alleycat race it is run on a closed course. Checkpoints represent the offices to which messengers would normally deliver, and empty packages are exchanged for signatures while the clock keeps score. Competitors start the race with a manifest, a list of jobs and delivery addresses, and must work their way around the checkpoints as efficiently and quickly as possible. Fake thieves lie in wait, ready to steal the bikes of racers who neglect to lock them up. At some checkpoints you’d be searched and your stash confiscated. At others you’d be made to wait around until your package was ready. At some you had to jump through bicycle tyres or do a shot of vodka before the marshals would sign your manifest.
The CMWCs are usually quite an unsophisticatedaffair. In 2010 the race took place in Panajachel, a tiny town in the Guatemalan highlands, and resembled something from Mad Max . Guatemalans are allowed to carry guns, as long as they’re kept on display, and a few messengers in Panajachel sported pistols alongside the radios and mobile phones which they carry strapped across their chests. Some of the events were nearly cancelled when ‘La Ocho’, the figure-of-eight shaped track that was due to host some of the races, was swept away in floods, along with several homes. It was rebuilt overnight. When the finals of the track races eventually took place they were illuminated by car headlights.
The year I went the competition was being held in Poland. ‘Warsaw has had it pretty rough over the last century,’ I read in the welcome pack for the competition. ‘First the Germans had a dream to turn her into a lake, then the Russians rebuilt her using cheap ass Russian concrete slabs, making her grey and dull.’ Most of the city, I learnt, was destroyed during the Second World War, after which much of the old town was laboriously reconstructed brick-by-brick.
The race was to take place on a peninsula jutting out into the River Vistula from the west bank of the city, near to where, at the end of the war, the Polish Home Army had waited for Soviet support that never came. A grand brutalist sculpture of a minesweeper commemorates the failed uprising. At racer registration I was given a number and a map of the peninsula.The course was roughly the size of a small city block, criss-crossed by tracks and punctuated by twenty-six checkpoints. Streets were named things like ‘Skid Row,’ and ‘Main Stage Alley.’
Modern Warsaw is not particularly bicycle-friendly. Vast, multi-lane roads cleave the city into fragments, while a complicated system of flyovers and bridges take you on mad and terrifying detours. We were warned to beware of the police, who come down hard on drunk cycling. As I cycled back to my hostel on a rented bike I noticed little covens of messengers dotted around the city, cruising the streets in packs or huddling together looking at maps. On a cycle path next to the Royal Lazienki park I got talking to a man from Vienna whose bicycle had been stolen from outside a club the night before, and who was trying to find a replacement. ‘I still need to work when I get back,’he murmured sadly, as he clattered off down the street, walking awkwardly in his stiff-soled cycling shoes.
A pair of cyclists pulled up next to me. They told me that a courier from Dublin had been hit by a car the previous night while crossing the Solec, an enormous multi-lane motorway that runs by the river alongside the race course. He’d been hit hard, his bike had been destroyed and he was in a coma in hospital.
Later that evening, under a concrete flyover, the messenger tribes of the world gathered. I bumped into friends from London who’d driven to Warsaw in one mad dash, relying on amphetamines and coffee to keepawake. Within hours of arriving their driver had been arrested for cycling with a can of beer in his bidon holder, and the others were trying to get him bailed. They were worried that he’d been caught with pockets full of drugs,
The CMWCs are usually quite an unsophisticatedaffair. In 2010 the race took place in Panajachel, a tiny town in the Guatemalan highlands, and resembled something from Mad Max . Guatemalans are allowed to carry guns, as long as they’re kept on display, and a few messengers in Panajachel sported pistols alongside the radios and mobile phones which they carry strapped across their chests. Some of the events were nearly cancelled when ‘La Ocho’, the figure-of-eight shaped track that was due to host some of the races, was swept away in floods, along with several homes. It was rebuilt overnight. When the finals of the track races eventually took place they were illuminated by car headlights.
The year I went the competition was being held in Poland. ‘Warsaw has had it pretty rough over the last century,’ I read in the welcome pack for the competition. ‘First the Germans had a dream to turn her into a lake, then the Russians rebuilt her using cheap ass Russian concrete slabs, making her grey and dull.’ Most of the city, I learnt, was destroyed during the Second World War, after which much of the old town was laboriously reconstructed brick-by-brick.
The race was to take place on a peninsula jutting out into the River Vistula from the west bank of the city, near to where, at the end of the war, the Polish Home Army had waited for Soviet support that never came. A grand brutalist sculpture of a minesweeper commemorates the failed uprising. At racer registration I was given a number and a map of the peninsula.The course was roughly the size of a small city block, criss-crossed by tracks and punctuated by twenty-six checkpoints. Streets were named things like ‘Skid Row,’ and ‘Main Stage Alley.’
Modern Warsaw is not particularly bicycle-friendly. Vast, multi-lane roads cleave the city into fragments, while a complicated system of flyovers and bridges take you on mad and terrifying detours. We were warned to beware of the police, who come down hard on drunk cycling. As I cycled back to my hostel on a rented bike I noticed little covens of messengers dotted around the city, cruising the streets in packs or huddling together looking at maps. On a cycle path next to the Royal Lazienki park I got talking to a man from Vienna whose bicycle had been stolen from outside a club the night before, and who was trying to find a replacement. ‘I still need to work when I get back,’he murmured sadly, as he clattered off down the street, walking awkwardly in his stiff-soled cycling shoes.
A pair of cyclists pulled up next to me. They told me that a courier from Dublin had been hit by a car the previous night while crossing the Solec, an enormous multi-lane motorway that runs by the river alongside the race course. He’d been hit hard, his bike had been destroyed and he was in a coma in hospital.
Later that evening, under a concrete flyover, the messenger tribes of the world gathered. I bumped into friends from London who’d driven to Warsaw in one mad dash, relying on amphetamines and coffee to keepawake. Within hours of arriving their driver had been arrested for cycling with a can of beer in his bidon holder, and the others were trying to get him bailed. They were worried that he’d been caught with pockets full of drugs,
Similar Books
