

Later, in a 3-up sprint, I drilled it from the line as Colin tucked behind Lacorte, hoping that he would tire. Interested in an even playing field, I was trying to give Colin a fighting chance, which he had, though Lacorte held him off when they started sprinting in earnest (at this point, well ahead of me).

Afterward, Colin paid me a nice compliment. "When I was trying to come around him his arms were shaking. He looked tired at that point." Lacorte, overhearing this, responded, "That's a tactic." Maybe, but leading your competition to believe that fatigue is not fatigue, but a tactic - that's a tactic, too.

I made third place look easy yesterday, and besides, I got a chance to top off the tan line on my thighs.

And even though it was probably a stretch to say that I raced against Lacorte, it's still pretty cool to go head-to-head against a National Champion.

Photos linked from Mike Mahesh's blog.

Tour of New York

We had numbers in this race, and I knew who to mark in the event that a leadout train failed. I stayed sheltered, and felt strong. I've been sprinting well. I can do this. I was in position. Brooklyn Velo Force had a strong train going up; our train was running strong at the front. Westwood Velo moved up and things got chaotic, dense, elbows bumping and everybody struggling to hold position and suddenly it wasn't fast enough. Our train fell apart. The front got jammed up and was very tight.

Suddenly BVF's two sprinters were on the front with 500 meters to go, and I had some daylight to the right. So I jumped, went across the road, hard, and tried to hold it. Opened a gap. Peeked under my armpit. Watched it start to close. Saw a guy come up on my right hip. The line was right there. Then more guys.

I was swallowed twenty meters from the line.

Maybe I salvaged a top ten. I came close to winning. Sigh. There's always next time.

I think it was a good move. Our train had started to disintegrate in the ragged, aggressive front. BVF's sprinter wasn't going to jump from that far out. I felt strong; the pace had slowed. It was worth a shot. The opportunity was there and I took it. What should I do next time?

I think I should be a little more patient; another hundred feet down the road, if that kept up, and I could have jumped clear to hold it. Maybe. If somebody else hadn't taken initiative by then. Maybe they started sprinting, saw me dangling out there, and laughed.

I'm glad I tried it. Sitting in and waiting for a possible sprint victory is tough - it's tough with ringers like Lombardi and Aracena in the field, it's tough on the psyche, the notion that I spent twentyfive bucks to risk my bike and my neck cruising around Prospect Park for over an hour so I can race for a minute and a half.

I'd rather upgrade on points than on top ten finishes, and to do that I'm going to have to take risks. So I should try it. Attack. More often. Go ahead. I think about a guy who races out at the velodrome, Tadeusz Marszalek. He's a great racer to watch because he attacks constantly. I'd rather race like him, not try to sit pretty and then hope that by some accident of registration I'm the best sprinter in the field. Because I'm not.

The right attack might get me that podium. Not this time, though.

Two teammates went down in the madness of the final moments before the sprint uncorked in earnest. Shoulder injuries. Kerry and Todd, best wishes for your rapid recovery.

The Ripple Effect?

I love when rest days coincide with rainy days - I can take the subway, read a few chapters of a book (currently: Acts of Faith by Phillip Caputo. Crushing), and not feel completely lazy or like I'm missing a day. Last night's efforts - twentyfive miles up to a crit in New Jersey, placing 8th in the race, and riding back to Brooklyn - got my egg well and cooked.

I think I've made at least one and possibly two stupid moves in recent races. I consider myself a decent rider. I feel relaxed and in control of the bike. I'm aware of riders around me and I'll let an attack or acceleration go if I think it's unsafe for me to get up and jump after it. But: recently, in a sprint, I was passing a lot of people because I was in poor position, too far back, but still had a lot of sprint to wind up and thought I could still place. I tore up the right side with a huge head of steam with the leaders still in front of me, but I needed to get left to have room to sprint more. I checked my left side and slid left, moving over several "lanes." Not holding my line. Not swerving, not in a tight pack - I had very definitively passed people - but still. Tenuous at best, right?

I think it was careful, but I also think it was stupid because it could very easily have not been careful. Confessional and defense all rolled together. I tend to roll my eyes at people sprinting from behind, but in this case, I placed in the top ten, I hit the line with a big head of steam, and if the line was ten meters down the road I could have podiumed. Should I have done it? Maybe not. Was it bad? Maybe not. Should I do it again? Probably not.

Here's the thing - different activity looks different from different perspectives. One person can go right up to the edge having assessed the safety of doing so, but an observer doesn't necessarily know what that person has and hasn't considered. The observer hasn't reckoned the what-ifs, so there's a lot of unsettled potential for risk. That leads to conflict in the pack.

A teammate's recent race report described coming up in a cat 2 sprint as another rider swerved toward him. Rather than swerve to avoid him, he leaned against the rider, trying to stabilize the situation. Obviously, words were exchanged after the race, and my teammate's point was that he felt it was the safest thing to do in the situation.

Things appear different to different people; if you want to avoid setting off a chain reaction of people taking precautionary measures because they don't know whether or not you have evaluated the risk of the move you're making, then it might be best not to toe that line of apparent-but-evaluated/controlled risk.

