Lucas Brunelle

By Kurt Boone

Lucas Brunelle is best known amongst urban cyclists for his incredible, and incredibly risky, helmet cam footage of alleycat racing from around the world. Earlier this year he released “Line of Sight,” a full-length documentary collecting his best footage from the past decade of filming. He grew up in Martha’s Vineyard, an island seven miles off the coast in the Atlantic Ocean, best known for its presidential getaways. Lucas’s first bicycle was a Diamond Back BMX that he loved to ride around the island with his friends, exploring by bicycle, learning the ins and outs of riding through trial and error. Lucas was an outcast in his youth but found fast friends riding his bicycle.

Lucas Brunelle attended Martha’s Vineyard High School and was a rebellious student—riding his bicycle down the hallways at full speed, stealing a couple of cars and getting himself arrested in front of the high school building on purpose. Such rebellious acts landed him in reform school at 15 years old. In high school he also began his entrepreneurial career by starting a lawn mowing business and then getting involved with a criminal insurance scam that would send him to jail and put 18 felonies on his record. Lucas developed a fondness for technology early in life, working with Basic, Fortran and other computer technology of the day. Like his filmmaking skills, most of his computer knowledge is self-taught.

Eventually Lucas would get himself on track and attend The University of Massachusetts at Amherst and graduate with a degree in finance with honors in 1996, starting a courier company from the ground up upon graduation. In 1993 while in college he got his first taste of working as a bicycle messenger during a summer semester at Northeastern University, along with his first experience in bicycle messenger street racing. Alley racing was the precursor to today’s alleycats, with bicycle messengers sprinting down deserted alleys for bragging rights. There were no checkpoints