VIVI Zuricrit: Course, Elevation & Route Profile

Course & Elevation

The circuit is a flat asphalt block through the Hard quarter between Lochergut and Bullingerplatz. Sihlfeldstrasse, Zypressenstrasse, Agnesstrasse, Martastrasse and Hildastrasse make up a 1.04-kilometre lap with five corners, and two of them shape the race: the Bullinger Hairpin at Bullingerplatz, where a horseshoe-shaped double bend replaces the simple 180-degree turn you would expect, and the Koblet-Z, three quick changes of direction in close succession named after Hugo Koblet. Elevation is beside the point; roughly seven metres of relief per lap is city topography, not a climb.

The 48 laps are run as a points race. An intermediate sprint comes every sixth lap and pays the first four riders five, three, two and one point; the classification is settled first on laps completed, then on points, and finally on the closing sprint that a bell announces. Lapped riders must leave the course immediately, and no team may start more than four riders.

Racing happens on a Saturday evening, in the prime-time slot of a programme that only later winds up under floodlights with the fixed-gear races. The streets are narrow and spectators stand a few metres from the bunch; the organisers counted more than 12,000 of them around the circuit at the previous edition. The race runs as an official UCI Pro Criterium and the start list is by invitation.

Pacing Strategy

A criterium is not ridden evenly. Forty-eight laps add up to some 240 corner exits, each of them paid for with a short, hard acceleration. What that acceleration costs depends almost entirely on position: sit in the back third and every exit starts from a lower speed. The opening laps therefore belong to positioning, not to saving energy.

The rhythm comes from the intermediate sprints every sixth lap. They cut the race into eight blocks, and nobody wins all of them. The workable plan is to commit to two or three of them and simply ride near the front through the rest, rather than contesting every sprint and spending the second half of the race reacting.

The standard trap sits immediately after a sprint: the bunch eases, you drift back ten places, and then spend two laps fighting through the horseshoe to regain them. That costs more than the sprint did, and a rider who loses contact while doing it gets lapped and taken out of the race.

Training plan for VIVI Zuricrit: 12-week build

Just under 50 kilometres on this circuit means about an hour of racing for a professional field. The average power of that hour says very little: the demand is several hundred short spikes of five to fifteen seconds, each followed by half a minute in the draft. What matters is the ability to repeat those spikes, not a high steady output.

The race is decided on the run-ins to the sprint laps and on the last corner exit before them. Come out of it fifth and you sprint for fourth; come out fifteenth and you sprint for nothing. Then there is the closing sprint, which breaks a tie on points and is contested on legs that have already been through eight scoring laps.

Conditions are urban and late: a warm August evening, asphalt throughout, a circuit that has been raced on since midday. There is no climb, no descent and no place to breathe except the draft. The long wait until an evening start pushes fuelling and the warm-up back through the day, and a rider who has not ridden the lap beforehand meets the kerbs and road markings of the horseshoe for the first time at racing speed.

In training that means repeated maximal accelerations of 8 to 15 seconds with 30 to 40 seconds of recovery, in sets of ten and more, until the last repetition looks like the first. Add cornering technique at racing speed, standing starts and close-quarters group riding, because position on this circuit can only be held in contact with the bunch. Long endurance rides simply underwrite the hour the race lasts.