Juniors Track World Championships 2014 at the Speedom

Walter Euhus from Langenhagen, Germany informed me, that the UCI Juniors Track World Championships 2014 will be held at the Gwang Myeong Speedom in Seoul. The competition schedule run from 8th to 12th of August, on 10th I had to fly to India for business reasons, so I visited the stadium on Saturday, the 9th.

The Gwang Myeong Speedom opened in 2006, has a spectator capacity of 30,000 and is the largest domed architecture ever built in South Korea. The erection of the huge structure was quite outstanding, check the link at the bottom.

I expected a large audience, but there seems not to be much interest in track racing in Korea. Most of the few spectators looked like international officials of the races or friends or relatives of the racers. Korean people were to see standing in front of many monitors fussy betting on Keirin racing with their backs to the actual racing on the course. Keirin is the Japanese form of sprint track bicycle racing, introduced after the Second World War to gain money by betting on the racers for reconstruction of the country. It became an official cycling discipline at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

When I arrived, some races were ongoing. Unfortunately it was not possible to take any photos from nearby the track; high fences divide spectators from the race. So although using a zoom lens with a range of 70 to 200 I could not get really satisfying results. 

cycle related activities round the Speedom

so even he used a bicycle?

the German box, especially for Walter Euhus

wonderful Pinarello machine

disks, disks, disks

Koreans betting

Further reading:

http://www.lusas.com/case/civil/velodrome.html