Episode 59
“It’s the best seat in the house. You get to watch bike racing and have fun doing it.”
~ANDREW PARADOWSKI
Have you gotten to know our new director here at T-Town? Here’s the perfect chance– Chairman of the Board, Rick Beuttel, sits down and chats with Andrew Paradowski, our new Expert Executive Consultant. Andrew has jumped in the deep end here, and this is your chance to get to know him better!
Thanks to B Braun Medical Inc. for sponsoring the Talk of the T-Town Podcast. BBraun is a global leader in infusion therapy and pain management, B Braun develops, manufactures and markets innovative medical products to the healthcare community. They are also strong believers in supporting the quality of life in the communities where their employees work and live.
Transcript
Voiceover:
Broadcasting to you from the Valley Preferred Cycling Center, this is the Talk of the T-Town Podcast, where we discuss all things track cycling.
Rick Buettel:
Hello, listeners. Welcome back to the Talk of the T-Town Podcast. After a bit of a hiatus, hopefully during the hiatus, you’ve enjoyed some of the interviews that we’ve been posting on our website of some of our athletes and some of the personalities, in and around the track, which was recorded and presented by Service Electric Cable TV. I’m your host for today, Rick Buettel, board chair of the Valley Preferred Cycling Center.
Rick Buettel:
I’m going to be interviewing our new leader here at the track, Andrew Paradowski. Without any further ado, hello, Andrew. How are you doing today?
Andrew Paradowski:
Hi, Rick, not too bad. Thank you very much.
Rick Buettel:
Well, we’re really pleased to have you on board. We did go through a change of leadership earlier in the season as probably most of our listeners and most people around the track now, because of that and because of the exciting summer of racing, which we’ve had here in T-Town, we’ll talk about it with our great UCI block.
Rick Buettel:
Just coming off nationals, it’s been of a bit of a busy first summer for you. You want to tell us how things are going so far?
Andrew Paradowski:
For sure, things are going great. It has been busy because I wasn’t able to get down here until the end of May, which means we’re jumping in feet first into the pool as the summer’s already going on. There was a bit of a reprieve because we were doing that recoding of the track over the winter. The season didn’t start in April like it normally did, but even then it was still jumping in as things were moving along. It’s been a little bit of catch up and a little bit of running things here.
Andrew Paradowski:
I think overall, the season that was planned by Joan and the group here at T-Town before I arrived has been able to be run well and successfully. People have had fun. We’ve had great increases in the number of riders that we’ve seen over the last couple of years at the UCI events. Participation in the community programs is a little bit slow this year, but it started to ramp up over the summer as more people realized that the track was open after the closure for the winter.
Andrew Paradowski:
Then also, for getting the word back out that we’re here and we’re open and it’s a lot of fun to be had here at T-Town. A bit of a slow start, but I think we got the wheels turning and I think everything is coming along quite nicely right now.
Rick Buettel:
As I think about the slow start and you’re right, it was a bit of a slow out of the blocks. Most of that was due to the resurfacing. Especially, that impacted community programming pretty hard. What feedback have you been getting about the new surface? Are people happy with it? Is it faster? It certainly looks 100 times better than last year’s track.
Andrew Paradowski:
I think the feedback is super positive about it. You’re right, the looks are night and day for sure. If you look at photos from previous years, even just 2021, you can see cracks and ruts all over the concrete and this year it’s nice, almost looks like a painted smooth surface. People are pretty excited to be on it. It’s quite smooth to ride on and maybe a little bit faster, and that might be evidenced by the fact that quite a few track records have dropped this summer.
Andrew Paradowski:
Now, of course, that’s also from the great training that those riders have done, but it certainly does help that the track is a bit smoother to run. They also had some good weather on those days too to help get them to those points. It’s certainly a great thing to come here fresh for me as well when the track is new and not to come in a couple of years ago when it was at the end of its resurfacing life. It’s nice to have that fresh start for my new start here.
Rick Buettel:
I’m certainly hoping that we can get another 10 to 12 years out of this surface as we’ve got out of the last time we did this because it’s not an inconsequential amount of money and it’s an investment in the future here in T-Town. Great to see the times are faster and hopefully the athletes are happy with it.
Andrew Paradowski:
For sure.
Rick Buettel:
Maybe just by way of background, tell our audience a little bit about yourself. Probably a lot of people have seen you around the track. Maybe people have said, “Hello, how are you doing?” Had a little bit more colorful feedback from time to time. Maybe just to fill in, riff a little bit on your background in cycling in particular and why you’re so passionate about this sport that we all love?
Andrew Paradowski:
I’ve been in cycling pretty much most of my life. I’d say every young child got on the bike as soon as possible as it’s a good activity for young folk to get into. I was spurred on at a fairly young age by one of my uncles who was competing as an amateur pro back in the ’80s. I just aged myself a little bit there. My uncle who was a Cat 1, 2 racer back in the eighties, I looked up to him a bit and I was like, “This racing thing looks really cool and I want to try that out.”
Andrew Paradowski:
When I got to my early teen years, I decided that I wanted to get involved with that and I got my first race bike and started doing some road cycling back then. It lasted for a couple of years when I got to the junior, the true UCI junior age group, that 17, 18 group before I hung up my bike shoes and stopped for a while. A lot of that had to do with how the development was going in Ontario at the time.
Andrew Paradowski:
There weren’t too many kids in racing at that point. There wasn’t a lot of development going on and not a lot of support. As I was getting later into my high school years, I tuned out and dropped out like a lot of young racers might do, especially when they get even older into college and university. That happened for me a bit earlier.
Rick Buettel:
There’s a saying here, we lose a lot of young riders once they get to be a certain age to three deadly liquids, perfume, gasoline, and alcohol a little bit later in their life.
Andrew Paradowski:
I like that, I’ve never heard that. That’s good, I like that. I was away from the sport for maybe the better part of a decade as I went off to university. I still rode my bike casually transport and all that sort of stuff. I left racing just because I was maybe mildly disillusioned by it in my teen years. Then you graduate and go out into the real world, you get a big boy job. I started thinking, “Well, I should probably get some fitness involved in my life here and I’m working a lot. Fitness is good for both your physical and mental health.”
