An especially good time at the Festival di Ticino
By Emiliano Jordan
I moved here for the community, not for the racing. Don’t get me wrong, the racing is hard and competitive; the courses are challenging and beautiful and the calendar is full. But if I only wanted racing, I would have moved to Southern California or stayed in Tucson. It’s the community that surrounds bike racing — the cycling community at large — that drew me to Portland. It’s the number of cyclists, the amount of bike paths and the recognition of cycling as a legitimate form of transportation and even materials transportation.
At the center of this is the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA), the beneficiary of a fund-raising raffle that took place Friday night at Bike n Hike with generous donations from companies like Chris King, Rapha, Showers Pass, Endura, Doctor Will Bar, Ortlieb and, of course, a double grand-prize donation of two $1,100 Ticino city bikes from Electra. The raffle brought together an eclectic crowed that mixed bike racers, promoters and coaches with recreational or soon-to-be recreation riders, and even a Frank Zappa look-alike in old school pink BMX pants.
The specific goal of this fundraiser was to help the BTA with the “Build It” project, a project aiming to add 600-700 miles of bike paths to Portland with the end goal of seeing 25 percent of Portlanders using a bicycle as a habitual form of travel. I was happy to see Brad Ross of the Cross Crusades and the Portland Twilight Criterium, Chris Swan of Upper Echelon Coaching and a slew of other promoters, coaches and racers supporting the BTA. (more…)

