Koichi Nakano: The Merckx of Japanese keirin

I recently wrote a piece on Japanese keirin racing for Bicycling Australia magazine. There was one part that didn’t make the print edition, so here it is...

If Eddy Merckx is the god of road cycling, 69-year-old Koichi Nakano is surely the king of keirin. Born in Fukuoka in 1955, Nakano burst on to the scene in 1975 recording 18 consecutive wins in his first ever season. By the time he retired 17 years later, he had won 169 races and accumulated career prize winnings of more than ¥1.3 billion (AUD $13 million).

Outside of Japan, Nakano also claimed an unprecedented 10 consecutive Professional Sprint World Championships between 1977 and 1986 and it was these sublime performances that forced the cycling world to pay far more attention to Japanese keirin—previously viewed largely as a colourful curiosity—and eventually led to the event being added to the UCI program. Nakano only participated in the keirin twice at the UCI World Championships towards the end of his career, Maebashi in 1990 and Stuttgart in 1991. He missed the final on both occasions.

Nakano continued lobbying for keirin to become an Olympic sport after his retirement. It duly happened in 2000 when, poetically, Nakano was invited to pilot the derny around Sydney’s Dunc Gray Velodrome during the first-ever men’s Olympic keirin events (women’s keirin was added 12 years later in London). As Justin McCurry so beautifully observed in his book, War on Wheels: Inside Keirin & Japan’s Cycling Subculture, the world’s finest sprinters were, quite literally, riding in Nakano’s shadow.

Like to know about the fascinating world of Japanese keirin? Read my story in Bicycling Australia magazine here.