Lee Valley Velopark Crit, 12 Aug 2021

It’s been roughly 18 months since I last raced at Velopark in Stratford so I was looking forward to smashing it at one of my local circuits. My race was 40 minutes + 3 laps and I was racing in the women’s E/1/2/3 race and had the men’s 3/4 race on the track with us at the same time. I knew that this was race was going to be a little chaotic with 2 races going on at once with both races having a fairly large field.

My race was set off a minute after the men and I had a good start. I got clipped in quick and was third from the front in the pack. All was going well so far with a fairly high pace and a big bunch still together. A couple of riders attempted to get away but the bunch “let them hang out to dry” - we kept a gap so the riders off the front had no shelter and had to ride in a big headwind in their own and as they start to fatigue, the group will bring them back in the bunch- the rider off the front basically wasted their energy. So no riders got away and we were just rolling round as a big bunch. 

Things started to become very chaotic. We noticed the men’s race was coming up to lapping us so riders in my race was communicating with us shouting out “stay on the left”, which we did. Our group kept to the left side of the circuit allowing the men to overtake on the right. As the men were approaching us they shouted to us “stay left” “on your right”. We stayed left but a few of the men tried to overtake us by riding on the left side of the circuit, the same side my race was riding on!! A lot of the men also rode in the middle of our bunch to overtake us and very few of them actually went on the right side of the track to overtake. Everything was just shambles, my group split up massively and there was just riders all over the circuit. As you can imagine, it was pretty scary as there was at least 30 men overtaking us on the wrong side of the circuit at a very high speed. One of the men almost caused a big crash too! 

Our race was suddenly stopped by the Commissaires as they were aware that the men were in the wrong and not the women, even though the men didn’t see what was wrong. We had a 5 minute stop where the Commissaires explained that the men should be clear with what side they will be overtaking us and that the women will stay on one side of the circuit. This all happened in the first 10 minutes of the race! 

After a 5 minute Commissaire briefing, our race was resumed. After a couple of laps there was some more riders attacking but this didn’t work. I knew this would be a bunch sprint because it is almost impossible to ride away from the bunch or have a successful attack. Thankfully when the men were coming we were able to stay on one side and the men overtook us sensibly this time.

We suddenly had 3 laps to go and I was in the middle of the bunch so I knew I needed to move up. With 2 laps to go I was in a good position for the sprint, I just needed to hold it. A rider tried to squeeze in one last attack but it didn’t work. But it did speed the group up by quite a bit. With 1 lap to go we were all together but as we went up the small ascent the riders in front put the pressure on a little to keep a high pace. The group had split in the middle at this point, but I was luckily at the front of the split. I sadly lost a couple of positions but could only make one up before the sprint. The sprint started about 250 metres to go and just as I was about to overtake some riders in the sprint, we were already past the finish line! At the end of a very chaotic and interesting race, I was happy to have finished 7th in the sprint, especially as I was the only rider on restricted gears. It was also great to see usual form too after having a poor race over the weekend at Hoghill!

Amy Harvey