Glen Chadwick's Olympic experience

Glen Chadwick Near the start line. (Image credit: Glen Chadwick)

Cyclingnews diarist Glen Chadwick wraps up his take on the Olympic experience this week. Today, he recalls the big day - race day! In tomorrow's diary, Chadwick takes in some sights and then hits the road back to the USA. For all of Chadwick's Olympic diaries go here.

Even the sign-on was just at a little table down the end of the starting straight. (The kind of sign-on you'd see at an NRC event) The three of us had cooling vests on before the start; the idea of these is to keep your core temperature down. They work really well. They kept the engine nice and cool for a little while. All the countries were called up one by one in front of the spectators lucky enough to get tickets to start. These were all basically locals or CRAC (Chinese Rent A Crowd). For a lot of events the ticket prices were so low (e.g. BMX at $11) the locals just scooped them all up before anyone else had a chance.

So the first 80 kilometres were pretty cruisey, but once we hit the circuits... Man, oh man! The problem was that there was a significant break that formed about 20 kilometres to the circuit and the bigger squads USA and Russia missed the move, so the chase was on. To give you a rough idea of the circuit I'll basically say it was a 12-kilometre climb – tailwind – which isn't good. Then followed by a 12-kilometre decent, which was a head wind and you had to pedal down. Every lap was a fast one.