Cyclist Colton Barrett warmed up on the wooden track of the National Sports Center's Velodrome. His long, steady pedal strokes belied the speed he found on the straightaways as his tires held to a low blue line. Pumping faster, he curved to the highest reaches of the angled track, his body silhouetted against the clouds.
A worker was adjusting a new sign outside the top rails outside the track when Barrett's bicycle swept within inches of his face.
Startled, he let out a yell in the slipstream. Meanwhile, Barrett was gone.
For those with a need for speed, this weekend's Fixed Gear Classic bicycle race may be just the thing. The races on the NSC's angled track are the start of the Nature Valley Bicycle Festival, a 10-day celebration of cycles and speed, which continues next week with the Nature Valley Grand Prix criterium (urban street) races in St. Paul, Cannon Falls, Minneapolis, Menomonie, Wis., and Stillwater.
Now in its third year, the Fixed Gear Classic has an impressive local field, including Barrett, last year's endurance champion, and Terra James of Minneapolis, the NSC's Track Rider of the Year. The competition also has attracted a range of high-caliber visiting challengers, said Bob Williams, cycling coordinator for the National Sports Center.
"It's stronger and deeper," he said. "There's more riders of a higher level. They may not all be World Cup level, but they're at a higher standard and there are more of them at the national level."
The National Sports Center has intensified marketing of its signature race, and that's helped, Williams said.
"The word's getting around," he said. "Our reputation for the event has gotten around. Last year's and previous years' riders have told everyone it's a great event."
Topping the bill is Franco Marvulli, a four-time world champion from Switzerland; he's a five-time Swiss national champion and was a 2004 Olympic silver medalist.
At the top on the women's side is sprinter Shelley Olds, of Groton, Mass., the 2010 Pan-American Road Race Champion and current National Criterium Champion.
Top-rung racers, such as Marvulli, Olds and Barrett, can reach speeds as high as 44 miles per hour on the track, Williams said.
From blades to pedals
Barrett, of North St. Paul, started out as a speed skater when he was 5 because his mother wouldn't let him play hockey. At 13 he began bicycle racing as cross-training for skating. He began racing a year later.
He said he likes the competition and the strategy in bicycle racing.
"It wasn't a time trial," he said. "You could play the game and make attacks. ... I just love playing the game."
Now 20, he has hung up his skates for a couple of years after making the USA Junior Olympics team in 2008, and he just finished his first year at Marian University in Indianapolis. He's signed on with the Minneapolis-based Kelly Benefit Strategies-OptumHealth cycling team and is its youngest and only Minnesota member. Last year, cycling for a different team, Barrett won the endurance omnium at the Velodrome, tallying the most points in a series of races of 30 to 100 laps.
He said he's not worried about Marvulli or any of the other top-tier cyclists jetting in for the races.
"I don't ever worry myself about who shows up at the race," he said. "I deal with it as it comes."
Maria Elena Baca • 612-673-4409
