For the past decade or so the Onondaga Cycling Club, of Syracuse, NY, has sponsored a weekend of bike races. In 2006 it was held Memorial Day Weekend and it featured three events: a road race (held south of Syracuse), street sprints (held in downtown Syracuse) and a "crit" (criterium) held on a closed, 9/10 mile loop, in Upper Onondaga Park. Racers are grouped by ability levels (categories), gender, and age. The road race had distances from 33 to 87 miles, while the crit had between 20 and 27 laps. The street sprint was a straight shot about a block and a half in length. For more than a decade Chuck Dominick has been the race director. About 250 people raced.

While Greg Lemond and Lance Armstrong brought bike racing into the public eye, only a small fraction of  cyclists actually race. Unlike running, there is a pretty large distinction between races and other events. Only 70,000 or so hold a racing license from USA Cycling. Hopefully these pictures will convey some of the excitement of the sport at the local level.

Pictures of people I knew who raced at this event can also be found here at tabblo, while PhotoRadius has many pictures for sale. Note that if you click on a picture you'll get a larger version of it, and if you click again, you can get the full sized version. Note that above you can see these in a slide show.

These pictures are copyright under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License