Today, in our ongoing exploration of Olympic Sports That Americans Don’t Get, we present: indoor bicycle racing.
This is taking place at yet another of the dozens of large, spanking-new facilities built expressly for the Olympics by the Greeks over the course of about two frenzied weeks in late July.
If you have a wedding or bar mitzvah coming up and you’d like to hold it in a large, almost-new building with plenty of seats and just the faintest whiff of world-class-athlete BO, come on over here and make Greece an offer. For the right price, I bet they’d let you take some of these facilities home.
The indoor bicycle racing facility contains a large oval track that is steeply banked on the curves and surrounded by foreign people shouting. What they’re shouting about is somewhat confusing, or at least it was to me. I watched a men’s “sprint” event, which worked as follows:
Two racers on bicycles would come up to the starting line. They were wearing those high-speed Spider-Man suits and had thighs the size of military pontoons. As the racers waited for the starter to blow his whistle, their bicycles were held up by coaches, because the racers’ feet were strapped to the pedals, apparently so they could make a quick sprinting getaway.
As the start approached, the crowd grew quiet. The racers hunched over their handlebars, tense, waiting, until finally the whistle sounded, and at exactly the same instant both cyclists did … nothing.
Well, OK, almost nothing. They did start moving forward, but at an extremely slow wobble. It definitely didn’t look like a “sprint.”
Obviously, there’s some tactical reason why, in a bicycle “sprint,” you don’t start out actually sprinting. In some races I watched, the racers went halfway around the track at the speed of toenail growth, with the crowd shouting as if this were the most exciting thing that had ever happened.
I was standing behind a group of foreign broadcasters, and they were yelling into their microphones. I have no idea what they were saying, but it would have had to be along the lines of:
“They are going very slow! They are hardly moving! Wait! Oh, my gosh! Now they are going even slower! I have never seen such slowness. This is so tactical I may wet myself!”
Then, all of a sudden, one of the racers would start to go fast, and of course the other racer had to go fast, too, to try to catch him.
They went three laps total, and in every race I saw, the first guy to start going fast won, which made me wonder why they didn’t just go fast to begin with.
But what do I know? Nothing! That’s why I’m here, at the Olympics: to learn. So far, it’s not working.