Twilight Criterium is NASCAR of bike races
Many cities across the country host a criterium.
But only one — Athens’ own Twilight Criterium — brings together a rabid crowd of spectators for a bicycle race with a survival-of-the-fittest reputation.
“Let’s be honest, crashes are what people want to see,” Athens resident and five-time Twilight Criterium veteran Jordan Heimer said. “Most of the kids out there have no idea what’s going on in the bike race. It’s very hard to see from the sideline the actual ins and outs and the motion of the peloton. There is a lot of movement and a lot of stuff going on there. But most of the kids who are out there, they want to see people crash and see people pile up. It’s very similar to NASCAR.”
The Twilight Criterium will make its 34th run through downtown Athens on Saturday. The women’s race will start at 7:45 p.m. with the men’s race beginning at 8:45 p.m.
“What I love about the Twilight is the atmosphere and the energy coming from the crowd,” Athens resident and three-time women’s veteran Morgan Patton said. Patton has Type 1 diabetes and races professionally for Team Novo Nordisk. “That energy coming off of the crowd is what makes it so much fun,” she said. “There’s definitely not another race in the country that’s like the Athens Twilight race. There’s so much enthusiasm and everybody’s really excited to see you there. There’s so many people and the course is so short that there’s no lull in the noise and everybody screaming for you. When you’re racing, you hear it from the first lap all the way to the end and that’s huge for us.”
The Athens Twilight Criterium has a compact course through downtown Athens, which gives spectators multiple looks at the racers as they click off laps. The tight course and multitude of 90-degree turns mean that crashes are frequent, and likely to collect a number of riders.
“The energy of the crowd is something else,” Athens resident and Team Smartstop Presented by Mountain Khakis racer Thomas Brown said. “The crowd in Athens, it’s a college crowd so it’s probably younger than other places we race. They get really enthusiastic. They really get into it, which makes it more fun for us. We feed off of the crowd a little bit, but there’s an emotional attachment to it. I grew up in the area and I live in Athens now. Every time I go downtown for dinner, I see the same corners that are on the course, so it’s always at least in the back of my mind. They look way different on the bike. During Twilight you’re going against the normal flow of traffic and the sidewalks are packed with thousands of people screaming at the same time. That’s definitely not the norm.”
The downtown course and the thousands of people lining the street give the riders a bit of tunnel vision. Riders race in bunches and only have fractions of a second to shake themselves into an order that will fit all the way through the corners.
“Twilight was kind of the pioneer of night criteriums,” Athens-based Team United Healthcare of Georgia/The 706 Project rider Brendan Cornett said. “The Twilight has been around so long that it’s built a reputation. The community comes out to support it and that’s the impressive part. It’s pretty intense. Usually bike races are ignored in a lot of places but this one is out there because of the way the crowd gets into it.”
The Downtown Athens course is on city streets and has all the hazards that come with that — manhole covers, broken pavement and slicks left by dripping oil pans or radiators which are hard to see after the sun goes down.
“This will be the biggest crowd that we will race in front of all year long,” Heimer said. “The crowd just pumps the level. They’ll shout and scream and carry on and that makes people race that much harder. The energy coming off of the crowd is hard to explain. There’s a feeling that you get that you don’t get anywhere else. It’s very comparable to being a football player in Sanford Stadium. You go to some of these other races, and at some of the bigger ones you’ll have a couple of thousand people there. But there’s nowhere else where you have 30,000 people on the sidelines standing six deep just to watch you race your bike. It really gets you amped up.”
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