Trackanory!

3 days in the Nonsensedrome.

I was standing at the top of a frigid col to the north of Marseille, waiting for Mattia Bais and Arnaud Tendon to ride past me on stage one of the Tour de la Provence, when I got the call. It was a familiar name and number belonging to someone I had been working with on domestic TV cycling coverage for almost twenty years. I ignored him, and let the phone ring out. I couldn’t be arsed.

A ping a minute later informed me that he wasn’t going to take my blocking lying down.

‘Mate, you free to commentate the National Tracks?’

I looked at the dank road in front of me, and beyond to the soaked valley and the clouds on the horizon. It was an inhospitable vista and my shoes were damp. I’ll confess that in my mind’s eye I pictured the cosseting comfort of the Manchester velodrome, its stillness puffed with artificially warm air, infused just subtly with the promise of chips from Boardman’s Bar. Every now and then a pistol would fire, followed by a rush of colour and ripple of wind as the track flickered into life.

Then Mattia Bais emerged from the gloom and I put all such thoughts aside.

Later that evening, I replied. ‘When is it?’ hoping, if I am honest, that the dates would clash. The answer came immediately. ‘Next weekend, mate.’ He must have been let down by another commentator, I thought. That much was clear. In messaging me, a clear Plan B had been initiated.

I checked the diary, and save for the visit of an old friend from France, stopping off for a night in London, I was annoying free from excuses.

‘How long are the sessions?’ I typed, delaying my inevitable acceptance of the job.

‘Not going to sugar coat it,’ he replied, ‘fucking evil.’

Remembering how I had once commentated on Padel from an almost empty arena in Madrid for an uninterrupted 13 hours, I shrugged my shoulders, already knowing that I was going to head to Manchester in just a few days.

‘OK,’ I typed.

‘Boom!’

And so the deal was struck.

Track cycling is a hidden world of complication and nuance to me. Although many endurance riders, particularly those from Great Britain, straddle both road and track, I have consistently struggled to engage with its arcane and constantly changing grammar and structure.

In the same way that the governing bodies of the winter sports have been ridiculously ingenious in dreaming up a dozen different ways of sliding down mountains on frozen water, so “indoor cycling” (hat-tip to Twitter’s UKCyclingExpert) has been endlessly resourceful. While road racing has the infinite varieties of topography, town planning, railway timetables, prevailing winds, road surfaces, precipitation, dogs off the lead, rogue police-officers, rider strikes, friction, wind resistance, the availability of ambulances, oncoming traffic and Peter Sagan to enliven the simple pursuit of racing a bicycle, the track has fewer options. Its instructions are, ostensibly, extremely simple, almost ridiculously so.

‘Keep going straight for around 50 metres…’

‘Yeah?’

‘…then take a left.’

‘That it?’

‘Basically.’

In order therefore to conjure forth a panoply of different events (and the British national Championships this year saw 25 different gold medals awarded), a combination of imagination and evolution has coughed up onto the track a range of races from the “kilo” (turn left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left, left and stop) to the “points race”, an event which almost no one can comprehend, as was evidenced this year in Manchester - a subject on which I shall expound fascinatingly on the Substack after this polite request for your actual support…