Bunch Sprint Win!

The Bicycle Racing

After my success in the club road race championships, I got a the flu one weekend, and a virus the next, so my next race was the club time trial championship on the 1st of June. The last time I had ridden a time trial, I was uncomfortable on the time trial handlebars, and I was unsure about how much of a difference they would make, so I didn't put them on for this time trial. The course was 3 laps of the Kooragang circuit; just over 21kms. I was happy with my pacing (my average heart rate was about 90% of my maximum heart rate), my lap times were reasonably even (0:11:44, 0:11:53, 0:11:32) for a total time of 0:35:09. This time yielded me a very inconspicuous 10th out of 13.

The next  weekend it was back to my favourite race format, a scratch race. Racing was combined with Hunter District, so I was looking forward to a healthy sized field. I was excited about racing a scratch race again, but nervous because I didn't know whether my performance in the time trial reflected a drop in fitness from being sick, or just that I was a poor time trialist.



The race was over 5 laps of the Kooragang circuit. My plan was to stay at the back of the bunch for the first 4 laps, and see how things were looking at the start of the last lap. The breakaways that looked serious were early in the race (lap 2?), so I didn't expect them to stay out for the whole race.

There is one rider in the bunch, named Anthony (I think!), who has in the past made a solo breakaway at the turnaround (about 4km from the finish) and held out to the finish. I moved up through the group before the turnaround, in case Anthony was the one to follow, but perhaps a few people had the same idea. He did have a bit of a go, but was well covered by a few of the other riders.

After that possible breakaway was resolved, I did my best to inconspicuously drift back through the group to get into position during Woodchip Straight for a sprint finish. The group was slowing down and bunching up, so it was looking good. Once we entered the finishing straight Anthony sprinted again, and me, having previously been out-gunned by his aerobic fitness, thought, "Watch out! Better follow that!"

Talking to Anthony afterwards he said, "I was going for the Masters' finish line [a different finish line about 500m up the road from our finish line], and forgot it was a Kooragang race." Following this faux pas, left me in not a bad position, but maybe a little further forward than would have been ideal. Anthony faded, and then that left me behind Dave and Darren. Dave had a short turn at the front of the lead-out train, and then pulled over. Darren had a more solid turn at the front, and then we got to the trees and it was time to go!

I accelerated as hard as I could. There was only one rider in front of me and I was catching him (in the black and green 'CHEEKY' kit in the video). I thought that I had probably shaken off any riders following me through the 'traffic'. I gave it everything, and my legs were doing the usual burning thing. I was just about to sit down in the saddle again, and I heard some aero wheels coming up on my right, and somebody else shouting/grunting right behind me! I stayed out of the saddle a little bit longer! My legs were getting wobbly! I held onto the win, just across the line.

Looking back at the video, I am surprised I held on to win. I hadn't shaken anybody off at all! Lincoln (red helmet, black and white kit) had stayed on my wheel the whole way from half way down Woodchip Straight! Greg Tolhurst (I think, white helmet and red and white jersey) was making fast ground down the right (left-of-frame), and Ben Sparkes (white helmet, red, white, and blue jersey) only just didn't pass between myself and Lincoln. Final places were me 1st, Lincoln Latunin 2nd, and Ben Sparkes 3rd.

The Video Processing

If you think the above video is shaky, have a look at the original!



I stabilised it using a Linux Command-Line program named 'Melt', following this tutorial. My analysis command was

melt Finish.MP4 -filter videostab2 shakiness=10 smoothing=10 maxshift=-1 maxangle=-1 crop=1 -consumer xml:Finish3.xml all=1 real_time=-2

This created an 'analysis' file, that has the processing parameters and transforms listed in it. I manually increased the smoothing parameter in this file to 20 (and renamed it Finish4.xml), because this parameter is used in the 2nd step, which actually applies the transforms. This means it, and some other parameters, can be changed without needing to redo the analysis and just redo the transformation step. My transform command was

melt Finish4.xml -audio-track Finish.MP4 -consumer avformat:FinishStable4.mp4 vcodec=libx264 b=5000k acodec=aac ab=128k tune=film preset=slow

The videostab2 filter is based (I think) on this work, and you can read more there.