Andrew Paradowski:
Well, a lot of people go to the gym and all this stuff. I said, “Well, I liked bike racing as a kid, so why don’t I get back into it?” I said, “Well, I’ll try to look around for a bike club to join.” That’s what I learned as a kid, that you join a bike club. Also, back in Ontario and when I was racing as a junior, there was a requirement that you had to go to a learn to race program before you were issued a license.
Rick Buettel:
Before they give you a license, really?
Andrew Paradowski:
Yeah.
Rick Buettel:
That’s a good idea actually, if you see some of the people that are just starting out, maybe that’s a good thing from a safety standpoint.
Andrew Paradowski:
We do that kind of thing here at the track with try the track a little bit. It’s not quite a certification, but it certainly does give people the opportunity to try it out in a controlled environment as opposed to just jumping into the deep end and going right into a race. That wasn’t the case when I got back into cycling in the late zeros, but I didn’t know this. I did the online search and I found this cycling club called Midweek Cycling Club in Mississauga, Toronto. By the way, I don’t know if we mentioned yet, I’m from Canada.
Rick Buettel:
You’re from Canada? Take off, you hoser.
Andrew Paradowski:
This was the club that came up first when I typed in learned to race and I called them up and said, “I want to join your learn race program.” I found out later that I didn’t need to, but I said, “Well, this is a good enough club and it’s close to where I live and this is great.” I got back into racing there in the late zeros. I have a work history of working in the events field.
Andrew Paradowski:
When I say that it was mostly in the event production, audio visual stuff, was a DJ for a while. Worked with a company that did a lot of corporate events and all that kind of stuff. I have a background in running events. Turned out this club was also an event-driven club.
Rick Buettel:
Interesting.
Andrew Paradowski:
They put on a lot of events in Ontario, including the weekly two-day night crit, quite a few of the larger races they call them OCups, Ontario Cup road races in the summers, as well as provincial championships, a few time cross races. In the late zeros, they ran a couple of UCI cross races in Toronto. I got involved with them and I was a natural fit to help them out because of my event background and I just kept getting tagged to do more and more.
Rick Buettel:
You became the guy.
Andrew Paradowski:
Yeah, that’s always the case. It’s like, “You want to come help out?” You get dragged into it and soon you’re enveloped by this whole thing.
Rick Buettel:
I can relate a little bit of that. The next thing you’re the chairman of a nonprofit board. Everybody’s got lots of feedback for you. You’re familiar with that.
Andrew Paradowski:
Next thing I knew I was the president of the club.
Rick Buettel:
Careful what you wish for.
Andrew Paradowski:
Careful what you wish for. I did a lot of work there and I started organizing more and riding less and I never really got past being a Cat 2, Cat 3 rider. The systems don’t compare in Ontario and in the U.S. here, but I was never a top rider and I never would be because I’m more of an endurance guy. Time trialing was my thing and the only way I ever upgraded was because of winning stage races, short stage races where setting a good time trial time and staying with the pack.
Rick Buettel:
While everybody’s chasing you the rest of the way.
Andrew Paradowski:
That was the only way that I could get up there. A couple of years of doing that and at one point I’m helping out with racing and I get tapped on the shoulder at the finish line saying, “You’re pretty good at this finish line scoring stuff.” I go, “I don’t know, it seems pretty straightforward.” Have you ever thought about being a commissionaire? I’m like, “No, what’s that?”
Rick Buettel:
There you go.
Andrew Paradowski:
I’ve been in cycling for over a decade at this point and it was obviously with a gap in, and I had no idea what a commissaire was. I guess I understood the concept of a referee, but these are of the people that just operate in the background and produced this result that I looked at on paper I was like, “That sounds like a cool thing.” 15 years later here I am. I’m a UCI commissaire in track cycling in the elite national road. That was quite a big and long journey for me there.
Andrew Paradowski:
That’s where that started. Again, just getting roped into it as a volunteer and being involved in the sport. Let me tell you, being a commissaire is a great way to stay in the sport if you find out that you don’t have the same time you used to for training. It takes 10, 12 hours a week minimum of training just to stay in and more if you want to compete.
Rick Buettel:
I think we all suffer from that. Your journey along the way I think is indicative of a lot of people who maybe did it when they were younger than got a job or got married, or had kids. I think one of the best things about cycling in general, whether you’re racing or not is you can always go back to it. I think we see a lot of our athletes here, people that were great.
Rick Buettel:
Then maybe life and everything else got in the way for a while. Then, we get them back as masters.
Andrew Paradowski:
For all of you out there, if you’re interested in becoming a commissaire let us know, and we could always use a few more to help out with stuff like that. It’s the best seat in the house. You get to watch bike racing and have fun doing it. For any of you who play or go to watch baseball, it’s very similar. You sit there in the stands and you got little score book and you’re counting the runs on the sheet and stuff like that.
Andrew Paradowski:
It’s like every sport, there’s people who want to track it and that’s essentially what it is. It’s a great way to watch. Especially, if you like road racing the best seat in the house is in the car following the pack instead of sitting on the side and seeing it come around once every 40 minutes. This is a little PSA, it’s a little shameless self-promotion here to get more officials out there. If you’re interested, reach out to us here at the track.
Rick Buettel:
For sure. I’m sure USA Cycling would appreciate that because that’s not just a local problem here in T-Town, we’ve got an official shortage I believe nationally.
Andrew Paradowski:
Anyways, to make a long story short, too late, we’re getting into the early teens here of my cycling life story. I actually moved out to British Columbia for a couple of years and did my thing out there and came back in 2011 to Ontario to help run the road national championships in Milton, Ontario, where the track was built there about five years ago or seven years ago now, sorry.
Andrew Paradowski:
We put the event on and the Ontario Federation, so the Ontario Cycling Association was pretty impressed with what we put on and liked what I did for the event and they offered me a job at the Federation as their technical director to help other organizers learn the skills of the trade and how to run an effective bike race and stuff like that. Spent the next three years there helping out all the local organizers develop and learn and put on a really good cycling scene.
