Blood, sweat and gears

Four reasons why the Fitchburg-Longsjo is a classic

by David Barber

The beast is called the peloton. It's got more heads than you can count and a mind of its own. Part serpent, part insect swarm, it hits the roads in a riot of dazzling iridescence, chewing up macadam at speeds of more than 60 mph. In full cry, it sounds like nothing else you've ever heard, a metallic rattle and hum that cuts through the summer air with all the fury of a Biblical horde of locusts. But it is also a thing of beauty, and a riveting sight to behold.

The beast is called the peloton, and it's the stuff of legend. Don't call it a platoon or a bunch or a pack, though that is what it means, roughly translated. There is no adequate synonym for the awesome creature that comes to life when scores of tightly bunched cyclists power their way over preposterous distances in their alien bubble helmets and skintight suits, whooshing along at a demonic clip that would pulverize an ordinary mortal in no time flat.

The most fabled peloton of them all winds through hundreds of miles of French countryside each July in the punishing three-week marathon on wheels known as the Tour de France, one of the great tests of athletic fitness and sanctioned madness ever devised by sporting humankind. But the beast has other haunts as well, and you don't have to hop a plane to the Continent to hunt one down. Just find your way to greater Fitchburg this weekend, where for two generations now the peloton has been making its annual appearance in what is perhaps the best-kept secret on the Commonwealth's crowded sports calendar, the Fitchburg-Longsjo Classic.

Now gearing up for its thirty-ninth edition, the Longsjo is the second-oldest continuously run bike race in the country and has cemented its reputation in racing circles as one of the premier events on the domestic pro circuit. Originally conceived as a one-day slate of races commemorating a local hero cut down in his prime, the Longsjo has grown into a four-day convocation of flashing spokes and screaming quadriceps, a spectacle not to be missed by anyone with a taste for cutthroat competition in a carnival atmosphere. While nothing can rival the Tour de France for agony and ecstasy, this high-summer summit meeting of cycle fiends in our own back yard more than holds its own as epic theater.

If all this is news to you, you're not alone. It wasn't so long ago that pro cycling was a nearly invisible American sports subculture -- falling somewhere on the way-out jock fringe between arm-wrestling and cattle-roping. A hotshot cyclist had about as much of a chance at making a Wheaties box as a croquet champ. Then along came Greg Lemond, the Nevada-bred whiz kid who opened eyes in 1986 by accomplishing the unthinkable, breaking out of the Tour de France's peloton to become the first American champion since the race debuted in 1903. Lemond wound up winning three Tours in all, achieving a superstar status usually reserved for European peloton royalty and singlehandedly legitimizing a sport back here at home that few of his fellow Yanks had ever given the time of day.

But credibility isn't quite the same thing as popularity, and for some reason the greater public has been slow to catch on to bigtime cycling's unique mystique. Yes, the Tour de France now gets decent network TV coverage, and, yes, there are more slick biking mags on the racks than in the dark ages BG (Before Greg). Yet a certain aura of cultishness still seems to hover over our native sons and daughters of the peloton, despite the fact that no less of a stalwart American institution than the US Postal Service now sponsors a top-flight team of homegrown racers.

Is our peculiar national infatuation with the internal-combustion engine to blame? Does it have something to do with the collective trauma of too many break-of-dawn paper routes? The real answer, I suspect, may be less pathological than that: it could well be that competitive cycling is simply a phenomenon to which many folks have yet to be properly introduced. And to be perfectly fair, getting a hang of what's going on does take some doing. Exposed for the first time to the sport's potent combination of heroic aerobics and advanced aerodynamics, the newcomer can hardly be blamed for coming away with the impression that it's all a bewildering blur.

