Sophie Knight heads out to a Keirin track cycling event in Tokyo, and tells the tale.
When you set out to be an athlete, I’m pretty sure your ambitions don’t include having an audience of exclusively old men with bloodshot eyes and alcoholic breath, down to the last few well-thumbed notes and tin coins of their welfare check. Sadly, despite all the hours of non-stop pedal pumping, the carb-loading, the injuries and the trials and tribulations, that’s exactly how keirin racers end up. Wiping away tears with a surprisingly brawny arm, they hold their trophies aloft on a tiny podium to little more than the synchronized sizzle of cigarettes being stubbed out, and the lonely rattle of dropped beer cans.
Surveying the glum troops of flat-capped grandfathers, each of them clutching tattered bits of paper and sucking on browned teeth, one can forget that the point of the event is the track. A dissolved rainbow is circling at devilish speed — oh no, wait, that’s the riders themselves — up and around the velodrome like marbles in a jar. But there’s little sound or fanfare — the crowd wait inside, under cover, their breath held as they squint at the television set.
We stood in the middle, a trio of foreign imposters, incongruously young and extremely puzzled. After timidly asking the help of what appeared to be the only other woman there, we managed to fathom the betting system, and squandered a few thousand yen by scribbling randomly on our slips. “Matte, matte, matte,” huffed one of the pensioners. He made a few decisive stabs at both the English language and our slips, indicating the odds and those with the highest chance. We thanked him and got a huff of 7% beer and a “ganbatte ne!” for free. Back out on the track, it was like a high school athletics meet that all the parents forgot to go to (sad). We managed a few embarrassed yelps of support for the purple and blue whirling blobs, but eventually the lack of atmosphere and our grumbling stomachs got to us. We retreated to the back, where yet more men evidently preferred to watch their yen evaporate via a 14” television in a concrete yard, and where the bellows of the cheerful waiter at the yakitori stand was the flash of enthusiasm we had been waiting for.
Ten million skewers of various land and aquatic creatures later — chased with a few cool nama biiru and bizarrely cheap Japanese curry — was the highlight of the day. I wondered if some people came to keirin merely for this pleasure, and betted only so that they could continue all day, but our fellow diners looked more like they merely wanted somewhere to sit so that they could puff their way through a packet of inappropriately named “Hope” cigarettes. They warmed up, however, once we engaged them in a little discussion regarding strategy and odds — and they helpfully let us know when the final was due to start. Back in the stadium, months and years of strenuous training was being exercised in the last dash of multi-coloured lycra, again, to a largely silent crowd. We whooped and shouted support for random colours while the rest of the men merely hawked up Hope-infused phlegm and bitterly gripped their tickets. It seems that it must be one of the few sports that actually works better at a distance — preferably on television — than in real life, as it allows for the riders to be treated like the greyhounds or horses that the betting implies. Still, if you’re inexplicably at a loss of how to spend a few bob in Tokyo, or miss the smell of feeble desperation, go to keirin!
Sophie Knight is a freelance writer and zine fanatic, who creates her own as well.