Andrew Paradowski:
Then after that, then my next stop on the cycling tour was at the Pan Am games. I was the chair of the cycling events there in 2015 for road cycling. I was officiating on the track cycle, but I ran the road cycling events in Toronto and Milton.
Rick Buettel:
It was right in your backyard, you didn’t have to go to Columbia or Argentina or any place like that.
Andrew Paradowski:
No, no. It was literally right in my backyard, the road circuit took place. It started at Ontario Place, which is on the waterfront in Toronto and went westward along Lake Shore Boulevard, which I’ll call it, it’s not a service road, but it’s the road parallel to the major highway that goes into downtown Toronto. We shut the whole thing down and big three lane, multi lane road in both ways.
Andrew Paradowski:
It ended up going detouring into High Park, which is probably the second biggest public park in downtown Toronto. It’s several hundred acres. It’s pretty much the only climbing year to get in Toronto. I think it might have been a 30 or 40-meter climb, but with the circuit, we did it a few times and it actually had a switch back in it, so it was a neat course. That was only maybe a few miles from where I lived.
Andrew Paradowski:
Literally, in my backyard. That summer, and this is of where the story gets interesting, I suppose. Organizers would contact me and say, “What happened here? You’re not with Ontario Cycling anymore.” I said, “I’ve moved on to different things.” They’re like, “Well, who’s going to help me with our bike races?” I said, “Well, I don’t know, I’m sure they’ll have somebody there for you.”
Andrew Paradowski:
They’re like, “Well, can we pay you to come out to our bike races and help us?” I’m like, “Yeah, sure.”
Rick Buettel:
Pay me to do something I love.
Andrew Paradowski:
I did a couple of gigs and then I said, “I wonder, maybe I can make something of this.” I wasn’t sure especially in Ontario it’s a fairly small scene, it’s a population of 15 million, a little bit small in Pennsylvania, but a lot of it is concentrated in Southern Ontario, but it’s a fairly small cycling scene, much like cycling is in North America, it’s a European sport. We try our best out here, but it certainly doesn’t have the numbers that they have out there.
Andrew Paradowski:
I said, “I’ll give it a shot.” I spent a year doing it just as I don’t want to call it a hobby, but I was trying to see if it would work as a business and it turned out it did. In 2016, I went full gas into it and opened up my own event management company, and had been doing that ever since. Basically, running my own events, running other people’s events across the spectrum of cycling, road, little mountain bike. Definitely, a lot of cyclo-cross.
Rick Buettel:
Gravel probably, the beginnings of gravel.
Andrew Paradowski:
A little bit. Then of course, odd events here and there and I also started doing a lot of timing and scoring with a colleague of mine, Doug Pogue. He’s been here a couple of times helping out with our large races from race timing and dossier. Shameless plug.
Rick Buettel:
You’re welcome, Doug.
Andrew Paradowski:
Then, growing the business and growing and growing and things were going well. Fall of 2019, I’m looking at the books going, “I actually might end up in the block this year. Come next year, it’s going to be great. 2020 is going to be my banner year.”
Rick Buettel:
As they say, “God has a sense of humor.”
Andrew Paradowski:
We all know what happened the next year and everything just shut down. People in events and not just in sports, but any event they were the first ones to go. The last ones to get back in, because it was all about gathering people together, restrictions, basically I had nothing to do in 2020. There was a small reprieve I guess in the late 2020 when it looked like they were lifting restrictions and we almost got the engine cranked over.
Andrew Paradowski:
Then, the second wave came in Canada and then we shut down pretty quickly after that. Just a year of doing nothing, the business flat lining, and uncertainty ahead. What did I do? I decided to get married.
Rick Buettel:
Well, there you go.
Andrew Paradowski:
I had proposed to my wife Chantal back in August 2019. Again, looking forward to this big 2020 wedding. Of course, as it happens, things changed in life changed. We still got married in the fall and it was a nice small wedding on her parents’ back deck up in Nobleton, Ontario for a very, very small group. It was nice to have that small group and do that small wedding. Big weddings can be expensive [inaudible 00:17:23]
Rick Buettel:
No, no, no, precisely. You probably had the people that really meant something to you that you wanted there anyway. That’s what you’ll remember.
Andrew Paradowski:
2021 rolls around and Canada was probably a bit more stricter on the restrictions than you saw down here in the U.S.
Rick Buettel:
My gosh, I was going to Canada for business and I think the people that were doing this swab testing for COVID when you get there wiped half of my brain out, I think that’s how far up. Very, very enthusiastic on making sure that COVID spread any further.
Andrew Paradowski:
Then there were some choices that were made in Ontario that made the restrictions’ role right into the summer. Here I am looking at year two of no business and I’ve got nothing going on and I get this call from a colleague of mine down here, Tom Mains. He does a lot of the timing is scoring here at the track. I think he was on the podcast.
Rick Buettel:
We had a podcast with Tom. Our listeners that come frequent to track will know Tom. Tom does a little bit of track racing, a little bit of racing. You see him out in a boot, as you would say as well.
Andrew Paradowski:
Nobody says that in Canada. It’s fake news. Tom gave me a shout and said, “I was talking to my friend, Joan who was my predecessor here.” They said that they had this really big block of racing coming up and they could sure need some help. I know that nothing’s going on for you up in Canada right now. It’s basically everything’s shut down if you want to come on to help out? I’m sure they’d appreciate it.”
Andrew Paradowski:
I spoke to Joan. I said, “I’m free. If you need some help, I can come down and pitch in whatever.” She was like, “We’d be glad to have you down here.” I came down and helped out with some of the racing at the UCI block and Elite Nationals last year and had a lot of fun. This is a great track. It was actually my first time at this track.
Rick Buettel:
First time to T-Town.
Andrew Paradowski:
First time to T-Town last year, I’d heard about it and I heard all the great things about this track from before legend in the U.S. It’s been around for almost 50 years. Not surprising it’s built up that reputation and it lived up to a lot of it too. It’s a great place, a great community down here. I’ve been to obviously a few other tracks and we’ve had Milton in Canada for now about seven years that was built for Pan Am games.
