Erik Weispfennig was once a pretty good cyclist. Among other things, he was German champion in the team pursuit in 1993 and world champion in the Madison in 2000. Today, the 54-year-old is Sports Director and Managing Director of the Bremen Six-Day Race and must be a master in the discipline of "tightrope walking", he must be able to square the circle - and he probably has to prove even more endurance and capacity for suffering than in his days as an active racing cyclist.
Bremen Sixdays 2024: new edition after a three-year break
The Bremen Six-Day Race was cancelled in 2021 and 2022 due to the coronavirus pandemic. The event originally planned for January 2023 was cancelled by the organisers in September 2022. According to a press release, people's reluctance to buy in times of the gas crisis and inflation, as well as the unclear coronavirus situation at the time, posed too high a risk. Now, after a three-year forced break, daring to make a fresh start was still a risk. It took a lot of courage, entrepreneurial spirit and a great deal of love for track cycling to get involved. "It was brutal pressure," Weispfennig admitted.
Finding sponsors was anything but easy. Weispfennig is primarily responsible for the sporting side of things, but as Managing Director of the organising company Event & Sport Nord GmbH (ESN), he and his colleagues also had to ensure that the overall package was right. And if you want to put together a coherent overall package for a six-day race, if you want to fill the halls, then you have to be aware that track cycling - despite the numerous successes of German athletes at world and European championships - is a marginal sport in Germany and does not attract enough spectators on its own.
Special feature of the Bremen Sixdays
Especially not in Bremen. The Six Days in the north have always been a little different from the others; different from the Six Day races in Cologne, Munich, Stuttgart, Dortmund and even more so from those in Berlin. While almost exclusively cycling fans sat in the stands at the capital's Velodrom on Landsberger Straße and ate the provisions they had brought with them, in Bremen oxen were grilled on a spit, the VIPs were served the North German speciality of cabbage and spelt, and the beer flowed freely.
Six-day races in Bremen have always meant partying until the doctor comes. Even when stars such as Robert Bartko, Iljo Keisse, Andreas Kappes or, in the very early days, Patrick Sercu, René Pijnen and Klaus Bugdahl were doing their laps on the oval track, the crowds were mainly in the side halls. People who led a decent and quiet life for 364 days mutated into party animals during the Sixdays. People liked to talk about the "fifth season" in Bremen. In the Rhineland, people let their hair down at carnival. The people of Bremen, who don't really like carnival, did the same during the Sixdays.
Disruptive racing drivers?
Many Six Days spectators have never seen the inside of Hall 1 of Bremen's Stadthalle, where cycling can be seen, unless Klaus & Klaus are performing and belting out their largely meaningless songs about horses standing in the corridor or about the North Sea coast on the Low German beach. For years and decades, there was even a saying in Bremen: "The only thing that bothers you are the cyclists."
Erik Weispfennig took over as head of sport at the 2012 Bremen Sixdays with the premise of putting cycling back in the spotlight. He has brought the sprinters back to the Bremen track, he has Women's race and paracycling were included in the programme. The field of racers that the former professional put together was always top class, and year after year you could actually see that more people came to watch cycling, especially for the finale. Incidentally, anyone who still believes that the competitions on the indoor tracks are funfair races only has to look at the field of riders, which is peppered with world and European champions.
Short and steep
And the days when the winner - for whatever reason - was already decided in advance are also long gone. Bremen is also something special for the cyclists. In the briefing for the professional cyclists, Weispfennig said: "The track is very special and very tricky." The track in Bremen is special and tricky because it is only 166 metres long. At World and European Championships, 250 metres is the prescribed length. The track specialists virtually speed blindly into the extremely steep 58-degree bend behind the start and finish, where the riders' berths are located. When asked about the difference to the longer tracks, Roger Kluge found a nice comparison: "It's like turning off the motorway onto a forest road."
Field of riders for the Bremen Sixdays 2024
Putting together the field of riders for the 57th Bremen six-day race in January 2024 was even more difficult this time than it already was; keyword: exemption of professional road cyclists who are under contract with a World Tour racing team. This was because the European Track Championships were taking place in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, at almost the same time and tied up the best of the wooden oval guild there.
Fortunately, Weispfennig - former Vice President of the German Cycling Federation - has a good connection to the officials of the International Cycling Union (UCI) and the European Cycling Union (UEC). He was able to convince the European Championship organisers to bring forward the Madison so that track aces such as Madison world champions Yoeri Havik and Jan-Willem van Schip or Theo Reinhardt and Roger Kluge could race in Bremen. "Although Theo and Roger would actually have rather done without the European Championships than the Sixdays in Bremen," Weispfennig explains with pride.
"We've already qualified for the Olympic Games and I was really pleased when Erik asked us. There's a party in Bremen, and off the track it's generally a bit more relaxed than at other six-day races," explained Reinhardt. Without a party, the Bremen Six Days would work about as well as a bike without wheels. For the 2024 comeback in particular, the challenge now was to balance the tried-and-tested mix of sport and show in such a way that the spectators would accept it.
Highs and lows
The organisers had recruited Bremen's mayor Andreas Bovenschulte and pop singer Vanessa Mai as launch celebrities. Mai then gave a concert, and the atmosphere was - to put it mildly - poor. If you were a bit mean, you could say that the more lowbrow the performance, the more the audience in Bremen goes wild. But that's not entirely true either. Ballermann expert Mickie Krause, for example, once sent the audience in the neighbouring hall into ecstasy, but he didn't work particularly well in Hall 1. The organisers deliberately kept beer prices low at 4.50 euros for 0.4 litres, while admission prices were between 20 and 40 euros per evening.
