The second stage of the eight-stage Tour of Japan was held yesterday in southern Kyoto Prefecture, a ways south of Kyoto City. I was a volunteer to help in crowd management, as part of an effort to supplement the various civic and government groups with cycling-specific knowledge (e.g. to be able to foresee what lines the cyclists would take, to predict where spectators would be especially dangerous, etc.)

I wasn't there to spectate or take photos, but I could do both when I wasn't otherwise occupied. It's my second cycling race to see live, the first having been amateur races in March. This time the racers were professional.

There's a preschool right next to the start line, and the kids were to perform for the racers just prior to the start.

Among the various cars and motorcycles lining up for the start ahead of the athletes is this signboard motorcycle. If a cyclist or a small group breaks away ahead of the pack, she lets them know how far ahead they are (in seconds) via the signboard.

The race was 6½ times around a 15km (9mi) loop, though actual racing didn't start until a few miles after they left the starting area. Prior to that, everyone just rolls along behind the race-commissioner's car, until he replaces a red flag with a green one and zooms ahead out of the way.

Eventually the cyclists completed the loop and raced by for the first of six times they would pass the general area where I was stationed.

Where I was stationed was at the end of a long, lovely descent during which they fly at impressive speeds, but that's petered out quite a bit by the time they get to where I was standing, just before a sharp 90° bend.

The first time they came by, I took a short video via “Facebook Live”, but it came out sideways because I held the camera properly and Facebook requires it to be held in the wrong orientation. Converting to YouTube, I could rotate the low-quality Facebook video:

I'd expected to be blown away by their speed, but at this flat-ish area just before a 90-degree bend, they seemed positively pedestrian. The video above matches the “lack of zoom” feeling I had. Heck, I felt that I had gone just as fast when I test-rode the course last month. I suppose it makes sense, since safety dictates slowing considerably for the turn.

How silly of me. The data tells a different story.

These guys passed the camera at 50kph (31mph), while I had passed that spot at 30kph (19mph). The sense of speed is quite different on the bike vs. off, I guess, and my own sense of grandeur differs substantially from reality. 🙂

To be fair, they're riding in different conditions. The road was closed to traffic for the race, and the road surface had been cleaned the night before. It had been strewn with debris from recent storms when I rode it. I'm fast on descents, but both conditions (road open to traffic, and dangerous road surface) contributed to a fairly slow time for the long fun descent. It took me just shy of four minutes (3:58). Removing those restrictions, on my best day I imagine that I could do it in 3:30.

But on my best day, I'm not even in the same universe as these guys. During the race, one guy with a very appropriate Strava name did it in 3:00, a feat that, having ridden the road, I can't comprehend. And these guys are entry-level professionals; I imagine that world-class Tour-du-France level athletes would blow these guys away.

Drafting behind the team car is clearly cheating if done for more than a few moments, but there were no UCI race officials around, so they could apparently get away with it. The lack of integrity pisses me off.

As can be seen in these photos, I've moved to the 90° bend for this lap. Here's a 30-second clip of the peloton coming through:

For the last two laps I moved farther upstream to the curve at the end of the aforementioned long fun descent, just before they enter the areas I was at first. They've slowed down from the descent, but not quite so much, so it felt much more zippy here, just a few seconds upstream from the first place:

I tried some panning shots with a slow shutter, but I guess I don't know how to use the controls on my mini camera well, because setting the shutter-speed dial to “30” didn't actually change the shutter speed, so I didn't get much background blur...