World Champs - Bayley v Bos

matbooth

The above should read Wed 28th June, sorry!

Ricardo29

tks mat..nice site, and nice videos.

japan keirin circuit has always intrigued me...no crowd at all hardly, yet supposedly big bucks? made for gambling i guess...perhaps like a midweek horse race, hardly anyone at the track. id love to know more about it all, what they do earn, how the 'season' is structured etc.

matbooth

It does seem to be organised almost completely for gambling. It was originally set up as a gambling sport to raise money for restructuring after WWII and I think is now used to fund hospitals and other public services. I get the impression from the limited amount I have read that it used to be quite popular as a spectator sport but the stadia themselves began to attract a seedy image and on site support dropped off, but it remains a large revenue earner nevertheless. The JKA tried to reverse the slide when constructing the Kitakyushu Media-Dome (an absolutely stunning venue, profiled in the velodrome of the month section of my site). They're going to be using it for some night meetings later in the International series so it will be interesting to observe how many turn out there.
In the recent races there have been gaps of around half an hour between each race which means you've got to be fairly avid fan to stick around for the lot.
I'm afraid I don't know about the structure of the keirin season itself or the purses involved. I only follow the multitude of World Championship discipline meets in the country, which only sporadically involve the big pros. They clearly get a lot more money than they could possibly attract via success in world track competitions because there are a lot of very, very talented athletes there. A case in point is Tomohiro Nagatsuka, an Olympic silver medalist, who is one of the fastest standing 250m riders the world has ever seen yet he doesn't even contest the Japanese selection meets any more. He was riding in Matsuyama this week and barely showed at all. The nation also has so many juniors that it is just untrue (there are some prefectures with depth rivalling all but the top track nations). They all ride time trial disciplines, but they have to in order to qualify to become a keirin rider, and its virtually all on done on the big outdoor tracks.

I don't suppose that really addresses many of the points you were asking about, looking back on it. Sorry!

Thanks for the comments, I'm glad the site is of interest.

Cheers,

Mat Booth (www.trackcycling.info)

Billsworld

I heard a story from Mike Fraysse, that Kerrin was developed because after the war they had eaten all the horses and dogs. The wealthy in Japan I have heard stay away from kerrin in favor of Sumo and other more civilized sports. Just passing along a story, dont shoot the messanger