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UCI confirms Paris Olympic places and reserves
We are another step closer to knowing who will compete at the Paris Olympics, with confirmation from the UCI of the quota places (PDF). And to sighs of relief across the world’s cycling media, it validates the calculations which circulated online last week. The sprint and keirin allocations are as follows: Nations now have until…
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Irish champ Walsh changes plans after test event delay
With DerbyWheel’s April test event postponed, Irish sprint champion Orla Walsh has filled the sudden gap in her schedule with something from the opposite end of the scale. She revealed on Instagram that she will now be participating in the celebrated Mallorca 312 gran fondo event, riding the 167km circuit around the north of the…
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Taekwondo team amazes British talent show judges
Although most events will be ‘behind closed doors’, DerbyWheel organisers have promised crowd-pleasing entertainment at the competition’s big-money Grand Prix events, three times a year. But whilst we could easily imagine K-Pop acts keeping the fans happy between races, we at Global Keirin had our doubts about the promised taekwondo performances. Would that sort of…
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Prize money is not the Olympic spirit, says UCI President
UCI President David Lappartient says the decision of World Athletics to offer prize money to winners at Paris 2024 is ‘not the Olympic spirit’, and should have been discussed among international governing bodies. World Athletics recently announced that it would become the first federation to award prize money at an Olympic Games. Individual athletes winning…
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DerbyWheel confirms test event delay
Edits to the DerbyWheel website have confirmed Global Keirin‘s report that the test event proposed for Newport on 26-28 April has been postponed. References to the April dates on the Calendar page, and in DerbyWheel president DJ Hyun’s ‘open message to cyclists around the world’ were changed to ‘1st half of 2024’ – which we…
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Nations await confirmation of Olympic places
The UCI Track Nations Cup event in Canada marked the end of the qualifying cycle for the Paris Olympics. Countries have been accumulating qualification points since 2022. Rankings are produced based on each country’s best performer in the last two editions of each continental championship, and the 2023 world championship, along with the two best…
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UCI Nations Cup: world champ Andrews wins in Milton
World champion Ellesse Andrews took a decisive victory in the women’s keirin as the UCI Track Nations Cup came to a close in Canada. Andrews, the only New Zealander to have made the journey to Milton, needed a win in the repechage to proceed from the first round; and was third in her semi, behind…
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UCI Nations Cup: Lavreysen back on top in Canada
The Dutch pair of Harrie Lavreysen and Jeffrey Hoogland took first and second in the keirin competition at the final round of UCI Track Nations Cup, in Milton, Canada. European champion Lavreysen, competing in keirin for the first time in this year’s Nations Cup, surged to the front with just over two laps of the…
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DerbyWheel test event delayed
Global Keirin understands that the DerbyWheel test event, scheduled to take place at the UK’s Newport velodrome later this month, may not be going ahead as planned. Black Line, the UK-based coaching group led by British elite sprint champion Pete Mitchell, posted on Facebook on the evening of April 10th that ‘due to an event…
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Pist6: a model, a partner, or a rival to DerbyWheel?
DerbyWheel is not the only initiative seeking to reinvent, and expand the audience for, keirin racing. Operating from the new indoor facility in Chiba, 40km east of central Tokyo, Pist6 – pronounced, as an English speaker would expect, ‘pist six’ – looks much more like UCI style racing. The track at the Tipstar Dome, opened…
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Bikes of DerbyWheel: meet the machines on riders’ shopping lists
Keirin racing in Japan and Korea is generally synonymous with narrow-tubed, steel-framed bicycles which, in the rest of the world, would be considered vintage museum pieces. With the reintroduction of Girls Keirin in 2012, Japanese women were permitted to ride on modern carbon fibre frames. DerbyWheel will continue that trend towards more modern machinery. DerbyWheel…
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What’s in a name? Not the first ‘Derby’… not the first ‘Derby Wheel’
One of the many challenges facing an organisation seeking to launch a whole new sporting competition to a global audience, is choosing a suitable name. It needs to be unclaimed. It needs to be memorable. It needs to work, and be easy to say, in multiple languages. The word Derby first became associated with races…
