The 2024 Spring season saw a sports anime called Rinkai! that told the story of 5 young women who decide to join the semi pro ranks of the national keirin racing league. While the keirin is an event during the Summer Olympics, it began its life strictly for the purpose of gambling.
Keirin, literally bicycle racing, is one of many race formats that exist in the bicycle discipline known as track cycling or track racing. Track cycling is a form of bicycle racing that has existed since the 1880's and involves a closed oval track with steeply banking turns. The specialized bikes used in track racing are unsurprisingly known as track bikes. Track bikes have a fixed drive train, which means the gear that rotates the real wheel is fixed to the wheel its self, meaning that as long as the pedals are moving so too is the rear wheel. There is no coasting or stopping pedaling by the rider with out the risk of serious bodily injury. No matter how big or strong the rider is, the mechanical advantage of the drive train can not easily be overcome, if you try to stop pedaling while riding a track bike there is a very real chance that the momentum of the pedals will throw you from the bike. Due to the nature of the fixed drive train, track bikes only have a single gear, determined ahead of time by the size of the front chain-ring and rear cog. Racers will change the size of these gears depending on their goal for a specific rare. Usually, the gearing of the drive train is set to be very high, to achieve as great a speed as possible without having to pedal at an impossible rate. The final thing that makes track bikes different is the lack of any mechanical brakes. The only ways a rider can slow a track bike down is through gradual reduction of pedal velocity, removing the riders weight off of the rear wheel enough to remove it from the surface allowing the rider to lock the wheel up with their legs or crashing.
The race course in track cycling is known as a velodrome. Over the almost 150 years its existed the specifications of velodromes has changed. The biggest things that have changed are the total length which also helps determine the degree the four corners of the oval are banked. The track is always two long stretches capped with two banked turns on either end, with varying lengths of much shorter strait areas between each sides two corners. The total length of the velodrome and the straightaways determine the pitch of the turns. The modern Olympic velodrome is 250m in diameter with each of the corners usually at a 45 degree pitch. The banked corners are designed to allow the racers to be able to turn without turning their front wheel, the curve of the track carries them on a technically straight path. The surface of a velodrome must be free of blemishes and debris to prevent crashes. The width of the tires used in track cycling is usually between 18 and 23 cm in width and have very little to no tread. For comparison, the standard width of a mountain bikes tire is around 58-63 cm. Olympic velodromes are surfaced in specially treated wood planks that are designed to be smooth, featureless and offer a slight amount of traction for the wheels. The banking of the track decreases near the lower portion of the track, the typical position for the fastest racers. Riders that are high up on the track bank will normally have to maintain a minimum speed of around 25 kph to avoid loosing traction and sliding down the track.
Races done on a velodrome are either lap based or distance based. Keirin is a little bit of both. Keirin was established in the late 1940's as Japan was beginning to rebuild its self following the lose of the second world war. Its creation was primarily for the purpose of betting. This necessitated strict standards and regulations to limit the chances of mechanical advantage by more financially secure racers, limit material failure and to try and curb unconventional cheating. In Japan, from its inception to the current, Keirin is essentially no different from horse racing when it comes to why most people in the country pay attention to it, its an exciting way to gamble.
A Keirin race features eight racers for a heat. The standard distance of the race is 1.5 kilometers. The participants begin the race being paced by a motorized bike which will slowly build the field up from 30 km/h up to 50 km/h. Once the races have reached 50kph, the motorized bike will leave the track and the racers are free to go as fast as they want for the remaining 3 laps/750 meters of the race. The first person across the finish line wins. It is not unusual for the racers to hit a top speed over 70 km/h. The slow build up in the beginning is needed due to the bikes only being a single gear which is set to a significantly large ratio. Set your mountain bike to its hardest gear then try to pedal that from a dead stop and you're still not close to what the keirin racer is doing when they start their race.
There exists a multitude of racing formats in the world of track cycling and keirin is one of the few disciplines that has remained one of the few remaining events for track cycling in the Olympics. It is a quick race, mere minutes instead of hours like road racing, and has a lot of excitement as the racers physically bump each other to gain the best position during the race. It may be the most physical of all cycling disciplines and well worth checking out!
Unfortunately, Rinkai! has not yet been made available in North America but you can check out the keirin during the 2024 Olympics as of the week that this post is published. As with everything, there is a wealth of archived footage of keirin events all over YouTube along with the other track cycling events. I also recommend another Olympic track cycling event, the Madison, named after Madison Square Gardens (which used to host many track events in its early days). The Madison is a long distance lap event in which teams of two riders compete against each other. Both member of each team remain out on the track at all times, but only one of them is accumulating a lap count. As the race goes on they switch off which member is adding laps and they do so by a physical exchange where the rider who is transferring to be the laping member will be pulled up to speed through a hand grab by the other rider who will be pulling to the top of the track to slow own and rest, a bit of a transfer of momentum at 20+ mile ans hour...while all of the other teams are also racing and doing the same things, its intense to behold!
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