For those who have yet to see the light, a pilgrimage to the Longsjo offers the perfect setting for a conversion experience. Although it's a race sanctioned by the United States Cycling Federation and regularly draws teams of elite riders from far and wide, the Classic has remained true to its roots as a local event run by a hometown corps of dedicated volunteers. True believers abound, and the spirit is infectious. "All our venues are within five miles of the race headquarters," notes coordinator Dr. Ray Wolejko, "There's always been an intimate, neighborhood feel to our race, and we've been able to preserve that even as the numbers of riders have increased over the years." A veteran rider, André Goguen, who grew up in Lunenburg, agrees, noting that the town bustles on the Longsjo weekend like no other time of the year. "The only other comparable stage race in New England is up at Killington Mountain, in Vermont," he says. "And it's not nearly as spectator-friendly."

Here, then, for the uninitiated, are a few good reasons why the Longsjo is truly a Classic.

Race format:

setting the stage

In this athletic drama, everything depends on stagecraft.

The Longsjo, like the Tour de France on a miniature scale, is a stage race. What this means is that the order of finish is determined by the riders' aggregate time compiled over the entire competition -- in this case, four races on four consecutive days, each a markedly different challenge of cycling fitness and shrewdness (See "Day by Day at the Longsjo," next page). It also promises an element of suspense: today's stage winner might be tomorrow's peloton also-ran, and typically only a few ticks of the second hand separate the top riders at the end of the weekend.

The beauty of this format, which the Longsjo organizers adopted in 1993, is the accent it places on tactics and strategy, compelling riders to use their heads as well as their legs. In addition, stage racing brings team dynamics more into play, spicing up the proceedings with a volatile admixture of group psychology and Social Darwinism. The lone wolf stands no shot in a high-level stage race; cooperation and communication among trusted riding mates are vital factors in determining which rider will come out the top dog.

Bigtime road cycling is a team competition for one breathtakingly simple reason: air. Cutting through air resistance for mile after mile is brutal work, and only by conserving energy through crafty drafting can riders keep oxygen debt at bay and sustain what would otherwise be a muscle-emulsifying pace. Hence, the controlled pandemonium of the peloton, that cross between a stampede and a ballet, where jam-packed cyclists constantly jockey for position and swap calculated lead changes at perilous speeds, all the while biding time for the crucial moment to hazard a breakaway blitz.

The nature of the beast dictates that each team has a lead rider and a chain of command, with the prize winnings divvied up among the cohort. Rather like blocking backs in football, the role of the support riders is to clear the way for the team leader and pick the right spots for pressing an advantage. Success often hinges on how well egos can mesh, and on how ruthlessly a band of racers can impose its collective will on the others. There is no substitute for experience, which is why every year the Longsjo attracts a handful of top-flight teams looking to hone their edge and fine-tune their choreography. In past years, Australia and Norway have sent Olympic delegations, and the major corporate sponsors often enter teams as well. The teams to watch in this year's tilt, says Wolejko, are crews representing Saturn and Mercury (the automotive divisions, not the planets) and a team hailing from Canada under the banner of Radio-Energie Everfresh.

Demanding as this format is, it is also democratic. Some stage races cater mainly to team-affiliated riders, but it is part of the special character of the Longsjo that amateur club cyclists are always welcome and generally out in force. Hardcore pros, in fact, make up only a fraction of the pool of riders at each year's Classic: the race features eight categories for men, women, masters (over 35 years), and juniors (14 to 18 years), with mileage adjusted according to each skill level. Another format feature that keeps things lively are the Longsjo's races within the race, with cash prizes and jerseys awarded to the "King and Queen of the Mountain," top climbers in various course intervals during the stage.

Some 700 riders in all are expected to compete this year, and everyone who completes all four stages gets an official time. As with a certain storied footrace from Hopkinton to the Hub on Patriots' Day, anybody who survives this war of attrition over the long holiday weekend has every right to claim a moral victory.

Wachusett Road Race: summit up

Some say boxers; others say swimmers. Cross-country skiiers have their loyal constituencies, and so do speed skaters and soccer players. The debate will never be settled, there is no court of last resort, but that doesn't stop the partisan bickering.

