Reasons for a Grass Track #1

 Or Why Laura Trott is a Great Big Bully

In my last blog entry I promised to talk a bit about an initiative to bring grass track racing to Ottawa.  I’m pretty fired up about it- in part because I had an absolute blast the only time I raced grass track at the Southern Games in Trinidad in 2006, but more importantly for another reason.  I think it can be a valuable tool to help develop international riders with robust skill sets- skills that as a nation we currently lack at the international level.

The Canadian track team has collectively taken huge strides in the last 4 years.  More riders are getting exposure to international track events than at any point since I’ve started racing (Note: You will never find me gripping that a rider was taken to an event that was over their head, because I pulled my hair out for ten years as Canadian talent had to stay home because our federation wouldn’t commit to supporting a program). 

The entire track program has shifted its orientation to LA to be near the only international standard 250m in North America.  Because clearly our riders can’t be competitive unless they are riding on pristine Siberian pine.  Yet for our top Olympic track contenders this past year their limiting factors had nothing to do with speed, or training facilities or exposure to top notch international racing.  Rather what they lacked was the sort of fundamentals that many of their competition were exposed to from a young age.

Olympic Lesson: Our top riders lack the soft-skills of their competition

 I’m going to pick on Zack Bell and Tara Whitten in this blog.  For a couple of reasons, the first is that they are both exceptionally nice, role model athletes.  So the chances of them taking it personally against me and executing revenge filled counter-strikes are pretty slim. I hope.

More importantly to my argument, they are both World-Class, fruit of the genetic-freak-tree physical talents.  Both riders went from novice racers to either Olympians or World Championships medalists WITHIN an Olympic cycle.  Give that a second to sink in.

And while both riders are utter mutants when it comes to the physical metrics of track riding (speed, power endurance ect) the chink in both their armour internationally has been their bike handling.

By bike handling I mean, not just their abilities to manoeuvre their machines but also the larger process in which they read (and more importantly anticipate) the race and make split second tactical decisions.

I’m not suggesting that either Zach or Tara are BAD bike handlers.  Bad bike handlers don’t win World Cups.  They more than hold their own at the top of the result sheet against the best track riders on the planet.  However, having both come into the sport in their twenties, they concede an advantage to their rivals in this area.  At the risk of sounding Brailsfordian you simply cannot afford to concede that sort of marginal difference at the top flight of elite sport.  Both these riders are well aware of this fact, and both have worked exceptionally hard to improve this element of their riding.

Nowhere is this gap so flagrantly highlighted than in the Miss-in-Out, a cycling event that combines all of the worst elements of a bar room brawl and tax evasion.  And it is here that I would introduce two riders with physical talent similar (though perhaps not as exceptional) to Zack and Tara- Laura Trott and Bryan Coquard.

These pint sized racer are arguable the two best miss-and-out riders on the planet at the moment.  Seriously – they are nasty.  Youtube any-miss-and-out that they’ve won over the last two years and argue otherwise.  Heck let me do it for you:

According to a friend of mine, a few years ago at Junior Worlds Coquard was riding the wall at the guardrail on route to winning the points race. 

Trott absolutely muscled her way around in the bunch this summer in London.  She shot gaps that may not have been there and she shoved Kristin Wild around like a playground bully.  Wild is a top flight rider, roughly twice the size of the diminutive Trott.  And Trott owned her like a sub-prime mortgage.

Both Coquard and Trott are fast, quality bike racers that make instinctive decisions and commit to them.

Where the Grass Track Fits In

My hope is that by running fun low key grass track races for Ottawa’s cycling youth is that we can develop the next generation to have these innate skills. Because skills, like most things (excluding organic chem and cleanliness) come easy when learned early.  Skills are much harder to come by as the athletes get older.  If we have a bunch of 13-17 year old kids riding chariots and miss-and-out then hopefully they will develop the soft skills that will help them out years down the road should they both chose to pursue elite cycling and happen to have the physiology to do so (and even if they don’t it should be a whole lot of fun along the way).

We can build fast tracks. We can train with power. We can do all kinds of fancy wind-tunnel testing. 

But in the end it is still bike racing, and we need to make sure we are giving kids coming up through the system to tools to race their bikes, not just be fast on them.

Disclaimer 1: I have no idea if Trott or Coquard raced grass track.  I know Trott started track cycling at a young age as an alternative to swimming.  Two top British riders who did get their start grass track racing are Victoria Pendleton and Craig McLean.

Disclaimer 2: Despite having raced from a young age, and having done a fair bit of track league as a junior some of you are likely aware that I am a fairly shoddy bike handler. I like to think it’s more because I am a Safety Bear than actually a bad bike handler, but that might just be denial.  Meh, we’re not all diamonds in the rough.