We have an elaborate system to help manage it all, including several aid stations along the way for people to pick up extra supplies and buses with blankets to warm people in. That certainly becomes a bit of a risk when you’re going down mountain passes, where your speed can reach over sixty miles an hour. The racers’ fingers frequently get cold going downhill, so they have a hard time pulling their brake levers without full-fingered gloves-but they usually don’t realize it until it’s happening. Even though the sun is out, when you’re going downhill, the wind blowing off the snow at that elevation is much colder. For instance, last year, the sides of the road were covered in snow- it looked like February. In fact, we’ve even gotten snowstorms during the event. In our part of the country, when you have 10,000-foot mountain passes you’re going over, winter doesn’t necessarily stop in May. The weather is always our biggest obstacle. How do the elements and the elevation impact the cyclists? So Durango has a long history of fostering mountain bike racing in our country and the world. Our Iron Horse organization has also run thirteen national mountain bike championships here and hosted the first ever mountain bike world championships in 1990. The mountain bike race is unique because we bring the bikers into town and they ride through a brewery as part of the course. On Sunday, we do another round of events, which range from a kids race to a gravel race to a mountain bike race. They take place around the same time and on the same route, but we start the competitive race on the north end of town, and the race against the train on the south end of town. These Saturday events have been our mainstays for decades. There’s also a forty-seven-mile race to Silverton, where people compete against each other for a placing and time.
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The event begins in Durango when the train pulls up and blows its whistle, and thousands of people race the train to Silverton. The Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, in its true sense, is the fifty-mile tour, which pits the train-a genuine steam engine from the 1800s-against the people riding their bikes on the closed highway. Tell us a little bit about the various races: We understand that it’s a community effort, and I spend a lot of my time making sure the community at large is proud of the event. So the fact that this one has thrived all these years is not something we take lightly.
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I’ve been racing for over thirty years, and many of the cycling events that I went to ten or twenty years ago are gone. And we help the community at large-we helped fund a new breast care center here in town, among other care facilities. It’s made a very strong economic impact on our town, bringing in millions in revenue. We also have several EMS departments that support the event. It takes five law enforcement agencies because riders travel through a patchwork of counties and a portion of US highway Route 550 is closed for the event. We rely on about 250 volunteers to put the event on. We also have a lot of folks that come back year after year some have participated in the event thirty or forty times. So we’re certainly a bucket list item for cyclists everywhere. We’ve also had Australians, lots of Europeans, and some riders from Japan. But the bulk of our ridership, probably 70 percent, comes from Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. So it has certainly grown-in fact, it’s the second-oldest continuously run cycling event in the country.We have, on average, about forty-four states represented, and a couple years ago we had riders representing all fifty states. And, as Ed would tell you, in the early 1970s, he invited anyone who had a bicycle and begged them to come out to the starting line. In 2019, we had 3,400 riders for all of our races.
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How many people participate? Where do they come from? By chance, the bike shop I had worked at was owned by the founder of the event, Ed Zink, and they were looking for someone to take over in 2007, so I became the director. After graduation, I moved back to Albuquerque, but I eventually decided that I wanted to raise my family here. During college, I came up here to ride the event and was pretty enamored of it and the town, so I came back and worked in the bike shop and immersed myself in the Durango cycling scene. I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, which is a few hundred miles south of Durango. How did you get involved with the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic? Iron Horse director Gaige Sippy, a participant himself, discusses this Memorial Day weekend tradition. Since then, the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic has grown in popularity and prominence.
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Others wanted to do the same, and a small event was organized the next year. Tom Mayer bet his brother Jim, a brakeman, that he could outrace the locomotive from Durango, Colorado, to Silverton, Colorado, on his bike-which he did. One of America’s most treasured bike races was born out of a wager in 1971.