MPLS Velodrome

Words and photos by Aaron Thomas Smith

It’s basically a wall made out of a mixture of afzelia and oak wooden strips which have definitely seen better days. That’s what we ride and race on, every Thursday from around seven to ten at night. Saturdays a crew spends time repairing the surface, removing the soft boards and replacing them with ones that will support the seventy racers that will make innumerable laps across it in the coming week. Patching the holes and painting the lines—preserving this gift that a few fought so hard to acquire all the way back in the late 1980s.