However, the reduction to four days presented the organisers with an almost unsolvable problem. This was because the 2024 final was not a Tuesday, but a Monday and therefore also the so-called "Bremen Day", also known derisively as "Hairdressers' Day". Monday was traditionally always the day with the highest turnover at the six-day event, with even more partying and live acts - which also meant higher costs. And to recoup these costs, the ticket for the last evening cost a whopping 40 euros. That was clearly too much for many cycling fans. The grandstands on the final evening were emptier than they had been for a long time. Certainly something that Weispfennig and his colleagues need to think about.
Tasks for the future
They have made a lot of small adjustments for Sixdays 2024: they have equipped the riders with power meters so that fans can track their speed, heart rate and wattage on the video cube, they have deliberately refrained from sending women in short skirts with bouquets of flowers onto the track for the award ceremony, and they have had the sprinters ride in mixed teams. But they will have to keep tweaking the concept. "After the race is before the race," says Mario Roggow, who is responsible for the big picture as "Head of Sixdays".
Do they bring in Boney M. as a show act, or do they hire German rappers? They want to keep the older audience and attract younger people into the arena, another task that is like squaring the circle. One idea would be to omit the award ceremonies after every single elimination race, after every derny race or keirin competition, so that there aren't so many breaks. "That is certainly something we will think about. But you have to be careful that you don't scare away the very traditional fans at the same time, and you also have to comply with the UCI guidelines in some places," says Weispfennig.
Bremen Sixdays: Shorter means tougher
However, he does not see the fact that the six-day race now only takes place over four days as a handicap: "Basically, we are seeing a shortage of cycling events," says Weispfennig. "It's nothing new for the racers, and while they used to use Thursday to roll in, now everyone knew that they had to go full throttle from the very first second." And they did, and In the end, Roger Kluge and Theo Reinhardt also stood at the top of the podium in Bremen as the newly crowned European Madison champions - followed by the duo Havik/van Schip and the pairing Nils Politt/Lindsay De Vylder - each one lap behind.
Kluge/Reinhardt made the victory perfect with a double in the decisive chase and were honest enough to admit afterwards that they would probably not have made it without Havik's mishap in the 500 metre time trial on the final evening. The Dutchman had set a new track record the previous evening and would almost certainly have scored plenty of points in the time trial on the final evening as well. He would have cracked the 200-point mark for his team and thus received a bonus round. "They probably lost the race then. They had significantly more points than us before the final and it would hardly have been possible for us to make up one more lap," said Kluge.
All in all, a success
Whether the event in Bremen would be accepted by the public after a three-year break was written in the stars. "But fortunately it went very well, the format with the four days worked, we are very satisfied," said Weispfennig on the last evening. So it's fair to say that sometimes less is more. The organisers had aimed for 60,000 spectators. They did not give the exact figures, but it will have been in this range, which means that the Sixdays were probably also a commercial success.
Things are obviously different in Berlin than in Bremen. Three days of racing were planned in the capital for the end of January 2024. When advance sales were more than sluggish, the event was reduced to two days. They didn't do everything right in Bremen, but they did a lot of things right. And when asked whether there will be another six-day race in Bremen in 2025, Weispfennig, Roggow and the partners of Event & Sport Nord GmbH, Jens Wiegandt, Kadir Soytürk and Ingo Gösling, were all smiles and said in unison: "Of course it will go ahead, no question about it." The date has been set: 10 to 13 January 2025.
Six-day history
The first six-day race took place in 1875 in Birmingham, England, albeit still on high wheels. But the spectacle caught on, and four years later the first races were held in the USA. But because the individual starters exhausted themselves to the point of total exhaustion and the races therefore became increasingly less attractive, something new was needed. The US American Teddy Hale, for example, said after his victory in 1896: "I won, but I gave ten years of my life for a few thousand dollars." The New York Herald wrote of "inhumanity in the name of sport".
The "gladiators" kept themselves awake or anaesthetised their pain with "American coffee", a concoction that is said to have contained strychnine, cocaine and even nitroglycerine in addition to caffeine. The new idea for the Six Days provided for races with teams of two, whereby one of the riders always had to be on the track. The premiere was in Madison Square Garden in New York in 1899, which is why the two-man team race has been called the Madison or Américaine ever since.
Sixdays in Europe
The Sixdays came to Europe in 1909. The première was in the halls at Berlin Zoo, and from 1911 the races were held in the Sportpalast on Potsdamer Straße. In Bremen, the first race took place in 1910 at the Schützenhof in the Neustadt district - on a track that was not even 100 metres long, popularly known as the "Nudeltopf". The drivers took it in turns to race around the wooden track for six days and six nights. "If you're too tired, you'll be replaced by your partner," rhymed the writer Alfred Kerr. And the six-day champion Walter Rütt said: "You really only live with the help of the manager who puts food in your mouth, who washes, combs and changes your clothes." In the 1920s, the races in Germany also inspired intellectuals and artists.
"Inside there are two bars with jazz bands, a glass of champagne costs three thousand paper marks. When the spurt is over, you no longer turn your attention to the curve, but to your neighbour, who is also forming one," wrote the legendary reporter Egon Erwin Kisch. This era came to an abrupt end when it was banned by the Nazis in 1934. After the Second World War, the Sixdays were re-established and races were held at a total of 15 locations in Germany - only Bremen and Berlin remain.
Successes
The most successful six-day professional of all time is Patrick Sercu. With 88 victories, the Belgian, who died in 2019, was considered the "Six-Day Emperor" and later served as sporting director at various locations, including Bremen and Rotterdam. The most successful duo in Six Days history are Switzerland's Bruno Risi and Kurt Betschart, who won 37 Six Days together. The most successful German Six Days pro is Klaus Bugdahl, who died in 2023 with 37 victories. The most successful six-day rider still active is Roger Kluge with eight six-day victories.