Andrew Paradowski:
It was a nice, refreshing change to come to an outdoor track and see how different things are running and all that kind of stuff. I left after that, came back to Canada and the restrictions were being lifted and we were able to get back into things. I had a great cross season, started off a new cross race, which I was pretty proud of because it was a nice, fun little thing in Northern Milton.
Andrew Paradowski:
Then after having been down here, I was chatting with Joan on the phone for some things. She’s like, “By the way, I’m leaving the track.”
Rick Buettel:
She got the offer she couldn’t refuse, I mean, terrible. Moved to Santa Cruz, California and have the dream job working for BMC, get a bunch of free BMC stuff. That sounds awful, I’m sure I wouldn’t like that one bit.
Andrew Paradowski:
She’s like, “They’re going to post for the job and you seem to fit in really well down here. You have a lot of knowledge and a lot of skills. You seem to track cycling and a lot of this can be glutton for punishment sometimes. If you’re interested, throw your hat in the ring.” Track has come to be my favorite discipline as evidenced by that’s the discipline that I’ve focused on in terms of my commissaire life.
Andrew Paradowski:
I live in Milton, Ontario. When Chantal and I decided to buy a house together we were priced out of Toronto, I’m sure everybody knows that Toronto is one of the most expensive real estate markets in North America. We’re like, “Well, we can’t live in downtown Toronto. If we’re going to move to the outskirts, we might as well move to a town where we’re going to spend most of our time anyway because of the track.”
Andrew Paradowski:
We moved there and I spend a lot of time at the track. I do a lot of stuff there. Well, this is the kind of opportunity that comes along I think once or twice in your life. When it came along, I was like, “Well, what’s the worst that can happen? It shows that I’m still interested in being maybe a part of T-Town and that I like my time here. If they choose somebody else then great and I can come and maybe hopefully still come down and help out here and there. Maybe officiate some races and whatnot.”
Andrew Paradowski:
Threw my resume in and got an interview. Then a couple weeks later got a call and it was actually Rick. It was you who called me. I’ll let you tell this story.
Rick Buettel:
Speaking from the other side of the table, maybe right, we we’re all a bit surprised when Joan announced that she was going to move on, stay within the world of cycling, which is good. Actually, she’s helped out some of our athletes that have come and raced at the track this summer. Some of you have seen [inaudible 00:22:13] with his brand new BMC track bike. I think he’s doing a nice job and he’s an ambassador for that brand and the happiest person I’ve ever met, which is wonderful.
Rick Buettel:
Anyway, I digress. We were surprised, we shined the bat light up onto the clouds and said, “We’re looking for a new executive director.” We had a number of folks apply who were interested from literally all around the U.S. and Canada. You can imagine running a Velodrome you can go put an ad in the paper and get five people locally. Literally, we had people from all over. The board, we looked at all the applicants, we shortlisted, we interviewed three or four candidates that were shortlisted.
Rick Buettel:
I think it was wonderful having you express interest and then ultimately having you come back because you had been down to T-Town the summer before, and you knew how the place was run, knew some of what I’d say quirks and features, good and bad. Now, I think you hit the ground running. We would’ve been much happier to get you down here a little bit before may, but that is due to our friends at the United States Border and Protection Agency.
Rick Buettel:
There’s some vetting that had to be done in order to legitimately get you into the country and have everything work out as it’s working out now. Now, speaking from the board perspective, we’re very happy you’re here and hit the ground running. You said it earlier, I’ll echo it. Maybe since you’ve been here, what’s the biggest surprise? Maybe there weren’t that many surprises because you were down here the summer before.
Rick Buettel:
Now, you’re in a different role, you’re in the big chair as it were good or bad or maybe a good one or a bad one. What knocked your socks off a little bit when you’re like, “Wow, this is wonderful or okay. Wow, nobody told me about this.”
Andrew Paradowski:
I’ll give you one of each. Probably we’ll start with the good, I was really surprised, but maybe not so much about the passion of the community here. Those that are involved with the track, whether they’re racing or they’re volunteering or officiating or being on the board. There’s a lot of people around here who have a deep connection to this place. It’s not surprising because it’s been around for so long.
Andrew Paradowski:
There are people here who are multi-generational even Mara came to the track when you were racing here when younger, and then now she’s here working for the track. It’s got a long history and the devotion that people have for this place while surprising, it’s also understood. It’s got a really, really good culture that I think it has been lying dormant for a little while that if we reach back out and get people more engaged and more involved, that will reawaken a little bit.
Andrew Paradowski:
On the bad side, I would say it’s probably one of the comments that I hear about when I first got here, I was trying to meet a lot of people and talk to a lot of people, including participants in our community programs and stuff. One of the refrains that I kept hearing was, “I didn’t know about this place. I didn’t know it existed. I live one and a half miles down the road and I didn’t know it was here.”
Andrew Paradowski:
It’s not uncommon in Milton, this thing was built in the last decade and there are people in town who still don’t even know there’s a world-class cycling facility in their town that their taxes are paying for. It’s something that I’d like to change and get more people in the community to know that this place exists. Also, not that it’s just for high end UCI racing, but it’s a track for everyone, the community to come out to ride their bikes, to learn how to ride a track.
Andrew Paradowski:
For it to be more of a community hub that already existed. I think we just need to spend a little time rekindling it. Those two things, the good and the bad are intertwined a little bit. I feel like that can be rebuilt back up.
Rick Buettel:
Now, it is interesting, I’ve been coming here since the ’80s. I didn’t move to the area until 1990, but it is totally different in terms of the racing’s still phenomenal. That’s one thing that’s been constant all along and attracting the best people in the world to come here to T-Town in the summer on a Friday night, that’s something that existed then existing now. The show really isn’t a whole lot different.
Rick Buettel:
It’s just interesting and I wonder how it contrast to Milton in terms of what is your feature race event look like in terms of, I’ll say it butts and seats. It’s really changed a lot here and a little bit of it, I believe is that in the 1980s, on a Friday night, there really wasn’t a whole lot else to do in the Lehigh Valley. There was the Lehigh Valley Mall. There wasn’t a baseball team. Everybody didn’t have 500 channels of television.
