The track World Championships have taken Matt McGeehan all across Europe, to Australia and, in 2014, to Cali in Colombia where the usual pre-event scare stories that precede these kinds of excursions outside a sport’s heartland turned out not to be founded.
Instead, the championships in Cali were a celebration of track cycling, a discipline that has been dominated when it matters by the Great Britain team since the middle of the last decade.
Although track racing tends to look the same to viewers watching on television wherever it is held, travelling to championships held in such diverse locations gives each event a distinct feel and atmosphere of its own.
A TERRIBLE IDEA, they said. A track World Championships in a nation renowned for mountain goats like Nairo Quintana and Rigoberto Uran and notorious for criminal activity of the narcotic variety. Isn’t cycling trying to get away from drugs?
Then there was the need for armed guards, the warnings of apocalyptic rainfall flooding a track sheltered only by a roof scattered with holes, thus increasing the number of variables and lessening the impact of the aggregation of marginal gains.
It was portrayed as Sir Dave Brailsford’s nightmare, so much so that he decided not to travel, instead spending his fiftieth birthday – okay, pedants, it wasn’t his ‘real’ birthday as he was born in a leap year on 29 February 1964 – doing his other job with Team Sky.
Dark clouds swarmed about the Velodromo Alcides Nieto Patino and thunder clapped prior to the championships, with some training sessions delayed as wind blew rain water into the arena and onto the track. The only wall protecting it under the roof was a climbing wall at the final bend.
An access tunnel was flooded, mops were required to soak up the water and organisers then tied tarpaulin under the roof to guide any rain which might seep through holes and into the venue during the championships. The sheets of plastic looked like giant sails.
There were fears of delays in the racing, while some who shared Brailsford’s attention to detail questioned why we were here at all.
For the cosseted track riders it was a shock; from the temperature controlled, air-locked arenas like the London velodrome to one that had more in common with the Roubaix track where the ‘Hell of the North’ cobbled Classic would finish six weeks later.
It was Colombia’s second track World Championships, nineteen years after the event went to Bogota. Some joked Colombia merely wanted donors for cosmetic surgery, Cali being a favourite spot for such treatments. The augmentation of the buttocks is particularly popular and many track cyclists are well endowed in that area.
It wasn’t to everyone’s liking – the negative disposition of some meant they were determined not to enjoy it – but the 2014 track World Championships were a delight in many senses.
But people make an event and the Colombians embraced their visitors with open arms; the BBC’s local ‘fixer’ (not in the way you are thinking) welcomed his visitors with cans of cold beer.
There were succulent steaks on site, supple salsa dancers and the bike racing was fantastic.
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In Melbourne, a year prior to the 2013 track World Championships in Belarus, Australian models were used at a presentation to promote the following year’s event with the slogan: ‘You Will Win in Minsk’. There was no choice about it. People travelled in trepidation to the former Soviet state where Alexander Lukashenko and then UCI president Pat McQuaid opened the championships, the Irishman quipping after the opening ceremony that Europe’s remaining two dictators were on stage. Just to repeat, particularly for the lawyers out there: it was a joke.
Following that inauspicious start, the championships were heralded a success. A year on, under new UCI president Brian Cookson’s less autocratic regime, it was to the Americas that the track world ventured for a third time in the season after two trips to Mexico for the World Cup series.
In Mexico the riders avoided red meat, for fear of testing positive for clenbuterol, and lived on a diet of fish.
There were no such concerns in Colombia, but they had to resist the sumptuous churrascos cooked on the barbecue at the rear of the velodrome until their competition had ended for fear of carrying an extra few kilograms on the bike.
Sir Chris Hoy, in Cali as a mentor of the British team, could indulge, but chose to stick with the team. The six-time Olympic champion was an enthusiastic traveller, but others ventured to South America in cautious mood.
There were reports of riders telling their relatives not to travel, journalists expressing reluctance about venturing to Colombia and, when the wet weather and forecast for further downpours arrived, there were fears the championships might be postponed, or even cancelled altogether.
The reality was somewhat different as the Colombians fast-tracked those involved in the championships – from riders and team staff to media – through the airport and on to free transfers to their accommodation. The passage through traffic was made easier as official vehicles were escorted by police outriders. Even the few riders who chose to cycle to the velodrome each day – British riders were prohibited by coaching staff from doing so – had protection from officials in the busy lanes of traffic.
The doom-mongerers begging for the torrential rain which would curtail competition were disappointed, but the racing proved spectacular, with upsets aplenty, triumph, failure and controversy.
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When the track world comes together, it’s like having the fair or the circus in town.
