Our well-connected amigo over at Track Piste is reporting that the keirin races at this year’s UCI Track Champions League will be contested over the UCI-standard 6 laps, as opposed to the abbreviated 5-lap format of previous years.
Scratch races will also be extended from 20 to 30 laps, for both men and women.
These changes are not yet reflected on the Track Champions League website, but we have absolute faith in Luis.
The Track Champions League was presented in 2021 as the next evolution of track racing, with innovations intended to make it ‘easy to understand, spectacular to watch and accessible to fans worldwide’.
Facing the challenge of compressing four competitions into a few hours of live TV, events were trimmed and adapted. The early rounds of the sprint became three-ups, and the scratch races were cut to just a third of the men’s usual distance.
The changes led to very different races, and probably resulted in better primetime entertainment – but at the cost of continuity from the UCI’s showpiece events.
It’s simply impractical to squeeze a standard sprint competition of two-ups into the evening’s schedule, along with a full keirin competition! – so that was never going to change.
But they have found time to extend the scratch races, giving breakaway artists more of a chance to test their legs – although a bunch sprint finish remains the most likely conclusion.
Keirin was also tweaked in the initial seasons, with two laps of winding-up behind the derny instead of the usual three. It didn’t intensify the racing, which was still contested over three laps, and it only saved a handful of seconds in the broadcast schedule – so it makes sense to revert to the UCI’s standard distance.
Pist6, the UCI-like keirin competition based at the Chiba track in Japan, also races over six 250m laps.
(As an aside: if you wanted to make keirin shorter and more intense, you could always revert to the pre-2016 rules, with the sprint over 2.5 laps. Global Keirin misses the days of rushing the derny – still legal of course, but just not practical.)
