Track Racing, Three Hours North

Track racing is bike racing with everything extra taken off. You get one fixed gear and no brakes on a banked oval, and as long as the wheels are turning, so are your legs. A few of our teammates are hooked on it, and they drive about three hours each way to do it.

What track racing is

Track racing happens on a velodrome, an oval with banked corners. The bikes run a single fixed gear with no brakes, so you control your speed with your legs and your line. Races are short and fast. Some are solo efforts against the clock, some are mass starts where the whole field goes for the line, and some are scored on points as the race goes on. Positions change in a second, and the bike handling you build there shows up in every other kind of racing.

The closest track is in Redmond

The nearest velodrome to the Lab is the Jerry Baker Memorial Velodrome at Marymoor Park in Redmond, Washington. It opened for racing in 1975, and it's the only velodrome in the state. The track is a 400 meter concrete oval with corners that slope 23 degrees, which is gentle for a velodrome. That's why riders call it the Gentle Giant.

The Marymoor Velodrome Association, a volunteer nonprofit made up of local racers, keeps it running. Racing goes May through September on weeknights, with Friday night as the big show, and they teach classes for adults and kids who have never been on a track.

A handful of our teammates make the drive up in the summer. It's a long day in the car for a few minutes of racing, and they keep going back anyway.

Portland had a track of its own

Alpenrose Velodrome was built in 1967 on the Alpenrose Dairy property in Portland. At 268 meters with corners banked at 43 degrees, it was the steepest velodrome in the United States. It hosted the national championships more than once and decades of summer racing, and our team was a lot more active on the track while it was open.

On February 23, 2021, the property closed to all community events for good. Portland lost its track that day, and so did we.

When a track comes back to Portland, we'll be on the start line.

What we'd love to see

We want a velodrome back in the Portland area. Track racing builds the bike handling, pack skills, and raw speed that pay off in every discipline we race, and it's one of the best ways we know to bring juniors into the sport. Until there's a track closer to home, we'll keep making the drive north.