The Villager, December
12, 2007
By Judith Stiles
For a child, hopping on a bike can sometimes feel like saddling up an
imaginary horse for an adventurous ride in the glorious Wild West. For
an alley cat racer, hopping on a bike in New York City can be a
perilous undertaking, especially in bad weather, when slipping and
sliding can be greeted by the sudden opening of a car door that will
send the best of cowboys flying into traffic. Daring to be a bike
messenger and an alley cat racer makes life in the old Wild West seem
tame.
Lower East Sider Kym Perfetto of the Six Racing messenger team showed
no fear when it came to navigating through cut-throat traffic at top
speed in order to win the well-known Broadway Bombin’ Alley Cat race
this year.
“I felt this girl coming up from behind, so I grabbed onto the wheel
well of a nearby cab, but the metal was sharp and sliced open my
fingers. But I didn’t let go, and I won that race!” said Perfetto, who
will always have deeply lined scars zigzagging across her fingers to
remember this win.
Perfetto and the Six Racing team are part of a growing international
phenomenon of mostly bike messengers who have parlayed their riding
skills into free-spirited, ruthless, wild competitions, such as the
Cranksgiving Charity Race in New York City, The Stupor Bowl in
Minneapolis, Show Me The Money in Sydney, Australia, Saint Valentine’s
Day Massacre in Sacramento, Cal., Man Overboard in Washington, D.C.,
and many more.
In a typical alley cat race, bikers start from a common point, then
take and weave through traffic on lightweight bikes, usually without
hand brakes. At every race they receive a manifest that is like a
treasure-hunt map that indicates the designated route. The riders stop
at checkpoints to get the manifest stamped, before they ride on. Often
at checkpoints they are required to perform a task, such as doing 20
push-ups, picking up a package, pumping a flat tire or drinking a beer.
“At one of the races, we had to put on a mask and run in and out of a
paintball court with 15 guys shooting hard pellets of paint at us,”
recounted Pablo Airaldi, smiling and lamenting all the bruises he got
from that race.
Even though Perfetto and Airaldi enjoy the camaraderie of a racing
team, another team member, Dan Chabanov, was quick to point out that it
is really “every man for himself” when they race.
Yet Perfetto said: “Even though you try to beat everyone, it is good to
have allies out there. Like when Kym called me on her cell phone to
warn me about the traffic circle at the La Guardia checkpoint. We work
together in many ways and try to get in the top ten of a race.”
Perfetto noted that there are no referees and little officiating of any
kind, except the organizers have the power to disqualify racers for
infractions such as cutting in line at a checkpoint.
Chabanov added, “You can get disqualified for doing something stupid or
super-rude, like throwing a beer can at a checkpoint.” And although
alley-cat racers are renegades by nature, even they require a certain
amount civility during a race.
Every member of Six Racing team agrees that biking is a unique culture
and a way of life. “Obsessed” and “extremists” are happily how they
describe themselves, especially when they try and explain why they
would choose to compete in The Stupor Bowl in Minneapolis, when the
temperature is often below zero with a wind-chill factor of minus 30
degrees.
In 2007, Airaldi took fourth place competing against more than 270
people, in the 10th Annual Stupor Bowl, finishing the course of more
than 40 miles in two hours and 20 minutes. He vows to return next
February with his full-face mask and layers of long underwear. Coating
his entire face with petroleum jelly won’t keep his eyelashes and
spittle from freezing, yet still he is eager to race in the Stupor Bowl
again. Crazy? Foolish? No, this daredevil at heart has a passion for
alley cat racing.
“It is a bug that engulfs your whole life,” said Airaldi.
Unlike the discipline and rigor found in other team sports, Six Racing
team member Chris Thormann pointed out that alley cat racers do their
workouts during work, when they clock hundreds of miles a week as bike
messengers, even in the winter.
“I don’t have a particular training program and I don’t pay too much
attention to what I eat before a race. I usually have two slices of
plain pizza with vitamin water and that’s it,” said Thormann, who took
first place in the Out-of-Town Quake City Rumble in San Francisco.
After hundreds of miles of biking as messengers from Monday to Friday,
then another raucous 50 miles of alley cat racing on Saturdays, not
even Sunday is a traditional day of rest for these relentless racers.
These cyclists can often be found on Sundays in “The Pit” at the corner
of Chrystie and Broome Sts., playing a pickup game of bike polo. With
three to six players on randomly chosen teams, they play polo with
mallets and a street-hockey ball, gracefully maneuvering their bikes on
the asphalt, passing and taking shots like the best of polo players.
But with these guys, you will never hear them shout like Richard III,
in Shakespeare’s play, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” On
the contrary, saddling up on a bike is their preference — rather, their
life’s passion — for work, racing and polo, in the kingdom of New York.
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