The five-day USA Cycling Elite Track National Championships offered a virtual crash course (sorry, poor choice of words) on the number of different ways you can set up a bicycle race.

Scratch races, sprint races, pursuits, Madisons. Something called Omniums, which is cycling’s answer to track and field’s pentathlon…but with one extra event. Or heptathlon …but with one fewer…well, you get the point – they’re doing a lot of stuff on a bike on a track.  

Hmmm…what to watch…what to watch? How about the Team Pursuit? Done and done. And it was off to the L.A. Velodrome.

Like most of the venues that were built originally for the 1984 Olympics, the Velodrome is still heavily used for USA Cycling training and competition at the regional, national and international level. It’s the largest indoor velodrome in the country, and an impressively constructed and maintained building – and an arena used exclusively for cycling. There’s no retrofitting of this place for the Globetrotters or Ice Capade tours.

I walked in the door literally seconds after the first heat in the Men’s Team Pursuit had begun, and in no time at all I was drawn into the competition. There were four cyclists circling the track, spinning like crazy. As the name would imply, the three trailing cyclists were in hot pursuit of the leader, who led by the narrowest of margins and…what the? – he just peeled off, rode up the steep bank of the track and let everyone pass him! When he finally righted the ship and came back down, he was in last place!! And this guy is an elite cyclist?

I’m sure the new leader was thrilled to be the beneficiary of that gaffe, because he’s now busy…hey, what’s going on here? – he did the exact same thing as the other guy! Doesn’t anybody want to win this thing?

I looked around. Nobody seemed to be fazed by this unusual behavior. I started thinking it might be me.

So I started listening to the call of the P.A. announcer for clues that would help me sort out the motivation of these alleged world-class cyclists. He kept blathering on and on about the team’s this and the team’s that, and before too long I started to realize that the guys on the track weren’t racing each other – they were a single unit, together in their pursuit.

But what were they pursuing? I didn’t see anything like Rusty the Rabbit, the little sock puppet that greyhounds love to chase. Curious.

After 16 furious trips around the track, they stopped pursuing. And it was revealed that they were in actuality simply pursuing a good time. No, not that kind of good time – I mean the best time. As in fewest minutes and seconds. And since they were the only ones on the track, they got it.

Until of course the next group of four cyclists gathered at the starting line and began their pursuit of a good time. I wondered…why not just send the fastest guy on the team out and have him secure the best time while everyone else knocks back a Gatorade and cheers him on?

As I watched this scene repeat itself every five minutes or so, it slowly dawned on me. I remembered drafting. More specifically I remember The Bird drafting off of me on long bike rides. It works like this – the displacement of air that a cyclist generates will create a vacuum that sucks along another rider that happens to be in close proximity. The operative word here is sucks, as in it sucks to be the person in front dragging along the person who’s gliding blissfully behind you.

So that’s what was going on here. These cyclists were forming their own little peloton, taking turns drafting each other along. After one had led the pack for a lap or two, he would peel off by turning his bike up the steep bank, and then glide back down to the back of the pack, where he would be pulled along – resting before his next turn at the front.

In this way, the team benefitted from stringing together successive sprints that all told would greatly reduce the time it would take one man to ride four kilometers (roughly 2 ½ miles).

That still didn’t explain why in several time trials I saw though, one of the four riders peeled off from the pack and dropped out of the race completely. But I was making progress.

Once I had enough of an idea of what was going on so as not to appear like a complete knucklehead, I went into research mode. Approaching some unsuspecting soul that foolishly made eye contact with me, I asked him if he knew what was going on. And wouldn’t you know – he did. Justin was his name, and he just happened to be a local cycling coach. A patient local cycling coach.

I ran my hypothesis by him and was gratified to learn that I had more or less teased it out on my own. Justin went on to tell me that the actual official time for each team is the one clocked by the third person to cross the finish line – not the first.

So that explained the drop-outs. Having spent themselves in their stints as Rusty the Rabbit, these riders became more of a liability than an asset to their teammates, and thus called it a race without negatively affecting the team’s time.

I wondered if that was pre-arranged, or whether the first person to reach exhaustion first just up and did a “Peace, Out”. If so, what about the next guy on the team who had decided on the same exit strategy and was now stuck having to bust it for the rest of the race? I’m guessing that can’t help a team’s interpersonal dynamics.

In Team Pursuit competition, men race in teams of four and cover 16 laps, while the women race in teams of three and ride for 12 laps. On the drive home, as I was thinking about what I’d seen, it occurred to me that I couldn’t recall a race in which one of the women riders dropped out of her mini-peloton.

I wondered if it was because their team’s time was also derived from when the third rider crossed the finish line, thus removing that option. Or perhaps it was because the women had a shorter distance to cover. Or in the alternative, perhaps the men were just bigger wussies than were the women. Unfortunately, Justin was no longer available to comment on the Bigger Wussie Theory.

But back to the track and the central issue: What about the name? This “Pursuit” thing…if all they’re doing is time trials, albeit time trails involving some sophisticated maneuvering, then wouldn’t any competition based on securing the fastest time be called a Pursuit? The 100 Yard Dash Pursuit. The Boston Marathon Pursuit. The Ironman Triathlon Pursuit. Is track cycling merely giving a nod to the age-old Pursuit of Happiness?

I decided not to run this by Justin. Nobody’s that patient. I wrote off the question and returned my attention to the action on the track.

To be concluded in next post…