Sometimes few care. The 2009 event in Pruszkow, an industrial suburb of Warsaw, went by largely unnoticed by local residents.
On other occasions an informed crowd absorbs every second of the action, such as in Manchester in 2008, where it helped that there was partisan success.
In Apeldoorn in 2011, it seemed like half of Holland had cycled to the velodrome to indulge in Dutch beer and watch the racing.
Everyone knows everyone. The riders know each other from regular competition; the coaches and team staff have been rivals for longer than many of the riders; there are even family connections with Shane Sutton leading the British team and his brother Gary a key figure in the Australian set-up.
The officials are familiar and even the media are a regular band of followers, reporting on every revolution of the events.
The tigers – to stretch the metaphor – are the male sprinters, particularly those who engage in the individual sprint.
It is a gladiatorial duel, a macho-contest of the alpha males of the track world.
The riders prowl on their road bikes around the track centre, circling like caged tigers before being let loose in the Big Top, where they eyeball each other before exploiting any weakness with a ruthless manoeuvre.
Britain has won the last two Olympics in the event, through Sir Chris Hoy in 2008 and Jason Kenny in 2012, but has enjoyed little success in between.
There are times when Kenny can appear cowed by his opponent and all-too-infrequent occasions when he has been the supreme leader.
Kenny, perhaps more than most in the British team, has a cyclical approach to performance, peaking every four years and having long lulls in between.
The Lancastrian gave Grégory Baugé further cause to be bewildered in Cali in a display that summed up the malaise of Britain’s men.
Frenchman Baugé had been the dominant force in men’s sprinting since winning the 2009 world sprint title, crossing the line with a primeval roar.
He successfully defended the rainbow jersey in 2010 and reclaimed the top spot on the podium in 2012 having been stripped of the 2011 crown and handed a short suspension for missing three out-of-competition doping tests.
Thanks to his second place in 2011, Kenny inherited the rainbow jersey, although he was presented with a junior one instead in a bizarre, low-key ceremony in the bowels of the London Velodrome at the Olympic test event six weeks prior to the Melbourne World Championships.
After dominating the one-on-one duels between Beijing and London, Baugé could not comprehend how the Bolton rider, the silver medallist behind Hoy in China, could respond to win gold in London, having had a comparatively modest four years.
To see Baugé as the inquisitor – in the same room in which Kenny had been presented with the rainbow jersey – was strange in itself, but there were more serious undertones, reading between the lines.
There were suggestions of ‘technological doping’ which Chris Boardman, then head of the research and development group known as the Secret Squirrel Club, and Sir Dave Brailsford denied. Brailsford’s joke about ‘rounder wheels’ had been taken seriously by the French media.
The one rider per nation rule at the Olympics – something that will be rectified in Rio with two permitted – meant the depth of the field was greater at the World Championships, although Baugé had not met the desired qualification criteria and raced only in the team sprint for France.
Kenny wants to be a serial winner, but he gave himself a route to the podium full of obstacles by qualifying a lowly fourteenth. The thirteen riders who were quicker all dipped beneath ten seconds.
‘At least he qualified,’ his teammate and girlfriend Laura Trott would later say, referring to Kenny’s failure to advance from the flying 200 metres in the previous November’s World Cup meeting in Manchester.
A second round loss to 2013 world champion Stefan Botticher of Germany saw Kenny need a repechage heat to advance to the quarter-finals, where he was no match for François Pervis, who brought the Briton’s World Championships to a premature end.
Kenny was the team talisman, although his readiness to lead was perhaps brought into question when Sutton invited Hoy along.
Hoy and Kenny roomed together when they were teammates and are great friends.
They are very different personalities, though. Hoy can be gregarious and outgoing – even welcoming the media into Apeldoorn’s Confetti Bar with warm hugs on a rare night out, for him, not the media – whereas Kenny is more withdrawn.
Kenny has come into his own in recent years, though, but any suggestion of the former feeling undermined by the presence of the Scot was categorically denied.
Without Brailsford, Sutton clearly felt another team figurehead was needed.
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Sir Chris Hoy watched the action from track centre in his role as team mentor or ‘Mr Inspirational’. The moniker was coined by Shane Sutton, who believed Hoy’s mere presence would translate to an improvement of a ‘tenth [of a second] or two’.
That did not transpire as Britain’s men’s team pursuit squad, Olympic champions in London, could finish only in eighth place in qualifying, their worst display in more than fifteen years.
It left Ed Clancy, the team pursuit squad captain, scratching his head for months afterwards and Sutton questioning the commitment of the young group.