Who are the best-conditioned athletes of all?

You can make a strong case for the tribe of road-racing cyclists, and many have. Their pulse rates are among the lowest in the business, the ultimate measuring stick in any battle of the fittest. Their training regimens border on the maniacal: daily practice rides upwards of one hundred miles are not uncommon, the more killer hills the better. And when it comes to the X-factor of unmitigated masochism, they may well leave the rest of the pack in the dust.

You won't have to linger long at the Longsjo to learn to spot these serious cycling specimens. They're the ones whose physiques are the spitting images of cheetahs or greyhounds. They're the ones with thighs like industrial turbines. They're the ones whose rolling gaits will remind you of John Wayne in True Grit -- and whose shining gams, meticulously shaven to reduce wind friction, you may not have seen the likes of since Marlene Dietrich strutted her stuff in The Blue Angel.

But it's not just the distinctive physique that defines the breed. It's also what you can't see: the hard-wired cycling psyche. It's all good and well to be lean and mean, but to become a state-of-the-art bike-racing machine, your standard-operating equipment had better include a high threshold of pain and suffering. And make no mistake: pro cycling can be a blood sport. The price riders pay for the purring aerodynamic efficiency of the peloton is the ever-present peril of having almost no room for error -- one ill-advised swerve or mis-timed move, and the next thing you know you've got a chain-reaction pile-up that can mangle bikes, flay flesh, and snuff out hopes. Steely determination thus is a minimum prerequisite, and a streak of savagery never hurts. Not for nothing was the legendary Belgian cyclist of the '60s, Eddy Merckx, admiringly dubbed "The Cannibal."

The best gauge of just how barbaric this sport can be comes on the third day of the Longsjo, when the cyclists clash in the Wachusett Mountain Road Race. The elite male riders will do nine laps on this 11 mile loop, starting at the Wachusett Ski Area and finishing, 104 gut-busting miles later, at the wind-whipped summit. The official entry form describes the course as "hilly," which is a little like calling a big winter Nor'easter "snowy." Riders will be climbing some 600 feet on each ascent, then hurtling at speeds that state troopers would pull over motorists for hitting on the downhill side.

What is humbling to consider is that for the seasoned pro, none of this happens to be cruel and unusual punishment. Well, not unusual, anyway. There's nothing like a daunting mountain stage for serving up the moments of truth that the competitive cyclist hungers after, which is why the route of every Tour de France always snakes through the high passes and thin air of the Alps and Pyranees. Wachusett is no Alp, but it's no cakewalk either, and as Wolejko points out, it's proven to be the primary magnet for drawing riders to the Longsjo.

This year the Wachusett Road Race has a new sponsor: the Unitil regional utility, the energy provider for the Fitchburg-Leominster power grid. Is the industry onto something? If it could somehow harness the raw output of these cycling dynamos, it could keep all the lights in the county burning with plenty of voltage to spare.

Rich history: the story behind No. 1

Everyone gets an official number in the Longsjo Classic. The highest ranking competitors, by long-standing cycling tradition, are assigned the lowest numbers, pinned to the jersey so that everyone can identify the marked men (and women). In this race, however, there's a twist: the top-seeded rider wears Number Two.

Number One is reserved in perpetuity for Arthur M. Longsjo Jr.

In the '50s, when bicycles were still forged out of heavy metal and lycra was just a gleam in a chemist's eye, Art Longsjo was a Fitchburg sporting phenom, and a man for all seasons. In the winter, he strapped on his speed skates and was a terror on ice. Come summer, he mounted his bicycle and was a demon on wheels. That year-round endurance training left him in exceptional shape -- so much so that he failed his draft-board physical when he was called up at age 18. It seems the Army sawbones mistook Longsjo's ultra-slow standing pulse rate for a heart murmur and promptly classified the future two-sport Olympian as 4-F.