Bottom line? I felt what I did was safe but the ends don't justify the means.

Your thoughts?

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.

Track World Champsionships - Men's Match Sprint

I've been watching the Men's Match Sprint from the World Champsionships a few times over to see how it played out. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the first round, but here are the second and third rounds. France's Gregory Bauge versus Malaysia's Azizulhashi Awang - such a size difference between the two! There are plenty of small, punchy road sprinters like sprinter du jour Mark Cavendish of High Road, who came from the British Track Cycling team (the only one who didn't medal in the Beijing Olympics!), but it's a bit more rare to see a tiny track sprinter.

Rounds two and three are excellent sprints. In round 2, Awang keeps Bauge on his toes and changes his position frequently to throw off whatever Bauge's game plan might be; then, he disrupts Bauge's acceleration by riding him up track so that he's a bit less prepared to respond to Awang's long, steady sprint, which held off Bauge in those final 50 meters or so.

In round 3 it looks like he tried to do the same thing, but Bauge disrupted it by getting behind Awang and dancing around, throwing Awang off. Bauge had control, and with a lap and a half to go, Bauge was ramping up the pace for the sprint high on the boards, Awang was stuck down low with no way to get control over Bauge's sprint - he was toast. I wonder if he felt like he was swimming back to the boat at night with the shark's splashing noises coming closer and closer. Awang, low on the boards, trying to accelerate while Bauge had the obvious advantage in that Championship sprint.

In other Bauge news, Ethan at Laek House posted a handful of excellent pictures from the Bauge/Sireau crash. I saw an internet mention of this being caused by the tubular rolling, but it looks like Sireau's arm made contact with Bauge, which lifted and turned his bars. He lost traction, turned the bars more, and the tubular rolled while he was going down. Here it is in slow-motion, but really, the photos linked above are better.

Connecticut Criteriums

I spent a weekend in Connecticut and used the opportunity to race criteriums in Plainville and Bethel. I needed just a few more races before I upgrade, and I chose Plainville based largely on having heard about it from Sprinter Della Casa's blog and Bethel from its reputation in NYC as a good training crit. After racing both, I highly recommend each for some good weekend racing.

Plainville is an excellent course - fast and flat, D-shaped with two ninety degree turns separated by the home stretch and by a long, fast, winding part. The final turn was just before the 200m mark. The combined 4/5 category meant that the race was long enough to be satisfying (45 minutes plus 5 laps), and I found the racers and organizers, volunteers, and marshalls to be really congenial. I got there with enough time for a few warm-up laps before being called to the line, and when the race started I found that the quality of racing was pretty high. A few riders whom I wanted to be away from but nothing terrible, and some people who had that quiet confidence around them.

I separated the race into sections and executed my plan very well. I sat in and got a feel for it. Then I tested things out as an opportunist, putting myself in a good two-person break for several laps until we were decisively reeled in. Then, I sat in and recovered, and figured out what positioning I would need for the sprint (recovery was aided by an unfortunate 6+ rider stack-up on the backstretch; the officials stopped the race a few laps after as an ambulance needed to attend to one rider still down. Here's hoping that everyone is not too bad off and riding again soon). And then I played my position very well, putting myself where I thought I needed to be. I saw an acceleration moving up the inside on the backstretch, jumped, got myself to be the third wheel, took the corner at 31mph and sprinted. I got into a rider's draft and threw my bike at the line to take 2nd! I even won cash, which went right into lunch for me, my traveling buddy, our helpful friend, and our two hosts for the night. Burritos - my favorite post race food.

My traveling partner and I rolled up to Bethel in barely enough time to sign in and get to the line. I was able to take one (1) warmup lap: ninety degree turn, sweeping gentle downhill, wicked headwinds on the back stretch, and a hill that's long and steep enough to change things. Sand on the course but nowhere particularly dangerous. The cat 5 race was only 12 laps and I figured I'd just patrol the front. The front turned out to be the eventual winner, a big young guy who liked to sit at the front and hammer. Had he attacked he could have done some damage. He also telegraphed everything he was about to do, so coming up to the finish line I jumped right before he did, opened up a huge gap, and rolled over the line first. Except I had made a mistake: there was the official, ringing the bell. One to go - how did I mess that one up? I sat up, got a wheel, and tried to chill out. I did but was tired enough that I couldn't sprint the way I would have liked, and came in 3rd.

Good results feel good, but I'm happier about a few other things: I made plans for the races and I stuck to them; I read the races well, and I read the other racers well. But on the top of the list is that I just submitted for an upgrade to Cat 4. I'm also just happy that a weekend of traveling and racing worked out very well - I had a great time in Connecticut, hanging out with friends, enjoying the first weekend of Spring weather immensely. And we hit up some races that I do not hesitate to recommend broadly and widely (in fact, I just emailed my team doing so!). So, if you're within whatever you consider to be worthwhile driving distance of either Plainville or Bethel I recommend that you get out to them. The people are friendly and the courses are good.

