May 4, 2006

Biking in circles
And you can, too — with no brakes or shifting
By John "jaQ" Andrews jandrews@hippopress.com

A New Boston physical therapist by day, Tony Eberhardt has a dream of one day building a fully enclosed velodrome for professional bike racing. For now, he’s beginning a second season of organizing bike races at Londonderry Raceway, 23 Grenier Field Rd., Londonderry. Tuesday nights will see the Twilight Track Series on this fifth-mile track beginning May 9 and two afternoon summer youth programs start June 6 and August 1, run with the support of Manchester’s Police Athletic League. He and his business partner, Laurie Daley, maintain a Web site at www.leadcycling.com.

Q:The big deal that you guys make on your Web site is how the bikes are different.
The bikes are different from road bikes in that they only have one single gear, and they also have no brakes. So the trick becomes, then, the ability to take the bike from a standstill or slow rate of speed and then pick it up quickly into a sprint of close to 35 or 40 miles an hour, when you get to the guys that are top-notch.

How fast can that be done? 0-30?
Maybe within 10 seconds. They use banking sometimes to help — you can get high on the track and come down. Start at the top and dive down. That’s where a steeper-banked track, a velodrome, comes into play. You reach better speeds at banked tracks. Plus, you can carry the speed when you get up into the banking.
You can’t coast on the bicycles either. They’re direct drive. The chain is just direct to the [wheel].

There are different types of races that people ride in — it’s not always whoever gets to the finish line first?
Exactly ... We run points races, where it could be 10 laps, it could be 20 laps, 30 laps, and every so many laps, we do sprints for points. So, say every fifth lap of a 25-lap race, you’d sprint for points and points are awarded. So you could actually win two or three sprints and not win the bike race, but still win the bike race.

Because you had the most points.
Because you had the most points. So it becomes strategy. You need to know around you while you’re racing who’s got how many points, try to keep it all in your head so that you know when to make your move and when not to.

What we’re adding this year is something new called the Madison race. It was developed actually in Madison Square Garden — it was originally a bike track. That’s teams of riders, two riders per team, and what happens is, you take turns racing in the bicycle race. So if you and I were racing, say you would start out on the bottom of the track and you’d be racing one or two laps, then what would happen is, I’d dive in when I see you coming around. I’d put my hand out and you’d need to make contact with me. In the old days, we used to have to grab onto their shirt and sling them. But nowadays, what we do is either push or do a hand sling. So I put my hand back, you grab my hand and pass me and then pull me forward, kinda slingshot me into the bike race.

Is it dangerous?
It can become dangerous with the traffic of who’s on the track at that point and how people are riding. As we’re trying to make a release, there’s three other teams or five other teams that are trying to make releases.

Is there room in any of these races for newcomers, for people who want to come in and learn how to do this?
Yep, as we open the season, we always do, we have two specific nights that are just orientation nights. So for riders that have been, it’s time for them to come down, rekindle relationships with people, get their legs back, ride in a pack and just do laps on the track and kinda get used to being back on the track. For new riders, we provide new rider orientation, where we take them through. If they don’t have a bike, we give them a bike. We teach them about the track, give them informational packets to take home, point them in the right direction if they want to do research on their own ... And then we start breaking them into races. And we will do that throughout the season. The two nights definitely, but if somebody comes down midseason and wants to learn, that’s fine. We’re getting to the point that we have enough riders that we can now break into categories, so guys that we would consider an A category rider, a better rider, we can let them ride together. We can break out B and C riders also.

Do people need a license to race?
They do, because that helps us with insurance purposes. So for liability issues, we require that all of our riders get a license. And they can get a one-day license from USA Cycling or they can buy a yearly license.

With gas prices the way they are, do you think cycling might be a transportation mode of the future?
I think it is. We’re hearing that at a lot of different shops, there’s a lot of people who want to ride their bike. People are looking for different alternatives, electric cars and stuff like that, a lot of people are still turning to the bicycle. What we need to do around this area is make the streets a little bit more friendly. Rails to trails, things like that ... there’s a section in Nashua into Massachusetts that’s paved. If we can start to get more of that linked up around here, to link Manchester with Goffstown with New Boston, ultimately we might have a nice safe environment for people to ride.

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