Rick Buettel:
People didn’t have the Star Trek communicator and being able to literally beam content from anywhere in the world on their phone. I think the pace of the world and the pace of life back then, and maybe I’m showing my age now, but things just seemed a bit simpler then. We didn’t all hit Friday and just collapse through exhaustion onto the couch on a Friday night, go, thank God the week’s over where I’m going with all of that is it’s changed a lot.
Rick Buettel:
We don’t have as many people on a Friday night or there are ideas that you have in terms of things that have worked at Milton in terms of promotion, getting the word out, that sort of thing. We have had a bunch of people move to the area. You ride your bike around here, there’s 10 million new houses everywhere thoughts on just even awareness in the community.
Andrew Paradowski:
There’s a lot to unpack there. You started off earlier in the question about comparing Milton to here. It’s tough to compare. This is an outdoor 333 in Milton is an indoor 250, but it’s also in two different places. In some ways it’s night and day, or should I say summer and winter because there’s nothing really going on here, much past of the fall time. You might get the latter who is brave enough to come out here in the cold, if the track is dry enough to come and ride round.
Andrew Paradowski:
It’s essentially not running between, let’s say October and March, the six months there. It’s the opposite of Milton, even though it’s covered and it’s protected from the elements year round, people don’t want to spend their time in the summer riding on an indoor velodrome. They’d rather be outside in the beautiful sunshine and getting that vitamin D and riding on their favorite roots and hills and stuff like that. Participation at the track drops off a cliff literally.
Andrew Paradowski:
There’s a cliff just up the street from Milton, the Rattlesnake Point to nice view from the track, but nobody goes there. Basically, they have junior nationals in April. Then it’s basically over for track cycling until September when Elite National starts up and then they’ll have a winter training riding program and then racing season.
Andrew Paradowski:
Hopefully, anybody who’s in this area and they’re interested in some winter training for sure. It’s only about seven hours drive to Milton from here. I know there’s several people in the community who are trying to encourage more U.S. masters to go up there for the program than they have in the winter. Hopefully, we can convince some of the Canadians to come down here.
Rick Buettel:
Come down here and race in the summer.
Andrew Paradowski:
Maybe do some camps or something like that. The riding around here is amazing. It’s farm roads everywhere and the traffic is low to minimal and everyone around here is really respectful. The cars they wait and they’re not angry. I’ve heard of trucks in places where they’re not so respectful. Do something like rolling coal, for example.
Rick Buettel:
I haven’t seen much of that around here.
Andrew Paradowski:
Around here I have to say the community is pretty tolerant of cyclists and vice versa. I think everyone’s they good respectful road users. I will tell anyone from Canada, if you’re listening to come on to the area because the bike riding here is phenomenal. In terms of how to sustain a track, how to build it better, what kind of events put butts in seat? It’s tricky, I think if you look at the history of velodromes any track that has tried to be just a track is usually on a one-way course to failure.
Andrew Paradowski:
There are tracks who have survived in the world, especially in Europe that can just be a track and there’s enough support, whether it’s through sponsorship or government funding, or even just from participation that can keep it running. For the most part, I think if you want to have a successful velodrome, it has to be a facility that is, I don’t want to necessarily say multi-sport, but multi-use anyways.
Andrew Paradowski:
There are limits to how many people can be on the track at once. There’s only so many hours in the day that you can program a track. Obviously, you don’t want to be getting all of your funding from race fees and participation fees because then it would be too expensive to-
Rick Buettel:
You’d never get the first person.
Andrew Paradowski:
Cycling has a history of being a working class sport. In recent years, the way that prices have gone for bicycles and stuff like that is getting away from it. In however you want to look at it, it should be a sport that’s open to everybody and you don’t want cost to be a barrier for sure. You have to find revenue from other sources and sponsorship it’s here one year and it’s gone the next sometimes. It’s hard to keep the same people happy all the time.
Andrew Paradowski:
You’re always shifting around. There are a lot of really good partners here at the Valley Preferred Cycling Center. Obviously, our title sponsor is one of the key players and keeps this place running and we have a lot of great sponsors, LVHN and we’ve got service electric helping us out and I’m going to miss a few. Hopefully, I got them all in my mind. We’ll call them local community sponsors like Schearer’s and Master Supply. Help me out here, Rick.
Rick Buettel:
Well certainly, I’d be remiss for not mentioning the Air Product support air products and running the Air Products Program and a lot of our great athletes that we’ve had over the years and have started on the Air Products Program and just even a lot more than that of people have just come in and learned some healthy habits and learned a love for cycling.
Rick Buettel:
Maybe they never go on and ride a competitive race, but that’s okay, because I think you’re right. We can’t just thrive as a track, we need to be a cycling center and then even an extension of a cycling center.
Andrew Paradowski:
We also can’t forget the Rodale Institute as well.
Rick Buettel:
Of course, the Rodale Institute, the track wouldn’t be here without the grace of the Rodale family. Almost 50 years ago, the patriarch of the family going visiting [inaudible 00:33:25], falling in love with track cycling and saying, “You know what, we need one of these here in the Lehigh Valley.” Without that, we wouldn’t be sitting here, this beautiful facility wouldn’t be here.
Rick Buettel:
Even without the continued support of Heidi and the rest of the Rodale family and the Institute today, that’s been a very strong partnership and look to that continuing in the future for sure.
Andrew Paradowski:
It’s great to have big sponsors and smaller sponsors like Shangy’s and Ocean Spray. I apologize if I’ve missed anybody, but we do value and enjoy the relationships that we have with all of our sponsors and partners here. That only gets us part of the way. We have sponsorship and then we have entry fees and ticket sales, and all that kind of stuff, but there’s still going to be a gap with this kind of thing.
Andrew Paradowski:
We have to look to other ways to support the track in ways that can bring in some revenue. It’s not just about the revenue too. I mean, everything is built on eyeballs and butts and seats as you said earlier. I think we need to shift a little bit to having more activity here at the track that will do those things.
