New Races and New Venues
The New York City road racing calendar is anchored around early mornings in Prospect Park and Central Park. Outside of these mainstays, New York City races have typically been either single day affairs like the Harlem Criterium and the Orchard Beach Criterium, or weeknight series like Floyd Bennett Field (whose future seems increasingly uncertain).
But in the past few years this dynamic shifted slightly. Alex K of the Verrazano Cycles team has been doing the heavy lifting required to bring new races and new venues to the New York City cycling community. Hosting any bike race is no easy feat: we have written at length about the challenges as part of our Race Director Diaries series. But introducing new venues amplifies all of these hurdles — getting permission to carve out new space in crowded New York City parks for a few hours is often a very large ask for the NYC Parks Department and other stakeholders.
And yet Alex has managed to do it twice, first for the Randall’s Island Series and more recently for a tentative handful of races in Flushing Meadows Corona Park known as the World’s Fair Races. Flushing Meadows Corona Park has hosted bike racing in the past, but it has been two full decades since the now defunct NYC Spring Series last visited this park, making this effectively a new venue for the NYC cycling community.
New venues are a rare thing within the five boroughs of NYC and we didn’t want to miss it. So this past weekend we joined the inaugural edition of the World’s Fair races. The backdrop is a stretch of the park bounded on three sides by interstate highways. As with most New York City race venues, the course has its imperfections. Whereas Prospect Park and Central Park racing will have an occasional stray vehicle or pedestrian on the course and Orchard Beach has a few wheel destroying potholes, for the World’s Fair Race the challenge is drainage related — even on a sunny late Spring morning the inaugural race featured a few waterlogged stretches. As a result, racers finished looking something like this:
Drainage issues aside, it was exciting experiencing a new race, at a new venue that feels quite distinct from early morning racing in Manhattan and Brooklyn. Turnout for the first race was very strong with most of the fields selling out, but it is probably too early to know whether these races will become a more permanent fixture in the New York City racing scene.
Simply maintaining permits from NYC Parks introduces a great deal of uncertainty for any bike race, much less a race at a brand new venue. But hopefully the drainage issue resolves itself as we move into warmer summer months, and hopefully the cycling community can enjoy this new race for years to come. More race days and more venues are rarely a bad thing…
Programming note: we will have a full World’s Fair race report in an upcoming Journal entry, along with a complete photoset from the talented Daghan Perker.
The Full Gallery
After the race we headed up to visit our friends at ACME Bicycles Katonah - there are a few shots from their beautiful and brand new shop at the end of this photo gallery.
A New York City based cyclist and sometimes photographer. Part adventure rider, part crit racer, and fully obsessed with an English bulldog named Winifred.
Instagram: @photorhetoric
E-mail: matthew@tobedetermined.cc
