Adam Duvendeck is a five-time member of the USA Cycling track world championship team who competed in the 2004 and 2008 Summer Games.

Track cycling is the coolest Olympic event you’re not watching. It’s understandable, because the sport is pretty esoteric, even among cyclists.

Everyone’s heard of the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong is a household name and even your grandfather knows a mountain bike from a road bike. But mention keirin and Sir Chris Hoy and people think you’re having sushi with a knight of the round table. So let me make this easy for you: Track cycling is NASCAR on bikes. If that sounds awesome, that’s because it is.

Depending upon the event, riders race solo against the clock or in packs of as many as 40 riders. If that doesn’t pique your interest, keep in mind they’re doing so on bicycles with no brakes. That, for the most part, makes the bikes safer because hitting the brakes mid-turn would make you slide off the banked track. Watching Olympic-caliber riders whipping around a velodrome is a sight to behold, almost symphonic in its beauty. But when it goes bad, it can cause the kind of crashes that go viral on YouTube.

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Video: Archer Brady Ellison Shows Some Serious GearBecause everything happens faster on a track, especially one banked 40 degrees or more, track cycling requires more than brute strength. It requires quick thinking and quicker reflexes. It isn’t always enough to be the fastest; you also must be smart. That’s one thing that drew me to the sport. Oh yes, I loved the physical agony I had to endure competing at the international level. But I also loved the strategy required to beat guys who put in just as much time training and wanted nothing more than to pound me into the ground getting to the finish line.

So, about the pain. Track cyclists love pain. We cherish the fact a good workout makes us want to throw up. We know we’ve done well when all we can do is curl up in the fetal position and quiver after a sprint. Track cyclists know one speed: Flat-out. We don’t do leisurely six-hour rides. Our training is all about maximizing output – going as fast as we can as long as we can. A typical race might last 10 seconds or 30 minutes, depending upon the event. Track racing takes the fastest aspects of road racing and condenses it into one intense burst. Those lead out trains you see at the end of a Tour stage? The ones where riders put down more than 2,000 watts sprinting the last few hundred yards to the finish? That’s all we do, and we do it with one gear and direct drive (no coasting).

There are some variables in our training and riding style, of course, and they mostly come down to the type of event we’re competing in. It can get confusing for newcomers, but all you need to know is there are two types: Sprint and endurance. While I have my own personal bias about which is more exciting (sprint, of course!), neither discipline disappoints if you’re into action. Sprint racing includes three Olympic events:

Team sprint – The three riders of a given team start side-by-side. When the gun goes off, riders form a line. Each leads for one lap, racing against the clock for 750 meters.

Match sprint – A highly strategic one-on-one race that requires speed, smarts and great track position to maximize your efficiency over 750 meters.

Keirin – No, not the beer, one of the most exciting races anywhere. Six riders follow a motorized pace bike that brings them up to speed and keeps them there for 6.5 laps of a 250-meter track, then pulls off. At that point it’s a 2.5-lap drag race with high speed, great danger and lots of contact. It’s awesome.

Riders in these events look like linebackers. Male sprinters often squat more than 500 pounds and have legs like barrels. Everyone at the gym where I trained called me “Quadzilla” because I could easily put up more than 450 pounds on the squat rack. Sprint riders are specialists; you don’t see us crossing over to other cycling disciplines, simply because our bulk would be a hindrance climbing the Pyrenees.

That’s not true of endurance riders, who often include guys you see winning those frantic sprints in the Tour de France or Tour of California. Sprinters typically have fantastic top speed – it isn’t unusual to see the best of them top 40 mph – and they’re usually a little beefier than your typical road racer. The Olympics features two endurance events:

Team Pursuit – Four members of a team ride single file, drafting, to complete 4,000 meters faster than the team that started on the opposite side of the track.

Omnium – This is new to the Games, and it’ll be great. Think of it as the cycling equivalent of the pentathlon, with six races of 200 meters to 14 kilometers for men. Many of the events used to be individual Olympic events, and the decision to consolidate them in the omnium was not without some drama.

Track cycling dates to the late 1800s and has appeared in all but one modern Olympics. The events haven’t changed much in all that time, but the bikes couldn’t be more modern. They have more in common with fighter jets than the bicycle you rode to the park last weekend. They feature carbon fiber frames and components, they’re wind-tunnel tested for maximum aerodynamic efficiency and they typically cost more than your car. The British team, for example, is riding rigs designed with help from McLaren – the Formula 1 racing and exotic supercar outfit – with price tags rumored at six figures.

The tracks these athletes ride on are no less impressive. They’re made entirely of wood, usually Siberian pine because it is dense yet malleable. They’re 250 meters around and steeply banked to let riders turn easily at high speed. You can’t appreciate how impressive the banking is until you’ve stood atop the corner of a track like the velodrome at the Home Depot Center near Los Angeles and realize you’re 2.5 stories up. I promise it will send a chill down your spine. It’s one of the things that make this sport so great.

Track cycling is everything people, especially Americans, love about sport. It has high speed, high intensity and the constant threat of a colossal pile-up in races often decided by hundredths of a second. Why would you miss that?

Adam Duvendeck is a five-time U.S. National Track Cycling Champion who competed in the 2004 and 2008 Olympic Summer Games. He currently manages The VELO Sports Center – America’s only world-class indoor velodrome, located at the Home Depot Center in Carson, California.