Andrew Paradowski:
We already have some things running here like VeloFest, which brings in people who are already in the cycling community, but we have hundreds of vendors and several hundred, if not over a thousand people come in and participate in the spring and fall expo that bring more people into the track, and supports the track through revenues through that program.
Rick Buettel:
I understand you’ve set a date now for VeloFest for the fall. You want to tell the audience when that is?
Andrew Paradowski:
We have, it is September 24th. Hopefully, this program airs before that and we’re not still dating-
Rick Buettel:
Well, hopefully it does and hopefully there’s no rain on September 24th, unlike the soggy spring VeloFest that we had this year.
Andrew Paradowski:
I got to give a big shout out to the crew here. I actually didn’t make it to the spring VeloFest. Everybody here from the track, Kelly, Mara, and Wendy and our summer staff and all of our volunteers who come and help out for these events, they made that event run off without a hitch. It was still a good event despite the downpour. This track takes a lot of people to run from the small staff that we have all the way to volunteers.
Andrew Paradowski:
Certainly, that community aspect really does help keep the place run as well. We’ve been trying out a few new things. This year, my predecessor Joan had organized the Hincapie folks to come here and do their first Grand Fondo in the area. The Hincapie Lehigh valley Grand Fondo started this year, it was the day after our opening night on June 4th.
Rick Buettel:
Which was pretty incredible, a bit of a hectic opening weekend. The event itself, the Hincapie event and of course opening night just seemed to pair beautifully. There were a lot of people that were in town for the Hincapie Fondo maybe for the first time came and saw high level track racing and the Fondo itself. Tremendously well-ran, lots of people. I was here volunteering the day afterwards and it just seemed like everybody was very, very happy.
Rick Buettel:
They really loved the [inaudible 00:36:34] challenging, but I think that’s what a lot of Fondo athletes are looking for. Everybody said, “Geez, I’m going to come back next year and I’m going to bring a few friends along.” Hopefully, that snowballs favorably.
Andrew Paradowski:
They’ve already set a date. It’ll be the same weekend next year. I think what we shift back one day, so it’ll be June 3rd next year. Pretty excited to have the Hincapie folks back. It was great to see a lot of those folks that you mentioned come up here. I remember there was this one group of friends from, I think it was South Carolina that came up just to ride up here.
Andrew Paradowski:
They had done the one down in their neck of the woods and they came up to Friday night racing. All the Hincapie folk were given a free entry into the Friday night racing that night. They had a blast, they were up in the stands, cheering. They’d never seen this kind of racing before. Then, the next day they got to finish on the track, which made it a fairly unique thing. Some people say, “What does a Fondo have to offer?” I’m like, well, they have offer a lot of good things, especially in this area.
Andrew Paradowski:
Even if you’re from this area, you can sign up with them and go on rides that maybe you’ve done before, but maybe they haven’t been controlled by marshals or police, so you get to have a bit more freedom on the road. Plus, there’s a lot of great stuff that happens before and after and you get to finish on the track, which is a neat thing. Look for that next year to come back and keep bringing new faces and new bodies to the track to learn about track cycling and that I think that’s key to this whole piece.
Andrew Paradowski:
You talked about how do you build the community and you make this place a hub for the community. There’s already a lot of groups that start their rides out of the parking lot on Wednesday evenings or Saturday mornings. You’ve got the Lehigh Wheelmen and other clubs that start their journey rides here, start their rides here and end here. This place already has a community feel, so expanding on that will just serve to help bolster that culture that we talked about earlier.
Andrew Paradowski:
The more often people come here, the more use they get to being here and it just becomes a place they instinctually think of when they think about cycling.
Rick Buettel:
I used to think of Lehigh Valley had two draws for cyclists. One obviously being the Velodrome. The second was that Bicycling magazine was based here. Bicyling magazine, still in the valley, but now way at the far edge of the valley, I think over in Easton. One thing that bicycling used to run very well and used the track as a cycling center was they would run the Bicycling fall classic that hasn’t happened for a few years.
Rick Buettel:
Maybe Andrew, do you want to talk a little bit about the idea of maybe we start to dip our toe in the water and run a velodrome fall classic, or I don’t know what we’re going to call it, but start to fill that gap, because that was a wonderful ride. I think a lot of people would come to the area for it. I think we also had a lot of local participation as well.
Andrew Paradowski:
Obviously, we saw the success of the Hincapie Fondo in the spring, that basically got the creative juices flowing and we said, “Well, why don’t we see if we can get something going for ourselves?” We’re going to try something small this year. Not certainly up to the same level that the hi Hincapie folks did, because they did work all year and that was their sole focus for that one event and a large scale kind of thing.
Andrew Paradowski:
We’re looking at doing something in September, the date isn’t hyper finalized yet, but we’re looking at maybe September 17th, where we’ll organize a small little Fondo for the community to start here at the velodrome. We’ll have some morning snacks and then head on out and do a ride around the county and maybe stop at a few places. We’re thinking of stopping maybe at a lake or we can certainly have our friends at the Rodale Institute provide another rest stop for us. It’s a great place to stop.
Andrew Paradowski:
They’ve got a lot of neat things happening there. I think they have a little museum or a shop that talks about a lot of stuff. They do there with the organic farming and stuff like that. Then, come back here for maybe lunch in The Plaza, low key, small, but everything starts small. You test the waters out, see how it goes.
Rick Buettel:
See what works, see what does it. Learn from it, do better the next year.
Andrew Paradowski:
If you’re interested in trying it out, check out our website soon at thevelodrome.com. You’ll see some details for that coming up within the next week or two. Think of it as a large group ride in some respects and then we’ll see where we can go in future years. There’s a lot of other stuff that we want to do, Rick, the last part of your question is what are the things that we want to do to add to the value here at the track.
Andrew Paradowski:
Well, we’ve got a couple of things that we’re doing coming up over the next year that I think will be really interesting. The first one is we’ve got a movie night coming up in a couple of weeks. I think we’ve got this infield and it’s a great place. It’s a controlled venue where we also have a concession where we can sell food and drink and a bar as well. If there’s some adults who want to enjoy an adult beverage while they watch a movie.
