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Video: Full-contact brakeless skullduggery in Japanese cycle speedway racing

From East End bomb sites to the land of the rising sun

The closest thing cycling has to rollerball — or at least roller derby — cycle speedway involves an oval dirt track, singlespeed bikes with no brakes, spectacular sliding turns and lots of rider-to-rider contact. This video from Japan show how speedway has even spead to the far east, and is just as daft and fun there too.

It also has one of the best bits of skullduggery we've seen as a rider prevents a pass on the inside of a turn by sticking his foot into his challenger's wheel. Skip to 0:55 if you can't wait, but the whole thing's worth two minutes of your time.

Cycle Speedway started in the UK between the wars, but really boomed after WW2 as bombsites provided instant race tracks; by 1950 there were 200 clubs in East London alone. If you fancy  go, it now comes under the umbrella of British Cycling, with about 40 clubs

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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6 comments

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Matt eaton | 9 years ago
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I find cycle speedway very appealing, if the race calendar didn't clash with BMX I'd be tempted to have a go.

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JohnnyRemo | 9 years ago
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Very tame. Most disciplinary suspensions in British Cycling are from Cycle Speedway - almost all for fighting...

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nowasps | 9 years ago
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Is sticking your foot into a rival's wheel a good idea? Surely you're likely to go down as well?

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shearer27 | 9 years ago
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Some great looking bikes there. Grass (sand) roots right there. Having fun and nothing too serious - as it should be. Like.

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andybwhite | 9 years ago
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Surely that's not the best they can do? Not a patch on UK cycle speedway  1

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OldRidgeback | 9 years ago
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The bikes have changed a bit.

The local track where I grew up was on the site of a former piggery. It was redeveloped for housing years ago.

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