Hey Dennis, great word portrait!
Some keirin observances/rembrances, now potentially out of date, all potentially inaccurate.... :^}
CR on-list justification: Keirin equipment specs are rigidly codified, all frames were lugged steel, nothing in the way of "new age" componentry. Steel frames, steel/aluminum components and rubber. Keirin-certified components carry the "NJS" stamping.
Keirin is a travelling circuit, with tracks active primarily when keirin is in town. Maybe for a week, or a 4- or 5-day program, every few months. I'm guessing local riders may use the tracks for training during off-time, but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure whether all the riders travel the national circuit, or whether a core of high-ranked riders travel and lower-ranked riders remain local---I suspect the latter. I used to get "gimme free parts" calls from Nelson Vails and Michel Vartens (sp?), when they were in Japan for keirin, from all over the country, so those guys and the tip-top Nakano Koichi-types definitely travelled.
Late-night tv ads, newspaper ads and hanging ads on public transit (train/subway/bus) announce keirin time. There is pretty much zero local keirin attention in major media during off-time. I never checked out the "sports newspapers" though, where there might be more consistent exposure.
Keirin was considered fairly lowbrow, with many/most bettors drawn from the ranks of day laborers and the irregularly employed. Tracks are usually located in lower-rent districts, not near the higher-rent areas where the express trains stations stop. I lived near a local station near a track for a while (in Kyoto, on the Hankyu Arashiyama line, track was near Katsura?), and when keirin was in town the local train cars filled with hardscrabble men toting betting sheets. Horse racing and boat racing were similar, but horse racing managed to move upscale during the '90s, drawing in higher-income bettors/spectators, even making horse tracks a quasi-chic place for even high-spending female office workers to congregate. Keirin tried but as of the late-'90s hadn't managed to move upscale. From Dennis' description it sounds like they've made some progress.
At least a couple of former keirin riders I knew alluded to leaving the sport because of race "fixing." One had been on the Japanese Olympic team, so I didn't discount these comments as sour grapes from guys who weren't strong enough to reach the top ranks and bigger purses. IIRC, horse/boat/bicycle racing is a quasi-private for-profit enterprise controlled by a single gentleman with hard-core nationalist leanings and shadowy organized-crime ties. A certain percentage of racing profits, less than half IIRC, goes directly into the national coffers, I think earmarked for education. At any rate there was a general public perception of a seamy underside to organized gambling, and it did not have the wide fan base and clean image of pro baseball or pro soccer.
Paul Brodek Hillsdale, NJ
On Tue, 06 Jan 2004 10:05:20 +0900, Dennis Young
<mail@woodworkingboy.com> wrote:
>I made it over to the Maebashi Keirin track, a three hour drive by car
>through mountains and plains. It was really only to visit a bike shop in
>the good sized town, and didn't expect a race session to be going on during
>the new years holiday, but upon passing the place I noticed that the parking
>lot was jammed, so I parked and payed my 100 yen (about a buck) and entered
>the track lobby. What a gorgeous pista track! It's completely enclosed
[more really cool keirin stuff snipped....]
Paul C. Brodek
Hillsdale, N.J. U.S.A.
E-mail: pcb@skyweb.net