Andrew Paradowski:
We want to give it a shot to see what it looks. We’re going to bring in one of those large inflatable screens like you see at some of the movies in the park type thing. We’re going to be showing The Bad Guys, which is an animated feature about some animal criminals who decide they want to fly straight. It’s all about their adventures doing that. That’s happening on August the 20th, we’re calling it Spinner & a Movie.
Rick Buettel:
I like it, I see what you did there.
Andrew Paradowski:
I’ve gotten into that dad pun part of my age. Like dinner in a movie prior to the movie we’re going to be doing a spin session, so there’s the spinner part from 6:00 to 7:30, like the adult fitness classes we run in the morning it’ll be a guided spin session with one of our coaches just doing some skills and drills, that sort of stuff, not a learning one. If you’ve not been through it, try the track or some sort of skill set on the track might not be for you.
Andrew Paradowski:
Anybody who has been to any of our community programming would certainly be welcome to come and try that out, and then come off the track at 7:30 and then we’ll start the movie just after dusk 8:00 PM. That’ll be interesting and fun. It’s something that I’d like to if it works out and it’s great and people like it, that’s the kind of stuff that I’d like to see continue on here at the track.
Andrew Paradowski:
Especially, if we find the funding to replace that scoreboard in corner three and four, because then we have a built in screen where we could show movies once a week, a summer series [inaudible 00:42:38]
Rick Buettel:
We don’t have the cost and the hassle of renting something, setting something up every week, and then taking it back down at the end of the night.
Andrew Paradowski:
If anyone out in listener land knows of anybody who wants to sponsor a new screen, now we know we’re happy to discuss putting your name under that board for a couple of years to get it going.
Rick Buettel:
Very receptive to that, absolutely.
Andrew Paradowski:
The venue itself, because there’s a lot of stuff that’s already here. We’re looking at doing a beer sampling festival.
Rick Buettel:
I’m very much looking forward to that. Tell us a little bit about it.
Andrew Paradowski:
We’re working with our main beverage supplier Shangys is The Beer Authority and they’re going to bring a whole host of craft breweries to the velodrome ones that I bet you that you’ve never heard of. There’s a list of maybe 30 or 40.
Rick Buettel:
30 or 40, wow.
Andrew Paradowski:
We may not get them all, but certainly these are the ones that we’re looking at bring into the velodrome. I look down the list and I’m like, “Yes, I’m not from the area, but through the last year I’ve seen the different views that are on and offer and I recognize five of them.” We’re talking about a lot of really interesting craft brew from Europe, from Asia, not your normal kind of sampling festival here.
Andrew Paradowski:
I think it’s going to be a great addition to the roster of non-cycling things that we do here to bring people to the track who have never been here before, and to see what we can offer, but then also bring in some revenue for the track.
Rick Buettel:
Bring in some revenue for the track, but you’re right though, also bring in people that have never been here before. Like you said, the people that live a mile and halfway didn’t even know it was here. One thing I’ve always struggled with is this area and you see it if you go for a bike ride pretty much in any direction, any time of day you’ll see riders everywhere. There are a lot of people that identify themselves as cyclists. One thing I’ve never understood, even in my competitive days, I never understood it.
Rick Buettel:
We have the crit across the street on a Thursday night, we just don’t get a lot of crossover between the participants, the people that identify themselves as bike riders, serious bike riders, people that watch the Tour de France on TV religiously every day when it’s on in the morning, or a recap in the evening, we don’t get a lot of them here on a Friday night. I think I had a view that maybe there was a chunk of the community that became a bit disillusioned with a prior director.
Rick Buettel:
Let’s just leave it at that. We would see a bit of a changeover with a change in administration and a new direction and more of an outreach. We’re still struggling with that. I think things we can do beyond just VeloFest , we’ve been doing VeloFest for a long time. That gets people here, whether it’s Spinner & a Movie, whether it’s this Fall Fondo. Hopefully, we can build that into something really big over a few years or getting people to come here and drink beer. I really do want to have an outreach to the cycling community and we’re here for them.
Rick Buettel:
They’re here for us, we wouldn’t exist without one another. Without this, velodrome being here, this would just be a cycling center, a cycling area and a cycling culture like any other small city in the U.S. I think the track is one thing that really distinguishes Lehigh Valley. I would just like to see more people here and out. Not necessarily participating, just come out and watch racing on Friday night, or enroll your kids in community programming, or do something to support the track. I mean, it’s a help us help you.
Andrew Paradowski:
It’s interesting when we talked earlier about some differences between T-Town and the Milton track. The one thing that T-Town does have going for it, that’s really great is even in today’s lower numbers, a really good fan base that does come out on Friday nights. Thank you to everybody who still comes up continually on Fridays.
Rick Buettel:
For sure, 100%.
Andrew Paradowski:
That’s something that continually impresses me, we’ll call it a regular Friday night, which is like it’s national race or a local race really outside of the UCI stuff that happens here in early June. You’re going to see even these days, 300, 400 people in the stands. In Milton, that’s the turnout they would expect for a nation’s cup.
Rick Buettel:
Really?
Andrew Paradowski:
It’s a little bit more, so they’ll get 1,000 or 1,500 on a night, but for what is equivalent to the Friday night racing here, if there were 50 people in the stands, I would be surprised.
Rick Buettel:
You’d be really surprised. That would be a good night.
Andrew Paradowski:
There are some logistical things around that and every track has its own issues and stuff like that, but it hasn’t been around long enough and there hasn’t been that community culture that’s been built here over time. Hopefully, we can take the seed of people that are coming here and convince people to despite all the different things you mentioned earlier that there’s so many different things to do on a Friday night now, whether it’s to see one of the other sport teams that are here or go to right now, we got Music Fest going on.
Andrew Paradowski:
That’s obviously a big draw and I wouldn’t blame people to go into that versus a Friday night because it’s something it’s a great offering that Lehigh Valley has, whether it’s all those things or even just like you said, staying at home and staying on your electronic device. I think there’s some things that we can do to entice folks back to the stands and make racing a bit more interesting here.
Andrew Paradowski:
At the very least, tighten it up and offer them an interesting enjoyable night out on a Friday, even if you’re not into cycling and you don’t understand cycling-
Rick Buettel:
It’s still a heck of a show. It’s still a heck of a spectacle.