It was six years later, in 1956, that Longsjo achieved the unprecedented feat of competing for the US Olympic team at both the winter and summer games. Remarkable though that accomplishment was, the Finnish lathe-operator's son had really only begun to tap his potential. Longsjo originally had begun cycling as a way to keep himself fit for speed skating during the off-season, but before long he had established himself as one of the country's most promising young riders. As Peter Nye relates in The Hearts of Lions, his lively history of American bike racing, Longsjo was renowned as a fierce competitor and a relentless workhorse. One of his regular training rides, according to Nye, was to pedal westward out of Fitchburg until he hit the Mohawk Valley in New York, swing north through the ranges of southwestern Vermont and New Hampshire, then south for home, where he would wrap up his odyssey with a quick spin up Mount Wachusett.

Tragically, Longsjo's finest season of bike racing was also his last. In 1958, he tallied an impressive series of victories at various distances, capped by two wins in late-summer races in Canada. A day after winning the prestigious Quebec-to-Montreal race, Longsjo died in the passenger seat of a friend's car when it swerved off the road in Vermont as they were traveling back to Fitchburg.

The first Longsjo memorial race was held in downtown Fitchburg in July 1960. As part of the inaugural festivities, a marble monument honoring Longsjo was dedicated on the Fitchburg Upper Common. Engraved with the Olympic torch and flanked by smaller stones depicting a speed skater and a cyclist, the memorial has been the city's ceremonial hub of activity on the first Sunday in July ever since. These days the Common is the designated site of the final stage, the criterium sprint races. It's a poetic spectacle: waves of cyclists spinning around the Longsjo stone for lap after lap in uptempo homage to the Flying Finn who had no quit in him.

The Finns have a word for that indomitable quality of spirit: sisu. Guts, fortitude, heart -- however you care to translate it, Art Longsjo had it in spades. Which is why, for one summer day in July, he's still Number One in his hometown.

For the fans: something for everyone

You don't need to have a rooting interest to have a blast at the Longsjo. It doesn't even matter if you wouldn't know a peloton from a pirouette. It's the spirit of the occasion as much as the heat of the competition that makes this cavalcade of cycling live up to its classic status, and in an age when athletic heroics are so often the product of packaged hype, you couldn't ask for a better tonic than the authentic excitement it consistently generates.

You want color? The luminous sponsor-festooned jerseys of the cycling world make horseracing silks look subdued, and when they blaze by in a furious blur they'll be the envy of every dragonfly in the local wetlands. (Keep your eye peeled for the green-and-white diamond jerseys in each category -- only the day's leader gets to wear that one.)

You want style? Check out the sleek lines and gleaming drivetrains of the latest generation of streamlined racing cycles. They're lighter, stronger, and faster than ever, equipped with fine-tuned gearing ratios that have already consigned the models of a decade ago to the antiquity of Model T's. And if it looks as if the riders' feet are stuck fast on the pedals -- well, they are. One of the biggest technological breakthroughs in competitive cycling in recent years has been the transition from toe-clips to cleated pedals, an innovation undreamed-of in the days when Art Longsjo was making headlines.

How about infectious enthusiasm? Lend an ear to Dick Ring, an old racing buddy of Art Longsjo and the official announcer for the Classic since the late '60s. His is the voice you'll hear crackling on the P.A., simultaneously calling the race and exhorting the riders with the unflagging energy of a circuit preacher and the leather-lunged flair of a carnival barker.

Frenzy and zealotry, you say? All the major teams have their wild-eyed entourages, including a yeoman regiment of trainers and mechanics who make sure racers keep up their intake of fluids (not plain old water, if you please, but a rainbow assortment of electrolyte-replacing concoctions and chemically enhanced goos), and rush into the breach with a replacement bicycle in the event of a flat tire or a busted cable.