They were by no means alone as Britain’s team sprint travails continued as Olympic champions Jason Kenny and Phil Hindes, joined by Kian Emadi, missed out on a medal ride.
At least they completed their qualifying ride without coming to the attention of the commissaires or a cheat accusation against Hindes, who admitted to deliberately falling during the Olympics.
Hindes is German-born with a British father and speaks with a German accent, choosing to join British Cycling, in part, perhaps, because of the depth of talent in Germany, who are a team equivalent to Jamaica’s 4 x 100 metres relay squad.
René Enders, who likes to do standing jumps up whole flights of stairs or over chairs as a warm up, teamed up with Robert Förstemann and Maximilian Levy.
The flying Germans, with Förstemann’s gigantic thighs at second wheel, were beaten to gold by New Zealand. France were third. It was to be the only time they would be defeated in the men’s sprint events all week.
Germany were not to be defeated in the corresponding women’s event as police officers Miriam Welte and Kristina Vogel triumphed. Indeed, the only concern for Germany’s female sprinters was a message on four Post-it notes in a lift at the team hotel, apparently directed to Welte, which read: ‘Miriam. Call. Me. [Heart]’.
She did not investigate further.
* * *
The Keirin is track cycling’s equivalent of the wacky races.
It is big in Japan, where it is one of the few sports punters can place wagers on the result. Riders wear armour in the Japanese Keirin, but do not in the UCI version of the event.
The competitors line up behind a motorised Derny bike, which usually emits petrol fumes into the arena.
The Cali Derny looked like a motorbike – a ‘pimped up’ Derny – but it was electric, taking away the aroma that makes the event a more sensory experience.
The Keirin was no less thrilling than usual, though, as François Pervis gave a demonstration of Keirin racing that left Sir Chris Hoy purring.
Hoy is four times a world champion and twice an Olympic gold medallist in the event and knows the good and the bad.
In 2009 he crashed at a World Cup event in Copenhagen, damaging his hip in an injury that forced him out of that year’s World Championships in Pruszkow, Poland; it was a good Worlds to miss.
He liked to ride Forrest Gump-style – to use his own phrase – from the front and Pervis did likewise as carnage unfolded behind him.
The thrilling Awang Azizulhasni did not make the final, but made a lasting impression on the competition.
Malaysian Awang, who once saw his calf skewered like a chicken drumstick by a piece of the Manchester Velodrome track, always has the crowd and the commissaires on the edge of their seats.
More often it is the officials who are kept busy by the Malaysian.
The ‘Pocket Rocket’ spots gaps that others dare not enter and did so again in the semi-final, resulting in his disqualification and a heavy fall for Australia’s Matthew Glaetzer.
Glaetzer spectacularly flipped backwards out of his saddle, propelling his bike up the steeply banked home straight to bounce and fly towards the commentary box, where it left some of the occupants needing to change their underwear. Chris Boardman was composed enough to get a photo while sitting alongside Simon Brotherton, the BBC commentator.
The final was no less incident-packed as Olympic silver medallist Maximilian Levy crashed out, incurring fractures to various points of his shoulder, in a collision defending champion Jason Kenny did well to swerve.
Levy resurfaced three days later sporting a sling and a polo shirt shorn of the fabric on its shoulder to give a glimpse of some of his ailments. In a city where there is still bull fighting, he looked like an animal that had escaped death after a last-gasp reprieve.
Fabian Puerta gave the home crowd, with their vuvuzelas and loud roars, interest in the final and he finished best of the rest with silver for Colombia’s first medal of the championships.
Kenny was fifth as his former teammate Hoy looked on.
Cali was always one of Hoy’s favourite trips as a rider and he did not hesitate when invited by British head coach Shane Sutton in an unpaid, voluntary mentoring role.
The Scot engaged in the racing as a fan, enjoying being able to be at a cycling event without being pulled left, right and centre by requests from organisations, sponsors, fans and the media.
He also loved the atmosphere.
Hoy said: ‘I remember a few years ago there was a Colombian rider who won the omnium and beat Ed [Clancy] and the place… I thought the roof was going to come off.’
That would really give the detractors something to complain about.
* * *
Some suggest track racing is dull and predictable.
Rarely is it so, but there is no argument that there can be dominant individuals and teams.
One near-certainty each year is that the British women’s team pursuit squad will return from the World Championships with gold medals.
Champions in five of the six previous World Championships with three riders and over three kilometres – a run that included victories in Manchester, Pruszkow, Apeldoorn, Melbourne and Minsk; silver in Copenhagen the only error – their dominance had strengthened with the addition of an extra rider and an additional 1,000 metres.
