Behind the scenes gallery: My view of the track world championships

Riding rollers in hotel hallways, exploring for snacks, and cramming bikes and riders into planes, vans, and Team USA's infield pit.

When I started telling people that the track world championships had been moved from Turkmenistan to Roubaix, the initial response I got was always some version of, “Man, I didn’t think you could run a track race on that velodrome.” Then I’d have to explain that not only does Roubaix have the most iconic velodrome in all of cycling, they also have a brand new indoor 250-meter track right next door.

For all of us on Team USA, a trip to Roubaix and a visit to the iconic velodrome seemed like a much easier trip than one to Turkmenistan, although I was slightly disappointed to miss a chance to visit somewhere I’d never have any other reason to go to.

With just an eight-week turnaround from the Olympics to the world championships, we went with a reduced squad, built more around the bunch racing and only composed of people that wanted to race again so quickly after the five-year cycle that led into Tokyo.

We had the newly crowned Olympic champion with Jennifer Valente as well as Ashton Lambie fresh off the individual pursuit world record and chasing the world title that’s eluded him the last four years.

I raced the Omnium at the Olympics but haven’t had a ton of exposure to high-level bunch racing before, so I competed in every opportunity I had in Roubaix, racing the Scratch, Points, Elimination, and Omnium races across four days.

Despite the pressure and heavy fatigue of four days of racing, I wanted to try and capture some of what happens inside the team on these trips and show the atmosphere of elite track racing. So here is a look inside the trip on a more personal level, some of the day-to-day minutia that defines periods of time away from home.