An Introduction to Crashteriums

Daylight savings has arrived and all over the country it's criterium season.

For the uninitiated a criterium is a bicycle race that is conducted on a short road circuit. Short as in often less than one kilometre long and rarely more than 3 kilometres.

Though short, these circuits are often “technical.” When a cyclist uses the word technical what they really mean to say is “it'll be a miracle if you stay upright for one full lap let alone the whole race.” Course designers seem to delight in making sure there is at least one corner where a cyclist would have to defy the laws of physics to get around at any speed above a crawl. Guess it's a good thing that most cyclists don't study physics. You can tell the ones who do - they become course designers.

Races are either run over a set number of laps or for a set length of time and then a set number of laps. As in race for 40 minutes and then the next time you cross the start/finish line race for another three laps. My local races use the time + laps format. Now let's think about this for a minute. The faster you go, the further you have to race. You would think that there would be a gentleman's agreement that the bunch would proceed at a crawl for the first 40 minutes and then race for the last few. That would be the sensible approach... but cyclists were never known to be sensible. I mean they are trying to defy physics on that corner after all!

Criteriums are raced in a fast and furious manner. Given that the circuit is short and the straights are shorter it is vitally important to be up the front of the bunch. If you are caught down the back when the hammer goes down there is very little chance of moving up. What that means is everyone wants to be at the front... trouble is that there is only so much room up there. The end result is that everyone tries to move up by going faster than both the guy at the front and the others who are also trying to move up. In other words the sprint starts when the gun goes and keeps right on going until the finish.

The positioning problem is further compounded by the fact that a rider wants to be at the front but not on the front. If you ride on the front you are exposed to the wind and so do more work than everyone else in the pack. So you have the guy on the front desperately trying to get off the front, the guy in third desperately trying to move up a position and the guy in second desperately trying to hold his position. If you thought cycling is a non-contact sport you haven't been caught in the melee that is criterium racing.

My grade in the local criterium has taken an interesting approach to the positioning problem. We attempt to fit ten riders in the first few rows hence increasing the number who are in the “perfect” position. At first I thought this was a suicidal approach – those corners are bad enough single file. Then I worked out the thinking behind the tactic: packed so close there is no way a rider can fall – there just isn't the room! A side benefit is that there is no way an A grade rider could beat us – they wouldn't make it around the first corner!!

Where do I ride in a criterium? My usual place: off the back. I was embarrassed about this initially but after riding past the bodies strewn across the road the last couple of weeks (seems there is enough room to fall after all) I have kind of decided that I don't really want to catch the bunch after all.

Tortoise