Yet Joanna Rowsell, Laura Trott, Elinor Barker and Katie Archibald flirted with failure in the closing laps.
Barker, by her own admission, could not keep up and peeled away moments after hitting the front on the penultimate lap, narrowly avoiding a collision with Trott who then had to sprint after Rowsell and Archibald to ensure Britain held off the Canadians to take gold.
The triumph left Dani King, the reserve after revelation Archibald was selected in her stead, in floods of tears: it was the largest downpour inside the velodrome all week.
The British girls managed to make light of the incident, giggling wildly at each other in recalling their narrow and lucky escape.
Archibald, a nineteen-year-old from Milngavie, near Glasgow – the start of the West Highland Way and home of Colpi’s ice cream, the world’s finest – has a penchant for piercings, hair dye and tattoos. For Cali, her hair was red, white and blue.
Whether the first Scottish female world champion track cyclist will go on to get a rainbow stripes tattoo, who knows, but her win was predicted to be the start of a big future.
* * *
Fabian Puerta’s Keirin performance was merely an hors d’oeuvre for the spectators as Edwin Avila thrilled his home town crowd.
So much so that one British Cycling coach – one of the championship’s major critics – declared it the loudest he had heard at a velodrome ‘inside or outside’. Perhaps he was getting carried away in the moment and forgetting the deafening din at the London 2012 Olympics.
With the sound escaping through the sides of the arena and the holes where water was creeping in a few days earlier and between sessions – for conveniently the forecast downpours arrived, but not while the majority of bike racing was occurring – it truly was a cauldron of noise as Avila three times lapped the field. Three times.
Three others managed to take two laps and seven more a single lap but their efforts were dwarfed by Avila, who reclaimed the points race world title he first won in Apeldoorn three years earlier.
It was a points race performance few have managed; perhaps only Australian Cameron Meyer in recent years.
The twenty-four-year-old Avila was the star of the show, taking his place on top of the podium, yet still smaller than his rivals in silver and bronze position.
Once the formal presentation was done, Avila was joined on the podium by his emotional parents and it was easy to see where his short stature came from. The trio posed for photographers before exiting stage left where they were surrounded by a sea of reporters and camera crews eager to snatch a word with the hero of the hour in a huddle which lasted for fifteen minutes, when usually those types of things continue for just five.
He is a name to watch. Simon Yates, his predecessor as world champion, impressed in the 2014 Tour de France, less than eighteen months after winning in Minsk.
As Avila was achieving national acclaim, Owain Doull of Britain and Belarus’s Anton Muzychkin finished with the unwanted distinction of being pointless.
On the undercard to Avila’s victory was a one-kilometre time-trial event in which two riders went under the sixty-second barrier.
The kilo has lost some of its kudos since being removed from the Olympic programme post-Athens, when Hoy won gold, but remains a pure event which builds to a thrilling climax as riders take it in turns to go against the clock over four laps.
At the December Track World Cup meeting in Aguascalientes, François Pervis set the world record of 56.303 seconds, beating Arnaud Tournant’s mark of 58.875 seconds which had stood for twelve years. Both were assisted by altitude.
The Cali track’s altitude of 1,000 metres provided a smidgen of support as Pervis put in another phenomenal performance to win gold in 59.385 to Joachim Eilers’ 59.984.
* * *
As François Pervis was making serene progress through the sprint competition, Kristina Vogel was completing her win in the corresponding women’s event.
The German was peerless in winning the Keirin, too, on Sunday’s final day, celebrating by telling all and sundry it was an ‘un-fucking-believable’ championships for her.
It was clear the police officer and cyclist was overcome by excitement after the German women swept the board in the sprint events with three golds for Vogel and two for Miriam Welte.
Pervis had a phenomenal championships, too. There was no roar, like Grégory Baugé, when he triumphed, as if he had expected to do so given his phenomenal performances over the week.
Pervis won every time he stepped on to the track; thirteen times he mounted his bike on the pine boards and each time he crossed the line first.
The most special win for Pervis was in the blue riband event, the sprint.
He qualified quickest, beat Olympic champion Jason Kenny in the quarter-finals and then defeated Stefan Bötticher of Germany, the defending champion, to claim his third rainbow jersey of a remarkable week.
He kissed the track after dismounting following his final win of the championships.
‘Three world titles,’ he said. ‘It’s the first time for me. The first time I’ve won the sprint and Keirin and I did an amazing time in the kilo, under one minute.
‘Everybody pushed me and it [Cali] is my second home.’
Given Baugé’s comments and Kenny’s mid-Olympic cycle lull, Pervis was good natured when questioned on his dominance.
