samuri.co.uk

Bike:Van Tuyl
Distance: 35 miles

Right now, I’m guessing, there’s a short roadie bloke, who may be hammering away at the keys on his little keyboard, bitching about how when he goes to the velodrome, there’s a whole load of idiots who can’t ride at all. I’m also guessing, should he actually be doing this, that he will be mentioning a balding, bespectacled bloke and a young lad who clearly shouldn;t be allowed anywhere near a track. I’m almost certain, that if he is doing this, then he will NOT be mentioning that he offered to punch the young lad (about 14) on the nose and that he should get off the fucking track. Nice man.

We were racing. I was struggling a lot because one of the falls I had on Sunday, appears to have damaged my ribs a lot more than I first thought. I’m finding it really hard to breath deep and any attempt to lift my right arm up  causes a jolt of pain to run across my chest. So we’re racing and we’re in the last couple of laps,the chap in front of me is slowing a little so as we come out of the bend, I move out a little to start overtaking him. As I do this he twitches his elbow and veers up the track. I’ve got no choice but to go with him, not realising two chaps were starting to overtake me. Now this, as far as I’m concerned, is racing, you’ve got to be ready for stuff like this.

I got a fair bit of abuse and fair enough, I should have looked, but so should the guy I was overtaking. As I say though, ho hum, it’s racing.

Later on, some kids who had come to help a charity (who never turned up), were allowed to have a bit of a ride with us. Don’t take the word ‘kids’ to mean a group of slow, inexperienced, bored teenagers to mean that though. These are the people you’ll be seeing on podiums at national and international championships (maybe even the olympics) in the future years. Trust me, they’ve got lots of experience, are used to racing and are fucking fast, only one or two of them were struggling with our pace and a few were leading out the sprints no problem, not bad for a group of 14 year olds.

Anyway, short angry roadie was following one of these lads in a 5 lap sprint when said lad veered up the banking without looking. Bad mistake, but hardly worth being told he was going to get his head kicked in. Glad to see he didn’t leave the track and just carried on. I approached him afterwards and suggested he raise a complaint but he didn’t seem interested. It was clear then that he’d not told his family what had happened (I only knew because I shot under them as the bloke was having a go at him), who then started questioning him about it.

(I know if my 14 year old son was riding and an adult told him he was going to punch him, there would certainly be some punching going on), but he’d left anyway by that point.

Bell end.