remember just three years ago when america went fixed gear crazy and stateside bike shops were getting fat off of marking up and unloading anything with an njs stamp? no? not surprised. neither did a friend of mine -- a friend who lives with a hardcore commuter and bike collector -- when i started trying to explain the deal with keirin.
neither, i have to admit, did a cyclist friend of mine in japan know what i meant when i told him that i wanted to go see some track races. "track race?" "keirin, i mean. keirin." he'd never been, but was excited at the prospect. granted, there's other track racing in japan besides the specific style of racing that americans recognize as keirin (literally just "bicycle racing" in japanese), but there doesn't seem to be a culture of amateur participation like we have in north america, and everything outside of keirin in japan seems to be the realm of only olympians and world champions. i wasn't surprised that this friend had never been to a track.
in japan, keirin is more of a bettor's endeavor than a spectacle for fans of cyclesport anyway. actually, it's pretty much just a bettor's endeavor; and the japanese bet more money on keirin than on any other sport. what a country. i'm going to speculate that the japanese couldn't afford horses after world war ii and so turned to a cheaper, yet in nearly every aspect comparable form of track speculation as an alternative. it's probably not hard to find out, but i've already checked wikipedia once to get the year for my title, and that year would seem to be in keeping with my assumptions on keirin's origins. not that keirin started in 1957. that's just the year that the nippon jitensha shinkoukai (njs) set (froze) its standard for the equipment that can be used in track competition (of the sort that we designate as keirin in america). in other words, the njs stamp is a mark of authorization, not of quality or authentication. it marks an attempt to level a playing field made easily uneven by technological disparities. restating again: the njs stamp means anything but performance. but damn if that shit didn't sell.
keirin: it caught on. it's exciting, and you're likely to see it included in any track event that you probably won't ever go see at any of north america's fewer and fewer velodromes. if you ever make it, you'll understand all the betting once the keirin portion of the event is over. track events in the states include a variety of races, but keirin is just keirin. it's exciting, for sure, but you can only watch a five lap sprint race (and the racers are only really sprinting for the last one/one-and-a-half laps) so many times before you start hankering for a bit more excitement. it's something the first time you see a member of the pack pass the pacer (a cyclist in a specially colored kit reminiscent of "tron" at the track i visited in japan, but a motor scooter whenever i've seen a keirin race in portland). the pacer drops off the track, and the pack heads full force for the finish line for four, five, six hundred meters through four, five, six turns.
but the sprint gets less and less exciting the more of the races you see as part of the same event...and the races at keiokaku, the venue i visited, were scheduled from 3:30 p.m. until after 8:30. so we made it interesting.
there are about a million ways to make it interesting at the track in japan. nine racers ride in each race, and one through nine wear the same colors in each one. numbers one and two ride in white and black, and without the race schedule i can't tell you the rest of the order except that pink and purple round out the field. no one races for a team, but both the schedule and the "keirin newspaper" printed for each event list the home prefectures of each racer, and racers from the same regions are purportedly more likely to assist each other through drafts and sacrifice sprints.
the "keirin newspaper" costs about six dollars, but it's well worth the upfront expenditure if you're planning on making any bets (and you'll make them whether or not you planned on i if you plan on lasting the day). in addition to the information printed on the race day schedule, the newspaper includes expert advice, bar graphs comparing the recent winnings (in tens of thousands of yen) of the racers in each race, the way in which each racer took any recent places -- and a "talk" column. apparently, the racers are expected to ride in accordance with however they commented for publication before each race, and otherwise they're subject to hazing and ostracism. unfortunately, the "talk" is anything but straightforward, and deciphering its code is (in the best of all hopefully speculative bet-against-the-odds worlds) key to staying in the black.
got it? now just decide whether to bet straight or open on two or three racers (or any two of the groups -- racers one, two and three are in their own individual groups, and racers four and five, six and seven, eight and nine are in groups four, five, six respectively). betting straight on the top three finishers pays out the highest. you can also bet wide on either individual racers or on any two groups (if the two racers or representatives from both of your chosen groups finish in any order in the top three you get some cash), but the return is hardly worth it. (that's not really making it interesting, anyway.) there's also box betting and something called "nagashi," both of which seem to be involved with grouping bets across categories, but none of us got so sophisticated. restating again: we didn't know what we were doing. luckily, the minimum bet at keiokaku is 100 yen. hedge yours and you're looking at between 500 and 3000 per race, and then twelve races means you really hope to hit something at least a few times.
