This ’90s keirin gallery is a glimpse of another world
In the family tree of cycling disciplines, track cycling is the most traditionalist branch – bicycles with one gear, two wheels, no brake, propelled around a velodrome. And of track cycling’s many disciplines, it’s the Japanese strain of keirin racing that is the most beholden to tradition.
‘Beholden’ isn’t the right word, really. Keirin has grown around the shape that the past occupies – a bit like a tree on an exposed clifftop, blown onto a slant by the sustained wind of decades before it.
The history of keirin stretches back to 1948, where a Japan still reeling from the toll of the Second World War found a national passion. Alongside sumo, to which keirin is sometimes compared, the cycling event has a less sacred foundation – the government needed revenue, sought a gambling sport to tax, and keirin was one of those sports.
To this day, there are only five sports in Japan where gambling is legal: motorbike racing, horse racing, powerboat racing, football and keirin.
But despite its earthly origins, keirin is wrapped in tradition – for better and for worse. Japanese keirin riders must pass a strict, 11-month live-in traineeship at a keirin school. There is a rigid hierarchy, an appreciation of etiquette, and a respect for seniority, with older riders offered preferential treatment in starting positions. And although it is tactically complex, with riders declaring their strategy before the race begins, there is a clean transparency to the result: nine riders, racing for a finishing line, in front of a baying crowd.
Keirin is a paternalistic, hyper-masculine sport, only open to men since 1964. In its blue collar, smoke-haloed ethos, it butts up against preconceptions of Japanese culture as slick and futuristic. That mirrors the sport’s approach to technological innovation: the Nihon Jitensha Shinkōkai (NJS) is the governing body, and to level the playing field, mandates that all equipment must fit into rigidly defined boundaries. Frames are chromoly, built to approved dimensions and angles. Wheels have 36 spokes. Everything has to be pre-approved, bearing an NJS stamp.
Japanese keirin riders, meanwhile, approach the sport as a lifelong profession, learning the sport’s code, its rituals, its dance. There are only a few international riders that get a shot to race in the discipline, passing a less onerous apprenticeship than their Japanese contemporaries.
Keirin has been an Olympic discipline since 2000, allegedly as the result of millions of dollars in payments requested from the Japanese federation by the UCI to [wink, wink] “support cycling” in “material terms”, in consideration of “the excellent relationship the UCI has with representatives of the Olympic movement”.
Olympic keirin racing is a different beast, though. More international, more technologically sophisticated, less characterful. When (… or if?) keirin hits the boards at the Tokyo Olympics, the discipline’s past and future will meet in the homeland of its birth.
Until then, here is a grainy, glorious gallery from deep in the Cor Vos archives that gives a glimpse of Japanese keirin racing at the Maebashi velodrome, around 1989-1990.
Really, though, it could have been shot 30 years earlier or later and still felt much the same.
Some argy-bargy on the back straight in rainy conditions. 
In the movie adaptation of this keirin race, this guy would be played by John Cho. 
Riders enter the velodrome through the FIGHTING GATE. 
These conditions seem … sketchy … 
The clothing and helmets are designed for both protection and spectator-friendliness … 
… with big numbers across the helmet cover and sides of the overshirt to help punters pick out their tips. 
Bicycles and components alike fit within a rigidly defined set of technological guidelines. 
#4, spirit animal. 
Riders sport protection on their extremities to protect them from big hits from other riders and from the ground, should they come off. 
Where we’re going, we don’t care about toe-overlap. 
In the bowels of the velodrome, it’s a familial atmosphere as riders work on their bikes. 
A very strong selection of polo shirts and slacks on these old gambling boys of the 1990s. 
Number nine takes a flyer. 
The sprint is unleashed. 
And it’s #4 in a retro-chic photo finish. 
Packing the wheels down at day’s end. 
Form guides and ash-trays in the grandstand. 
Even the bell for the final lap looks cool. 
Thanks for letting us into your bike-racing life 30 years ago, chaps!
