Portland Twilight Criterium

[This post is about the 2007 race. For the 2008 criterium, you want to go here.]

A few photos and a video clip from last Friday's Portland Twilight Criterium, a pro cycling event held this year in the North Park Blocks. We'd never been to a criterium race before, and it was really fun to watch. 80 or so guys on bikes careening around a half-mile course at 30mph for 40 or 60 minutes, trying not to crash into anything -- and not always succeeding There's a pace motorcycle leading the pack, and when it catches up to stragglers, poof, they're out of the race. They've failed to meet the minimum criterium to stay in, hence the name of the event, I suppose.

Results of the evening's two races here. As you can see, in both races only about half the starting field made it to the finish. The others abandoned, were eliminated, or crashed. Now that's what I call racing.

As a bonus, over the weekend Versus carried some highlights of the shiny new Tour of Ireland. It doesn't exactly make up for Le Tour's ugly meltdown this year, but I never complain when there's cycling on TV.



Another bit of excitement was watching idiot spectators scurry back and forth across the course whenever they thought (often mistakenly) that there weren't any bikes coming. Sometimes they even jogged across after the motorbike, just in front of the race leaders. I don't know what was so important on the other side of the street that couldn't wait until the race was over, but it must've been awfully serious the way they put themselves on the line like that. And the ones pushing strollers... I don't know where to begin about them. And since this is Portland, nobody will really run across the street top speed. It's always this self-conscious slacker-ironic bouncy half-jog, like they'd rather be hit by a pack of 30mph bicycles than have a few perfect strangers think they were trying too hard at something. I guess that's one way to achieve glorious hipster martyrdom, if you're into that sort of thing.

In fairness, it's true you see people doing the same thing during the Tour de France too, often right on the edge of a thousand foot cliff, and the people doing it are wearing chicken costumes, and they're roaring drunk. And despite all that, they're still better at it than people are here.



One fun sociological bit was observing the gap between bike racing culture and our local bike scene where you're supposed to do it for ideological reasons. I don't think the motorcycles or any of the team vans ran on biodiesel, organic or otherwise. If anyone who scored a podium finish was a proper Portland raw-food vegan fundamentalist, it would surprise me greatly. I also don't expect your typical racer spends a lot of time torching Starbucks stores (although I'm sure they could get away quickly if they did), and if you spend all your waking hours training for the next race, I doubt you have any spare time to play in a few shoegazing indierock bands nobody's ever heard of. I suppose that, for all I know, the occasional rider might go home to one of those super-sustainable "cob" (i.e. mud and straw) hovels we're all supposed to want to live in, the way our medieval ancestors did. But I'd be willing to bet it's the exception to the rule. There were a few activist types at the race, some with booths, some just wandering around, and they looked a bit mystified, as if it had never occurred to them that one can go really fast on a bike, and some people get extremely competitive, even -- gasp -- macho about it. Deep down they probably found it a little troubling, although they wouldn't admit to it in a million years, of course. So that was kind of entertaining to see.



In a couple of recent posts I was complaining that my dinky little camera isn't ideally suited to wildlife photos. Seems it's also not that great at sports photos either. It's not because of the zoom, this time, or the shutter speed, or even noise at low light / high ISO levels. It's just that it takes too freakin' long after you take a shot before it's ready to take another. By the time it feels up to taking another photo, the entire peloton's whizzed past by then. At least they're on a closed course, so you can wait another minute and catch them on the next lap. So I'm carping, but really, I don't do a lot of sports photos. Almost never, in fact. Besides, I noticed a good number of people walking around with chunky pro dSLRs, and they all looked like dorks. I don't mean that as an insult, exactly; I'm a tech geek, and I've spent way more than my fair share of time over the years walking around looking like a total dork. And I'm not going to sit here and tell you I wouldn't go around looking like a dork in the future, if I had a good reason to. I'm just saying there are certain image quality vs. dorkage tradeoffs to consider. It's a complicated issue, I guess is the point I'm trying to make here.