What Happens When the Bottom of the Track Changes?

Watch enough modern timed racing and the blue band beneath the black line stops looking entirely like somewhere riders are not supposed to be.

It is particularly obvious from a standing start. The enormous gears now being pushed in pursuit, kilometre and team sprint mean the first few pedal strokes involve considerable movement underneath the rider, and one of the familiar sights immediately after the gate releases is the bike dropping towards, and quite often onto, the côte d’azur before being brought properly onto the racing surface.

Nobody thinks much of it because, on a 250-metre track without pads occupying that space, there has been very little reason to.

Shanghai changes that.

The new foam markers on the côte d’azur are designed to remove the problems associated with the old pads. They are lower, far less aggressive if struck and should behave more like a rumble strip than an obstacle capable of throwing a bicycle into the air.

They are also going to occupy a piece of track that riders have become accustomed to using.

Come out of the gate in Shanghai, allow the bicycle to make the same movement it has made hundreds of times in training and there is every chance the tyres will meet a marker.

That makes the opening metres of the timed events far more interesting than the appearance of the foam itself suggests.

Modern standing starts are not neat, straight-line accelerations. A rider is attempting to turn an enormous gear from almost zero speed, the bike is moving laterally beneath them and the quickest route into the first bend has increasingly involved using every bit of available space near the bottom of the track.

For a team sprint starter the consequences arrive almost immediately. They are trying to produce maximum acceleration while putting the first lap onto the shortest possible trajectory, with the riders behind already responding to whatever line they establish. A movement which previously carried the bike briefly onto the blue now ends with a physical marker underneath the tyres.

The same applies in the kilometre, individual pursuit and team pursuit. Riders will either have to control that movement more precisely, accept contact with the foam, or begin giving the bottom of the track more room than they previously considered necessary.

All three potentially cost something.

It becomes more complicated once the pursuit is at speed, because use of the côte d’azur has not been confined to the opening pedal strokes.

Watch closely enough and pursuit riders can be seen drifting onto the blue during an effort, sometimes momentarily and sometimes with enough of the bicycle below the black line to make the geometry fairly obvious. The côte d’azur is not part of the measured racing surface. A rider whose wheels travel inside it is therefore taking a route shorter than the nominal 250 metres around the track.

With pursuit performances improving by fractions of seconds and programmes searching relentlessly for marginal gains, it would be surprising if the shortest available trajectory had not become part of that progression.

The new markers take that option away.

Not by adding another rule — riding below the track was never supposed to be part of the course — but by finally putting something physical in the place where the boundary already existed.

That distinction is important when considering how riders will respond in Shanghai. They are not simply being asked to obey a new interpretation of the racing line. A piece of usable surface which has effectively been available to them on many modern 250-metre tracks will no longer be available in the same way.

Contact therefore seems considerably more likely than it might appear from looking at the markers in isolation.

Pursuit positions have also changed. Riders are lower, narrower and increasingly arranged around holding an aerodynamic shape rather than maintaining a generous view of the track ahead. In many of the most aggressive positions, the rider is not spending every second looking several metres down the track and making conscious steering corrections.

They know where the bicycle should be because they have ridden that line thousands of times.

If it wanders a few centimetres below the black line, they may know remarkably little about it until the tyres tell them.

In Shanghai, the first indication could be the vibration of the foam beneath the wheels.

That should be far safer than meeting one of the old pads, which is precisely why this system is needed, but doing it at pursuit speed while holding an extreme aerodynamic position is still going to get a rider’s attention. The next lap may then be ridden a little differently, not because the marker physically slowed them very much but because the rider now knows exactly how close it is.

That psychological effect could be every bit as interesting as the contact itself.

The quickest pursuit riders do not want to think about where the black line is. Once the start has finished and the effort has settled, line choice should be almost automatic. Enter the bend, hold the shortest trajectory, leave it and repeat.

Shanghai inserts something new into that automatic process.

A rider who has clipped a marker in training may forget about it immediately. Another may leave several centimetres more margin afterwards. Somebody who knows they have previously drifted onto the côte d’azur may consciously ride higher because the consequence of doing so is no longer simply a commissaire noticing.

Five centimetres for one bend is irrelevant. Leaving it lap after lap is not.

The 200-metre time trial presents the same problem from the other direction. The rider is already travelling at maximum speed and attacking the shortest legal trajectory as the timing begins. The opportunity to use the côte d’azur should never have been there, but the physical reality of an empty blue strip and one covered with markers is very different when a sprinter is trying to place the bicycle within centimetres of the bottom of the track at more than 70km/h.

Again, the markers are doing exactly what they are supposed to do.

That does not make Shanghai an ideal place for riders to discover how racing around them feels.

Had these markers been present through a season of World Cups and other major timed events, much of this discussion would probably already be finished. Riders would know how the foam behaves under a wheel, starters would have adjusted their gate trajectories, pursuiters would have recalibrated where the bottom of the track really is and coaches would have incorporated all of it into the normal preparation process.

Instead, one of the biggest changes to the physical environment of timed racing is arriving at the World Championships.

There will be training sessions beforehand and riders will adapt quickly because elite riders generally do. But training around a marker is not quite the same as discovering what happens when a World Championship start begins badly, when a pursuit rider drifts down while exhausted or when a sprinter attacks the black line at full speed with qualification at stake.

The markers need to be there. Allowing timed riders to use the côte d’azur as an extension of the track — deliberately or otherwise — is difficult to reconcile with events measured to thousandths of a second on a supposedly fixed distance.

Shanghai may nevertheless be messy.

Expect riders to hit them. Expect some starts to look different. Expect pursuiters to give the black line more room after their first encounter with one, and expect teams to question why a change capable of altering both the physical line available to the rider and their confidence in using it was not introduced early enough for everyone to race with it before the World Championships.

By the end of the week the foam may barely be noticed.

Getting to that point could be one of the more revealing technical stories of Shanghai.