"keirin newspaper" or not, gambling is gambling in the end, and whether it makes it more interesting or just wasteful, you start betting colors or on racers named like your friends or on the chubby fifty-somethings that you figure must still be in the game because they pull it off every once in a while. you're sure that this next one is the race that the twenty-three year old favorite from the same prefecture is going to sacrifice for yellow. it's impressive, though, (and also a little disheartening that you paid money for this) to see the video footage of the locker room before each race and realize that the bellies outnumber their trimmer counterparts. most of the racers are wearing pads, so they probably seem bulkier than they would otherwise (and how many pounds does the camera add?), but these physiques don't scream bike racing. regardless, they all look competitive when they make their entrance onto the track before each race, legs glistening with embro, and every entrance seems like the opportunity for an upset (if, that is, that's how you bet).
it's the music. really. they play a weird sort of fascistic muzak that, during the twenty minutes between the end of one race and the closing of the betting on the next, makes you sure that any wild guess is a certain victory. the racers look more like how they do in the locker room shots when you see them from the open air viewing area at the start line, but they all seem like ready equals from where we were sitting from races one through seven, a third floor gallery of boxes at the back side of the track. at that back side gallery there are a panel of ladies to take your bets, and the ladies smile and ask you for corrections when you've entered an incompatible combination for the betting category you've chosen above your picks on each of your betting scantrons. that made for an interesting experience of its own for the first part of the fun, but once three of our party had left the venue for other evening plans (one way up, one 30000 down and the other smilingly demure), the more interesting game seemed to be down on the track near the action.
you really do pick your battles. another gamble. it makes sense now why the woman beside you on the third floor was happy to pay for the box seat just to read next to her (probably) husband as he downed cup after paper cup of sake and made his bets. there aren't any bet takers in the anteroom behind the doors that open onto the seating area in front of the line. a row of machines accepts your cash along with your scantrons and spits out the tickets you use to claim your winnings post-race at another row of machines. the serious bettors -- and they're all serious down here -- crowd under the video screens that update the race statistics and the betting odds as more bets are collected. they wait until the very end to cast their best calculated bets. then they move out onto the track to heckle the racers as they line up. they shout some really awful things, though i can't deny that most of it could have been construed as overly enthusiastic encouragement. the "talk" from the "keirin newspaper" seems all of a sudden more than just an interesting novelty.
photographs aren't allowed from the track. they're distracting. but the late middle-aged man who growls the warning at you then screams something so assaulting at one of the racers that "distraction" becomes all but a laughable formality. not to mention the hanging cloud of cigarette smoke. and i thought alpenrose was decadent and depraved.
at about race ten, there's a crash. the sound of the tire blowing echoes throughout the entire stadium as if the sound of the helmet of the first racer to go down had been amplified over the loud speakers. imagine also thinking you've heard the sound of a bone breaking, a steel frame cracking. he takes down the entirety of the field behind him. the six gurneys stationed around the inside field of the track are there for a reason. the men at the line rail in expletives that their racers aren't going to have a chance to see the end of the race. forfeited bets. the racers spared the crash do finish, however, to a cavalcade of jeers. that muzak plays, and you're sure again that you'll make bank on the next race.
"did you want to come to the track for the bikes or for the betting?" i'd introduced myself to that friend of a friend saying that i was interested in bicycles, which is what prompted his question, and so i stuck to the theme in my answer. that friend of a friend was the one who bought the "keirin newspaper" and shared it with the rest of us over lunch before we bought our entrance to the venue and made our first wagers. when in rome, so it goes. and i don't know why the scene of the track didn't suggest the colosseum when i first spotted those gurneys.
bets are on as to why keirin developed the cache it did outside of japan in the late twenty-aughts, but the sport is undeniably not without its draw. personally, i couldn't have cared less for buying into the njs craze. the cranks on my commuter do, for the record, make the grade, but the mark isn't visible. you can hardly tell what they were to begin with. i had them blasted and custom powder coated. white. number one.
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