Eoin Mullen’s World Cup Diary: “The crowd roared as GB won; then it hit me, this was huge”

Mullen comes a cropper in the keirin as a Malaysian rider takes him out

In this insightful dispatch, young Irish track sprinter Eoin Mullen takes us inside the gladiatorial atmosphere at the London Velodrome. He recalls the roar of the crowd and the adrenalin of racing his World Cup debut last weekend; riding the sprint, keirin and kilo against Sir Chris Hoy and the other major names of big time sprinting.

Having trained hard for the past couple of months with the World Cup in mind, nothing could have prepared me for what I was about to experience.

We arrived in London a couple of days before the racing began to acclimatise and practice on the track.

The kilo was my first event and it had a late start of 8pm, which is a tough one. It’s hard to pass time while trying to save energy and not over-think your race.

I got down to the track around three hours before my event, which gave me plenty of time to warm up, get my race gear on and get a couple of flying efforts and a couple of standing starts done.

As I was doing my final preparations - putting on my skinsuit and race numbers and so on - the enormity of the occasion hit me when the British women’s sprint team had just broken a world record. The noise in the stadium was electric. With the 6,000 or so spectators screaming it made the hair stand on the back of my neck.

Before I knew it, I was in the gate with my straps and overshoes on and 30 seconds left on the clock.

I had a good start but then on my 4th or 5th pedal stroke my handlebars came loose but I continued on regardless. I crossed the line in a time of 1.05.281 which was a PB for me. But I was still a bit disappointed; I kept thinking had my bars not come loose I would have done better.

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I then got a massage from our masseuse Karen and headed back to the hotel as quickly as possible to get dinner and into bed and ready for an early morning on Saturday.

As I arrived down to the track on Saturday morning the first thing I heard form Martin (O’Loughlin Irish team manager) was that my heat was changed and I was now in the same heat as Sir Chris Hoy.

I drew ‘man 1’ and I remember waiting on the starting line as each of our names was being called; the huge roar from the crowd when they called Sir Chris Hoy's name out. I took position behind the derny, and just after the motorbike pulled off I looked back, sensed an opportunity to go and decided to go for a long one about two laps out. I was caught as my legs began to tire entering the final bend.

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I didn't have long then until the repacharge and I was drawn with European keirin champion Matt Crampton and Asian keirin champion Josiah Ng. It was in this race that disaster struck.

We had just passed the bell and into the final lap where there was contact with Matt Crampton as he came around me. It happens in the keirin; it’s pretty robust. Just as I regained control of the bike and had a sense of relief going through my mind, the Malaysian rider crashed just in front of me and I had nowhere to go.

Thankfully I wasn't badly hurt. I got all patched up and went back to the hotel and watched the rest of the racing on TV.

Sunday was the last day of racing and it was starting to take a toll on my body. We had another early start and had to be down at the track at 7am for a 9am start, I was the 9th rider to do the flying 200m time trial as part of the qualification for the sprint.

I did a time of 10.736, which unfortunately wasn't enough to qualify me into the sprints. But considering I‘d crashed the day before, I was pretty happy with my result.

It was then time to pack up the bikes and I went up into the stand to watch some truly spectacular racing and soak in the atmosphere of this amazing venue.

I have no doubt that London 2012 will be an amazing Olympics, even though the village is still very much still under construction.

I will definitely be looking forward to racing on the London velodrome sometime in the near future hopefully. But for now I am back at the UCI’s World Cycling Centre in Aigle in Switzerland training hard for my next big race which at the moment looks like the U23 European Championships in July.

Cheers

Eoin