The SBT crew recently posted an article on velodromes and
specifically the Forest City Velodrome in London, Ontario. We briefly mentioned some US velodromes and
promised to provide additional details.
Well, we are delivering the goods.
But first, some background…
We begin in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania in the heart of the
Lehigh Valley. “T-town” was near the
home of Bob Rodale, an Olympic skeet shooter in the 1960s and avid
cyclist. Rodale returned from his
Olympic experience determined to build a velodrome. Rodale had the funding and being part of the
publishing family responsible today for such magazines as Prevention, Men’s Health, Runner’s World
and others, he held considerable local influence. The velodrome was built in a cornfield Rodale
owned and the facility hosted its first event in 1975. The venue grew in status attracting riders from
all over the world to its racing schedule.
The track also produced local hero Marty Nothstein from nearby
Emmaus. Nothstein enjoyed a long a
career and was an Olympic and Pan American champion. Bob Rodale died in 1990 following an automobile
accident in Russia at the age of 60. The velodrome and the facility, known as the
Valley Preferred Cycling Center is open year round.
In August of this year the Chicago Velo Campus (pictured) opened a
temporary outdoor facility made of marine grade plywood. It is an Olympic-sized track (166 meters) and
riders must go through a certification process.
The facility has created a youth program and opened a bike shop and
training center. The facility has a
price tag of $45 million with an optimistic opening date of 2014. Located on the former US Steel South Works
mill, the facility will have seating approaching 20,000 when complete. Volunteers are hard at work now constructing
a structure of airplane hangar proportions to enclose the temporary track.
In 2016 New York City will cut the ribbon opening the
Brooklyn Bridge Park Velodrome thus returning velodrome racing to the five
boroughs. The last velodrome racing
events took place inside Madison Square Garden in the 1920s. Cycling then faded with the Great Depression
and World War II. Cycling has since come
back to New York; it began with Robert Moses (the man many blame for the loss
of Brooklyn’s Dodgers) who, as the head of New York City’s planning department
developed and pushed for bicycle lanes throughout the region. This led to the construction of a variety of
greenways and bikeways with the most popular possibly being the Hudson River
Greenway (the most heavily trafficked bike path in the United States). We’ll delve into that in a future post.
Financed by one person, the reclusive Joshua Rechnitz,
competitive biker, member of a philanthropic family and native New Yorker, the
velodrome is a $40 million makeover of the former Pier 5 warehouse near Furman
Street. The gift was until recently the
highest monetary commitment from a single donor in New York City history (surpassed
by the $100 million gift to Central Park by John Paulsen).
But wait... The website www.brooklynbridgepark.org offers
no velodrome information. The
work at the site has been met with skepticism and neighborhood protests so not
one shovel has yet to be turned on the project in spite of the funding. We’ll keep you posted…
Visit our website www.stickybottleteam.net for a trip around the Chicago Velo Campus.
No comments:
Post a Comment