Commonwealth Games

The Commonwealth Games are in Birmingham but, as we discovered last Thursday, the cycling  competition is not. It’s at the Lee Valley VeloPark and we got tickets for the morning session. It did mean that, on a Sunday morning, we were up and on a train by 7:15pm  The venue opened at 8:30am and we decided to get there on time to soak up the atmosphere rather than have a lie in and wait until closer to the 10am event starting time.

We’d never seen competition in the VeloPark to that was all new. It’s quite impressive inside but it’s also very warm inside. We spent the first hour wandering around looking at the souvenirs and buying breakfast. The bacon bap was really nice.   The warm-up is interesting because it definitely had a West Midlands focus - which is entirely to be expected - but when the compares for the day tried to get the whole crowd to try a Brummie accent I wondered if it had gone a bit too far. 

Most of the cycling competition was new to us but it was mainly Men’s Sprints and Tandem Sprints. Tandems Sprints are very unusual to watch.  It’s really interesting to see the Team GB team split into constituent parts: England, Scotland, Wales and the Isle of Man were all on the track,   The son of one of the Welsh competitors was set net to us and it was really sweet to here the support for ‘daddy’.  It was one of the tandem races but, sadly, Wales lost that one.

Unfortunately , the session came to a pan abrupt end when there was a horrific crash during one of the Scratch race heats. During the race, England’s Matt Walls had been trying to avoid riders who had fallen in an incident that began on the entrance to the corner. The grounded cyclists forced Walls up on to the barrier and then over it into the crowd. The video was quite horrific and the session came to a stop. We were in the stadium another 30 minutes, during that time we saw sections of the enclosure being blocked off while medics attended. There was no news so we stared to leave as we had no desire to become a gawker.  As we walked out the door they announced the final race would not take place until this afternoon’s session.

Fortunately, by the time we were home the news was reporting that only he only needed stitches in his forehead and had only scrapes and bruises otherwise. It seems none of the spectators needed hospitalisation.

One year ago: at another sporting event.