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Philly's
Other Bike Race
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The North American Cycle Courier Championships are coming to
Philadelphia. Are we ready? Are they?
Philadelphia City Paper, August 24, 2006
by Brian Howard
Their names are Squid, Lunchbox and The Polish Missile. The Brown
Hornet, Super Mike, Corndog and Dirty Dee. Yeti. Half-Jap. Lance
Fharmstrong. Gnatthew. Dumpster Love.
They're not pro wrestlers. They're bike couriers. And next weekend
several hundred of them will be loading up their big shoulder bags and
descending on Philly. To ride bikes. Really fucking fast.
You may think of couriers as tattooed, cut-offs-wearing, hard-living
maniacs - G.G. Allins on two wheels. And you wouldn't be completely
off. Couriers do go by strange nicknames and are maybe a little on the
grimy side. But if you think these daredevils - who spend their waking
hours risking skin, life and limbs dodging traffic and car doors to
rush packages between concrete towers - aren't athletes, well, next
weekend could change your mind. At Memorial Hall, an estimated 350 to
500 couriers from cities across the continent will converge to duke it
out at the North American Cycle Courier Championships (NACCC). They'll
determine who can balance on a nonmoving bike the longest, who can make
the longest skid, who can ride the best backward circles, who's best at
bike polo and who's the fastest sprinter. But mostly they'll determine
who's the best at their job. Over the course of a grueling two-day race
couriers will go neck and tattooed neck, delivering packages, locking
and unlocking their bikes and then delivering more packages in a
no-holds-barred, battle-to-the-death race to determine who's the best
damned bike messenger on the continent.
Well, that's part of it.
While courier races are competitive like any other sport, they're also
a lot different, and not just because the competitors look like they
stumbled out of the mosh pit. For instance, the pro cycling race that
takes place here between Logan Square and Manayunk every June rewards
the spandex-clad cyclist who can pedal to the finish line the fastest,
riding the same number of laps over the same course as everybody else.
A courier race is a bike race wed with a scavenger hunt; the course
isn't a circuit but rather a series of streets and intersections dotted
with pickups and obstacles (see p. 24). Each rider starts with a
manifest (a list of stops) and must shuttle dummy packages while
choosing the quickest routes, avoiding obstacles (such as cardboard
cut-outs of pedestrians), performing job-related tasks (locking and
unlocking one's bike) and generally trying to avoid smashing headfirst
into racers going in the opposite direction. It's about how fast and
how smart you are.
While the race itself is manic, "It's a lot more of a relaxed looking
thing," says the aforementioned Squid, a courier from New York who'll
compete next weekend. "You've got people in cut-off jeans and wearing
messenger bags. They look like these urban warriors, with their big
locks and the bag [where they carry their tools]. In the Tour de France
they are trying to be as streamlined and low-drag as possible. Here, if
you get a flat, you're going to be fixing it yourself."
While unofficial, unsanctioned "alley cat" races happen in cities all
the time, there are three, official, closed-course races in the
messenger world each year: The Cycle Messenger World Championships
(CMWC, which came to Philly in 2000 and takes place this year in
Sydney, Australia); The European Cycle Messenger Championships (ECMC,
this year in Helsinki); and the NACCC. The NACCC is perhaps the
smallest of the big three. Contenders who can only afford one big trip
in a year will sometimes save it for the European or world
championships because, much like soccer, the level of competition in
the States is thought by some to be inferior - every world champion
since the inception of the CMWC in Berlin in 1993 has been European.
Still, there'll be plenty of competition in Philly.
But figuring who's fastest at a courier race isn't as simple as seeing
who crosses the line first.
"It's gonna be a heck of a lot more confusing to keep track of who's
actually winning," says Joel Metz, a Portland, Ore.-based courier who
heads up the NACCC's governing body, the International Federation of
Bicycle Messenger Associations (IFBMA). With racers zipping around in
overlapping routes, heading to multiple checkpoints, it's a mixture of
speed and mayhem. "Obviously it's fun to watch for crashes, and there
will be those, and most people will be absolutely fine."
In addition to running packages and avoiding obstacles, racers must
collect signatures and outwit "bike thieves" who randomly move the
bikes of racers who don't properly secure their rides.
So what's to watch if you can't tell who's in the lead? Metz says it's
easy. When someone's missed a stop, or taken a bad route, it shows in
their faces. "You can tell people who are racing calmer," says Metz.
"You can tell when people are racing with a level head. They don't come
up to decision points and go, 'Which way am I going?' They know because
they've thought about this 100, 200 yards down the road."
In the end, the best racers will be the calmest, the smartest and
best-prepared. "The race course is predetermined, so you'll have lots
of people pre-riding the course [on Friday]," says Seattle's Matt Case,
a Raleigh Bikes customer service rep and former courier who'll be
riding next weekend. "The key is, how do you route yourself so you can
go quickly and efficiently?"
For the best-prepared, however, it's all worthwhile because the winner
gets to take home ... bragging rights. Sure, there are medals, trophies
and prizes - bikes, bags, other sponsor swag. This year's main race
winners in the men's and women's competitions will get a Raleigh Rush
Hour track bike and a custom bag from Philadelphia's REload. But for
the most part, all the mayhem is for the right to say you won. That's
because although the competition is the main justification for events
like this, organized courier races are also big social events.
"I often tell people that it's one part racing event, one part party,
one part trade convention, one part extended family reunion," says Metz.
Couriering is more than a job. It's a subculture. And it's one that's
attractive for its freedoms - not only the ability to ride one's bike
all day, but also to pick up and go somewhere else on a whim. Metz
explains that while bicycle couriers have probably existed since the
bicycle became affordable in the late 1880s, the subculture as it's
known today came into being in the 1970s and '80s. In the 1990s, says
Metz, people started to discover that the courier scenes in different
cities were sort of similar. "They'd say, hey, the couriers here are
just like the couriers where I was," says Metz. It became something of
an itinerant trade. If you can courier in one city, you can do it in
another.
So the people who'll get together for next weekend's race will be
people who've hung at prior NACCCs. They'll also be people who've
crashed on each other's floors, using their bags as pillows during
visits, working holidays or permanent relocations. And for people like
this, many of whom live off the grid, often without health insurance
and sometimes without land lines or permanent addresses, a big
centralized get-together is a big deal. There are parties. And art
shows (see p. 22). And beer. Past competitions have stipulated that
racers must be sober.
"It's kind of like half competition," figures Squid, "and half
dysfunctional family gathering. There are probably going to be lots of
spontaneous group rides. Groups of 20, 30, 50 riders. The whole weekend
people will be seeing couriers."
So while Squid and Super Mike and Dirty Dee and the like will all be
going at each other next weekend, they'll all pretty much be here to
hang out with each other.
NACCC by the Numbers
5 Number of bike- and graffiti-themed concurrent art exhibits
6 Years ago that the Cycle Messenger World Championships were held at
Memorial Hall in Philadelphia
8 Previous North American Cycle Courier Championships
150 Cases of beer provided by sponsor Pabst Blue Ribbon
800 Empty boxes that will be taped together to be "delivered" by
participants, along with a couple hundred tubes and a couple thousand
envelopes.
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