‘We don’t have special wheels,’ Pervis laughed in response to BBC journalist Jill Douglas’s tongue-in-cheek inquisition.
Douglas had to be patient to wait for the man of the moment as he appeared to dissect every revolution of each of his thirteen races with two French journalists, neither of whom had a tape recorder running or were taking comprehensive notes.
However, Douglas was not the only female in the velodrome left swooning like Sue Barker when David Ginola appeared on A Question of Sport, as Pervis proved as charming off the bike as he was a force on it.
Rather than finishing on the high of Pervis’s brilliance, the competition descended into farce when a brilliant 200-lap (50km) Madison proved more chaotic than usual.
Belgian pair Jasper De Buyst and Kenny De Ketele thought they had won it after scoring in nine of the ten sprints to accumulate thirty-one points.
But much deliberation from the UCI commissaires – around thirty minutes of discussions meant the stands were near empty and workers had begun dismantling the event infrastructure – saw the Belgians denied and the Spanish pair David Muntaner and Albert Torres awarded gold.
It was a chaotic conclusion to a championships which should be celebrated as an overwhelming success, coming outside the established track racing heartland.
* * *
There was uncertainty over the track immediately afterwards, with TBC alongside the dates and venues for the 2015 calendar, leaving UCI president Brian Cookson to deal with questions about the future.
The concern of federations was not about the venue for the World Championships themselves, but the lead-up to them, as the World Cup series carried qualification points for the event, and the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympics.
Riders must also qualify for World Cups through lower-profile meets throughout the summer.
‘The real-world problem was that there weren’t any bidders coming forward,’ Cookson said. ‘The ones that were interested originally had withdrawn.’
It highlighted the fragile nature of track competition and the tender process, which Cookson insisted would be reviewed.
The Briton also robustly defended the decision to take the event to Colombia, to a velodrome some regarded as unsuitable.
‘There’s a clue in the name – it’s a World Championships, so there’s got to be an opportunity of travelling from place to place,’ he said. ‘It can’t always be in the easiest places in Europe.
‘What we’ve got to make sure is when it does travel around the world, it’s in venues that are suitable, facilities are accessible and all the rest of it.
‘I’m determined that that’s what we’ll do in the future.’
For traditional track powerhouse Britain, the off-track concerns were slight compared to those on it.
Shane Sutton and Sir Chris Hoy were somewhat optimistic – this was the usual mid-Olympic cycle lull – yet the performance of Britain’s men was particularly alarming as they finished without a medal for the first time since 1998 and the early days of Lottery funding.
Despite being his usual bullish self overall, Sutton was scathing of the younger members of the men’s endurance squad, while simultaneously calling for Peter Kennaugh and Sir Bradley Wiggins to commit to the track for Rio.
So concerned was Chris Boardman, previously one of Sir Dave Brailsford’s leading lieutenants, that he called for the British Cycling performance director to declare his commitment to the programme or to move on, allowing someone else to take over.
‘It needs a full-time boss,’ Boardman said. ‘Dave would clearly be the best full-time boss, but if he’s not going to do that, it might be better if somebody else comes in and takes the reins.
‘He’s such a character, if he’s still there it’s difficult for people to go in and take command, but it needs somebody like him.
‘British Cycling’s in a period of change now. Still got some fantastic ingredients, some great athletes, got some great people working for them.
‘The potential is all still there. It just might need somebody to pull it all together.’
In the aftermath of London 2012, Brailsford told the British Cycling staff and riders that he would be with them all the way to the Copacabana Beach in Rio, when many thought he would be finishing on a high, like Hoy and Pendleton.
After eight golds in Beijing and London – fourteen medals on the track from twenty events – to repeat the trick in Rio and lead Tour de France-challenging teams on an annual basis, would be like lightning striking thrice.
Brailsford often described his dual role – as British Cycling performance director and Team Sky principal – as one of spinning plates. He ensured all his plates kept spinning and if one was about to topple off its stick, he would reach for it and ensure it returned to a rhythmical spin.
In Cali it seemed the plate marked ‘track’ – for so long a reliable spinner – was close to falling off.
A few weeks later, Brailsford quit his role as British Cycling performance director to concentrate on life on the road with Team Sky.
It was perhaps fitting that the final track World Championships under the tenure of the man who coined the phrase ‘the aggregation of marginal gains’ took place at an outdoor velodrome. And it was great.
Matt McGeehan is a sports reporter for the Press Association, the UK’s national news agency. He has covered cycling on the track and road since 2009. Cali was his sixth track World Championships.