Marty Nothstein

I read this Cycling News interview with Marty Nothstein, and found it pretty interesting. If you watch track sprint races from the 1990s, Marty Nothstein is the enormous dude in the front at the finish line. He's got a couple palmares, including being the National sprint champ from '96 to '01; here he is dominating the 1996 Olympic trials at the Trexlertown Velodrome (the 5 parts of that video are pretty enjoyable).

I like that interview with Nothstein because it spins into some geekery, and that's satisfying to me. It's fun to learn that Marty was sprinting on a 50x14 gear - a huge gear for track racing, but incidentally, a fairly small gear for road sprintig where riders will be pounding a 53x13, 12, and maybe even 11 (but if roadies think that a 50x14 is a small gear, try starting your sprint in that gear, from a standing start!). He also shares his preferred crank length with us - 167.5mm for sprint events.

I also like that we get a perfect glimpse into the significant ego of the sprinter:

CN: Six hundred meters out, Marty Nothstein, or Lance Armstrong?
MN: In a sprint?
CN: Yeah.
MN: After how long?
CN: A Classic.
MN: He's done.
CN: Six hundred meters out, Marty Nothstein or Mario Cipollini?
MN: Cipo's done. No problem.

Something in me doubts that a beefcake like Marty, a pure sprinter, would even be with Lance Armstrong or Cipolllini with 600 meters left in a Classic. But there's Marty, pretty confident in his ability to destroy everybody else. The sprint is certainly a discipline that just attracts or perhaps manufactures big egos - I wonder to what extent that's due to the fact that, unlike many other cycling events, sprints are very individual events. The match sprint is (usually) a one-on-one event. There is a lot of room for tactical manipulation of the race but there is very little room for nonpersonal variables to sneak in and effect the outcome of the race - whereas, in road cycling, so many racers need to be humbled by their vulnerability to the elements, the terrain, a staple in the road, or a team that's just too damn strong. To win a road race, the stars have to be alligned, the cards shuffled, the tires intact, and maybe you've got to be the strongest rider on the road.

In a track sprint, you've only got to be the strongest rider on the banking. So I can see where the ego comes in to play. Oh, right, and there's this:

MN: I need to win.
CN: Why?
MN: I just plain out like it! There's nothing better.

Need more be said?

Rumor on the street is that he'll be around to teach some higher-level training sessions at the Kissena Velodrome this season. I'll have to check that out.

Closing the post with a fun fact: the GT that Marty is mounting here was actually made by Trimble Cycles, developed and built by the uncle of a teammate of mine. Other Trimble designs were incorporated into Kestrel bicycles, but my favorite Trimble design due to its sheer outlandishness is the "sailbike," an aero tt/tri bike from the 80s. Crazy!

Three-up Underdog Sprinting

A curiousity in track racing is the 3-person or 4-person match sprint. Elite level match sprints have only two riders - that's the point. One of the best match sprints I've seen while sitting in front of a computer is Huebner vs. Golinelli in the 1990 World Champsionships. In a match sprint, two riders will stalk each other slowly, using track stands and feints in order to gain what seem like slight advantages - being behind the other at walking speed. Getting to jump from a preferred spot on the banking. But these slight advantages are huge where the entire race takes place at top speed in the last 200m. Take a look:



At Kissena we occasionally ride in 3- or 4-up match sprints. When you jam an unexpectedly large number of racers into a tight omnium, the official's task is to make everything proceed as smoothly and quickly as possible, and so 3- or 4-up match sprints are organized during elimination rounds. They are undeniably amateur. And they are fascinating, because they introduce some unforseen elements into the racing.

I was reminded of it while watching the finish to the 2008 Paris-Roubaix. Cancellara, Boonen, and Ballan were alone at the front with plenty of room. The commentators told us that Ballan was the underdog, Cancellara was the strong man, and Boonen is the big sprinter. As they got within a few kilometers I kept waiting for attacks that would pit Boonen and Cancellara against each other and leave Ballan struggling to hold on. Nothing.

As they passed under the 1K to go banner, I knew something was about to happen... but it didn't.

If I were Ballan I would have attacked just before entering the Roubaix Velodrome. The best way to defeat two stronger riders is to pit them against each other, and if they're in the position where they are threatened with dragging the other up to the leader, then that favors the attacking underdog. Sure, they might be fresher, stronger, and faster, but if they both hesitate for a second, waiting for the other to carry them up - well, a second or two is all you'd need. And you might be lucky enough to get three or four seconds.

I learned this by getting absolutely hosed by an avowed nonsprinter in a 4-up match sprint this past summer. We were cruising, watching and waiting, and Niki broke from high on the banking in Turn 3. None of us wanted to burn for 300 meters to give the race to the people on our wheel, and by the time we realized that, Niki had 50 meters on us. And then 75.

Other useful reading material on this subject: Sprinter Della Casa's How To Beat A Sprinter.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to go do some squats.

EDIT: So, apparently Sprinting for Signs removed the post with the video in it; it was taken off of Youtube. However, at Belgium Knee Warmers (on the same day!) is video of the 2008 World Champsionship Road Race, featuring Alessandro Ballan going on the attack with 2K to go. What an attack! Wow!