Continuing from the altogether too long discussion of Kenyan running that took all of Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 3, today I want to switch gears (ha ha, this joke will make sense in a second) and look at an example of another group that jumped from relative anonymity to dominance in what is a fairly niche sport in a relatively short period of time.   The sport is track cycling and the ‘country’ is the United Kingdom (technically this includes NORTHERN Ireland, Scotland and Great Britain).  And this discussion will only be marginally too long.

As with the Kenyan runners, I’ll look a bit at the sport and then try to examine what the UK did to achieve dominance (and more importantly how they went from doing nothing on the world stage to kicking absolute ass in a relatively short time period), to see if there are any commonalities or what have you.

Again, I don’t intend to spend nearly the time ton this as I did on Kenyan runners.  I’d just end up typing the same stuff over and over again and it’ll get a lot less detailed as I go. And while this is a bit longer than I’d have liked, some of that was my attempt to break up the blocks of dense text with videos.

I’m also going to move to 4X/weekly updates, otherwise this is literally going to take me like 6 weeks to cover because I keep adding stuff to it.

.

What in the Hell is Track Cycling?

Track cycling is another one of those weird little niche sports (not unlike Olympic lifting) where the folks involved in it are passionate to the point of psychosis and the folks who aren’t haven’t even heard of it, can’t understand it and don’t give an ounce of a damn (much to the lament of those who are passionate about it).  Unless they are watching Youtube videos of the absolutely awesome crashes that occur, then it’s pretty cool.  We do love carnage.

Continue reading Why the US Sucks at Olympic Lifting: Part 4