{"id":612,"date":"2012-11-07T03:19:28","date_gmt":"2012-11-07T03:19:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/crankpunk.com\/?p=612"},"modified":"2012-11-07T08:10:30","modified_gmt":"2012-11-07T08:10:30","slug":"japanese-keirin-big-thighs-big-guys-and-very-few-non-japanese-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crankpunk.com\/ja\/2012\/11\/07\/japanese-keirin-big-thighs-big-guys-and-very-few-non-japanese-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"japanese keirin: big thighs, big guys and very few non-japanese eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"

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crankpunk once plied his trade in Japan – Saga-ken on Kyushu Island, near Fukuoka, to be precise. racing on the island wasn’t very popular and soon i was cranking up highways in a minivan with 8 teammates in stinking punkheat and no air-con for up to 16 hours at a time up to the regions of the Nagano area to race (Japan is a long country). trust me, getting to the start line an hour before the off, having your FD fall off due to a crappy mechanic on the first lap, then driving 16 hours to get back at 6am on a monday and starting work at 9 was not exactly what you’d call a blast. still, 4 hours drive to a race these days is a breeze…<\/p>\n

what is quite popular on Kyushu, as all over Japan, is keirin. the word itself, if written in the Chinese characters, translates as ‘complete wheel’, though more often it’s written in katakana, the phonetic alphabet used for foreign words. the next town over from me, Kurume, had a keirin track which some Japanese guys on my team used on the first sunday of each month, when it was opened up to the public. i headed down there with my road bike one sunday, having only ridden\u00a0 track once before in my life many years ago, and i was hooked. it wasn’t so much the actual riding round the track \u2013 there were 200m, 400m, 1km and 4km mini-events that we raced in \u2013 but the actual smell and feel of the place.<\/p>\n

open to the public all day for a small fee, the stands were littered here and there with the odd drunk passed out in the morning sun on the benches. a few track officials were always there to make sure the place was used properly – it was an outdoor concrete track – big guys with barrel guts in their 40s and 50s, thick shoulders, fat sausage fingers with rings on them, all ex-riders. there were always three or four of the pro keirin guys also hanging around, chatting to friends or doing some training in the back room.<\/p>\n

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lumpy legs abound in The Complete Wheel<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

these guys turned up in huge Toyota Crowns – the de rigueur<\/em> vehicle for mid-level yakuza (Japanese mafia) as well, it seemed, of track cyclists – or tricked out Benz and Beemers. they invariably had dyed, soccer-player style hair, gold chains, bodies that looked like they could be dropped from 50m and bounce three times and legs that wouldn’t look out of place in a redwood forest. they were always affable enough, but they ruled the place. you sensed this power. they were like made guys, they’d been through the keirin school, paid their dues, done their time, and now they were reaping the benefits.<\/p>\n

some of them train their asses off. there was a hill near my house that was a steady 5% for a good 6km, where some of the keirin riders would be mid-week, dressed in their star-motif shorts, black shoes without socks and mushroom track helmets, sprinting up it – on their fixed gear track bikes. and what bikes they were, all regulation-specific, chromed out, clean, bright and tight.<\/p>\n