I have actually got a race report this time. On Monday we drove over to Apeldoorn for a night meeting on the track. The velodrome complex is very impressive and posters everywhere informed us that this was the venue for the track world champs in March 2011.
I raced open, and we had five events; points, scratch, miss and out, keirin heats and final and a mystery distance event. The first couple of races were ok as I was still finding my racing legs, but I improved throughout the evening. In my keirin heat everything was going fine when I got this huge hook that smacked my front wheel that sent me up the banking, I managed to stay upright and still qualified for the final. The guy who hooked me rode up beside me and patting me on the back and apologised, or so I think, he could have been telling me to eat splinters for all I knew. In one of the other heats a rider was disqualified for “dangerous riding” which I thought was almost impossible in a keirin, so the guy may have been covering his tracks.
We had the mystery distance race before the final and I can report that I won this most prestigious event. Ivar told me just to keep an eye on the guy with the bell. The commissionaire's stood round talking while we raced ignoring what was going on for ages. I went out on the attack with two others, who eventually had enough of being out the front and just as I was left out front by myself they rang the bell for the final lap. The bunch never caught me.
I made a mess of the keirin final, I drew place one which is the guy who has to catch and sit behind the motor bike for the first 1300 meters. The motor bike goes faster and faster until at 50kph and 700m to go the motorbike pulls down and the real race begins. All the other races that evening the bunch had slowed and pulled up the banking as the motorbike pulled up so I though I would take a flyer off the motorbike and surprise them. Only one guy wasn't awake so I had four grinning Dutchmen sitting on my wheel thinking that surely this dopey Kiwi didn't expect us to fall for that old one, going into the last lap where, consequently I got cleaned out in the dash for the line.
Next day we headed down to Belgium for a kermesse, which is basically a booze up with a bike race. I was short changed with this race because even though we had cobbles, narrow roads and spectators blowing cigarette smoke in your face the weather was totally un-Belgium by being a nice fine day with little wind. This was of little comfort to me during the race as it rapidly turned to “slagroom” as we say in Holland. I was also hoping to try the local beer as Belgium is renown for its fine selection. You go to a supermarket and will be greeted by big long aisles of the stuff, starting from weak as “tui' like brown fizzy water up to the real knock a cow out at ten paces stuff. I will be endeavouring to do an exhausting in-depth study of this important subject before getting back to New Zealand.
Track training has been going well. At the weekly group session this week the Dutch pro road champion Nikki Terpstra has been training with us. Honestly no one takes much notice, he is just back from the world champs in Australia where he covered himself in glory by almost winning with a late breakaway which was caught in the last kilometer.
On Friday night at the local track they had the first heats of the European Stayer champs. I mentioned these in the last report. Very spectacular racing, the British moto rider smacked the wall and went down and one of the German moto's chopped a Dutchman to the delight of the Dutch crowd. This sport is huge in Germany where crowds of ten thousand will routinely show up to races. The pressure was on the Germans to perform in front of their supporters as the Dutch had won two heats so the Germans had to win the third.
Now as every Dutchman knows, when Germans swarm across the border thinking it's 'third time lucky' this has never in the past been a time for celebration. Ivar and me committed the fatal error of sitting by them in the stand and found out why.
In the late 1930s the Germans had a dive bomber plane called a “Stuka” which they used to great effect. Now the Stuka wasn't a great plane but some enterprising German put a siren on it which when the Stuka started to dive down to bomb, the siren would wind up producing a screaming sound which was found to cause far more damage to the population physiologically that the actual bombing itself, so the stuka was used more as a tool for physiological warfare. If you ever wondered what happened to the guy who thought this all up, I suspect he works for the air horn factory that the German supporters shop at. I have never heard anything so loud or so many different noises as when the German riders shot past and it may have scared me for life, certainly when they didn't win I noted many happy faces, much like VE day.
