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| An amateur cyclist competes in a Georgia race. John Bazemore/AP |
Brakeless and spoiling for a race
At the New England Velodrome, cyclists compete in track racing – a niche sport within a niche sport.
By Will Kilburn | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitorfrom the October 12, 2007 edition
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Londonderry, N.H. - For those whose notion of bicycle racing begins and ends with telecasts of the Tour de France, the scene at New England Velodrome would be a puzzling one, starting with the race course itself: a banked, 1/5-mile concrete oval, within earshot of jets taking off from nearby Manchester Boston Regional Airport.
The 30-or-so racers who showed up on a recent Wednesday night also look different from their Tour-ing counterparts. While all sport colorful spandex jerseys and bulging leg muscles, many also have muscular arms, the better for races that are measured in seconds and meters rather than hours and miles.
All of this follows, says Anthony Eberhardt, who directs the racing series that runs from May through September, from the nature of the track bike itself: A single "fixed" gear and no brakes, so that the rider has to resist the motion of the pedals with his legs in order to come to a halt. While this may sound unsafe – and maybe bordering on the insane – one veteran of both road and track bicycle racing says that track racing is far safer.
"On the road, when people do have brakes, they tend to use them when they shouldn't," says Brooke O'Connor, an elite racer who has gone up against the world's best. "Other crashes on the road will happen when somebody goes through a corner, and either their wheels slide out from underneath them, or they take a bad line... and you don't have any of that on the track."
The series, which just finished its fourth season at the Londonderry track, one of only about two dozen in the country, is the brainchild of Mr. Eberhardt, who grew up racing bikes outside Philadelphia, both on the roads and at the nearby Lehigh County Velodrome in Trexlertown, considered to be the Indianapolis Motor Speedway of track cycling. Now a physical therapist, Eberhardt first launched the series four years ago at a track in Keene, N.H. A year later, he moved it to its present site: a track that is still used by go-karts on the weekends.
Unlike other forms of bike racing, in which spectators typically see only the start and finish, everything happens up close and personal in track racing. Race formats include time trials, in which a lone rider races a set distance against the clock; scratch races, with multiple riders blasting off from the starting line and going all-out for the duration of the race; and match sprints, in which two racers typically take off slowly, shadowing each other on the high banks of the track as they angle for drafting position for a final sprint that often lasts less than a lap.
The soundtrack at New England Velodrome is provided by Dick Ring, a veteran bike-racing announcer who was lured out of retirement by Eberhardt. A one-time national-class cyclist and speed skater, Mr. Ring was the voice of New England bicycle racing from 1964 through 2004 and says that a lot of the fun for him comes when he sees road cyclists take to the track for the first time.
"There's a lot of riders that could endure a road race, and then all of a sudden they get on a track and they're lighting it up, and they've got themselves a great deal of talent that they never knew they had," Ring says. "So this is what's really enjoyable."
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