What with all the hubbub and the hullabaloo, it's enough to prompt the thought that the sport might eventually come full circle and once again capture hearts and minds the way it did a century ago, when competitive cycling was the hottest spectator sport in the republic. In the mid 1890s, there were an estimated 100 velodromes and outdoor racing tracks in cities across the country (notable among them Madison Square Garden, originally built as a cycling venue), and enormous crowds turned out for meets such as the Diamond Jubilee in Springfield, Massachusetts. One of the stars of that era was the 1899 world champion Major Taylor, an African-American cyclist who became known as the "Worcester Whirlwind" when he moved here from the midwest to race on the integrated New England circuit. Taylor was later sponsored by Fitchburg's Iver Johnson Arms and Cycle Works, which signed him to a lucrative contract to ride and promote their new line of pneumatic-tire bicycles.

Somewhere along the line, bike racing was relegated to the agate type of the sports pages, and golden names like Taylor and Longsjo faded into scrapbooks of yellowed clippings. But when the peloton blows into Fitchburg come the Fourth of July weekend, you'll swear the sport is catching its second wind. Long a local institution, the Classic may just be coming into its own as a glorious revolution.

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Day by day at the Longsjo

Thursday, July 2:

Royal Plaza Time Trial

The course: a 12.9 mile circuit beginning and ending at the Royal Plaza Hotel, located at the junction of Routes 2 and 31, in Fitchburg.

Time: Racing begins at 9:30 a.m.; pro women at 2:45; pro men 4 p.m.

In this stage, riders run the course solo; the only adversary is the clock. The elite racers will cover the circuit in less than a half-hour. For best viewing: watch several riders begin at the base of the hill below the hotel, then stroll up to the hotel parking lot to see them climb the steep grade at the finish.

Friday, July 3:

Aubuchon/Glidden Circuit Race

The course: a 3.1 mile loop beginning at the Wallace Civic Center, John Fitch Highway, Fitchburg, and ending at the Pearl Street hilltop.

Time: Racing begins at 10 a.m.; pro women at 1 p.m.; pro men at 4 p.m.

The course features a long downhill straightaway and a hill climb of approximately 100 feet. Pro men will do 25 laps; pro women 10 laps.

For best viewing: watch the peloton take the sharp turn off John Fitch for several laps (you'll be able to feel the rush of the slipstream), then station yourself at the top of the Pearl Street hill for the race finish.

Saturday, July 4:

Wachusett Mountain Road Race

The course: an 11-mile circuit beginning at the Wachusett Ski Area, running along Route 31 through the town of Princeton, and finishing at the summit of Wachusett Mountain.

Time: Racing begins at 9 a.m.; pro men at 12:30 p.m.; pro women at 12:37 p.m.

The longest stage -- and the most punishing. The course tends to string riders out, so you'll need to keep close tabs on the races to figure out who's on top. This is the stage that usually determines the overall winners, since the crackerjack climbers often come in minutes ahead of the pack.

For best viewing: Riders finish the race at the summit after a final climb up Mile Hill, and this year spectators have the option of taking the Wachusett ski lifts to the mountain-top. The best bet for catching the most action, however, is the stake out a spot near the entrance to Wachusett State Park during the initial laps, then hoof it up to the summit for the grand finale.

Sunday, July 5:

UMass Medical Center Criterium

The course: a .9 mile flat, three-corner circuit on Main Street in downtown Fitchburg.

Time: Racing begins at 9:30 a.m.; pro women at 1:30 p.m.; pro men at 3 p.m.

Cycling criteriums are the closest thing we have in our day to the chariot races in the hippodromes of Imperial Rome. Riders must negotiate tight quarters and sharp turns, and maintain hair's-breadth spacing at high speed to avoid bone-crunching pile-ups.

For best viewing: any perch will do, and circulating around the course is the best way to observe the race from all angles. Claiming a spot on the Upper Common will allow you to see riders surging up Main Street and sweeping around the hairpin curve back toward City Hall.

--DB

Special thanks go to Longsjo maven Doug Barney and Tales from Tritown columnist Sally Cragin for revealing the best places to see the race.