Andrew Paradowski:
We can spend some time educating new people that come to the track and letting them know how great cycling is sport to watch.
Rick Buettel:
Maybe one more serious question before we move on to the lightning round, which is a podcast tradition here at Talk of the T-Town. We had an incredible block of UCI racing this summer. We had a lot of track records falling. You’ve mentioned that earlier. We had a lot of Olympic champions, a lot of world champions here, a lot of people who wore both hats, Olympic end world champions. I’m speaking of a couple of Dutch gentlemen that were here.
Andrew Paradowski:
Lady.
Rick Buettel:
That’s true, thank you. Keep me honest. UCI racing is something that really distinguishes T-Town from every other track in the United States. Can you talk a little bit about what that means? I’d like to hear your view on it in terms of hosting something like that. Then also maybe explain to our listeners of what that means and what having UCI racing in the United States means in terms of what the benefit is for the Federation?
Rick Buettel:
I think a lot of people don’t really know that or understand that we’re providing a lot of value for not just ourselves here.
Andrew Paradowski:
I’m assuming that maybe 80%, 90% of the listenership knows what the UCI is.
Rick Buettel:
Well, but for the 10% who don’t.
Andrew Paradowski:
For the 10% who don’t. the UCI is the International Cycling Union or the Union Cycliste Internationale. Now, it’s the governing body for the sport as sort of appointed by the IOC, the Olympic committee. Every international Federation is basically placed in charge of the sport-based on what the Olympic committee sort of deems as the international federation. Then from there, it goes on and identifies a national federation within each participating country.
Andrew Paradowski:
In the United States, it’s USA Cycling, in Canada, it’s Cycling Canada, and those national federations are charged with administering the sport within their country, and then collaborating with the UCI on international events that happen in the country. Then also, the high performance of their athletes as they move on into more international racing. That’s where the big key part comes in running these international events. It does a bunch of things.
Andrew Paradowski:
One, it allows our riders a chance to compete against riders from around the world to see what the competition is like. Like we said earlier, cycling is a bit more of a European sport, so a lot of the big riders are from Europe. It draws these riders into our own backyard to give our local riders a chance to compete against those riders and understand how racing works in that part of the world and different skills and tactics and whatnot.
Andrew Paradowski:
It also has a bit of a practical and administrative thing in that there are a lot of regulations around what’s required for both athletes and countries to participate in some of these large events. For athletes, they need to basically gain points which are on offer at these UCI races. Different levels give you different amount of points, and however you finish in the race. If you finish first, you can easily get several hundred points all the way down to just a few points for coming in down further down the list.
Andrew Paradowski:
These points are important in several respects. One, actually it’s the brand new regulation and I think this was talked about at a previous podcast with Z Manno, one of the international commissaires here in the us about how riders now need points to enter into class one events, which is the level of event that’s right below a nation’s cup, which is right below world championship world. Third from the top basically.
Andrew Paradowski:
You need 10 points just to enter in a race. Having international races here allows our local riders a chance to earn these points without having to break the bank and travel to Europe or somewhere else to gain these points. It’s great for those individual riders to do that. Also, the USA Cycling as the National Federation to not have to send riders away. It keeps things low, because it’s expensive to travel, especially now these days with the price of flight and gas going up and everything.
Rick Buettel:
It’s expensive and it’s also problematic and dependable. Other than that, it’s terrific?
Andrew Paradowski:
Yeah. Having that in the backyard in your own backyard is certainly very helpful. There’s another practical reason, there’s a regulation that says that if a country wants to send athletes to world championships, they must run an international race. USA Cycling is required to host one race somewhere in the U.S. that I believe it’s the minimum is a C2 for sure, which is the one below the C1, obviously. That’s the lowest level of international racing that you can do after that. It becomes a national race.
Andrew Paradowski:
You have to have one of these races. The UCI does that to ensure that there’s racing around the world so much like Canada, they have to do it as well. They’ve chosen the high road and they’ve been running world championships and world cups and nations cups for the last little while in Milton because they have the facility, they have facility to do it right. There are certain restrictions.
Andrew Paradowski:
At the current list of what can and can’t be done, we could never run a Nations Cup or an Elite World Championships here. Of course, we’re still allowed to do the class one and two events and I’d have to look again. Don’t quote me on this, but there might be a lower level championships might be able to run maybe worlds or junior worlds still. I know the UCI is shifting towards more like indoor 250.
Rick Buettel:
Indoor board two 250s.
Andrew Paradowski:
Partnering with USA cycling is pretty key because if we like running UCI racing here, it brings in, like you said earlier, the big guns from Europe and it adds to the prestige of the track. It does draw in a bigger crowd for those nights who are coming here to see those athletes and the higher level of racing. It certainly fits into our program here, but I also want to call it the cherry on the top of the Sunday that we’re trying to build.
Andrew Paradowski:
I don’t think it’s the [inaudible 00:54:16]. All of everything we’re doing here, but it’s certainly is the culmination of it can be the culmination of everything that we’re doing. Especially if we’ve built a very, very strong development program here underneath and not everyone is going to go that way. There are several tracks in sport and in cycling, one of them is cycling or active for life. They’ll call it, you may not go pro, but you’ve developed this lifelong love of cycling and you keep doing it for the rest of your life, but some may go pro.
Andrew Paradowski:
Having that pathway for them here. Also, our friends at USA Cycling to help develop athletes from around the country is certainly important. There are not a lot of tracks that can do this in the U.S. There’s maybe a handful that could put on these kinds of events. Maybe I don’t want to sell any one track out, but between Carson and Los Angeles and here, there aren’t too many tracks equipped to handle an event like that.
Rick Buettel:
An event like this and attract the athletes and host them.
Andrew Paradowski:
I think that relationship is really important on both sides. USA Cycling can support us in what we want to do, and then we can support them by hosting these events for our athletes and their athletes as well. That is certainly a relationship that I think is important.
Rick Buettel:
I like what you said too, it’s the cherry on the top, it’s the really, really visible part. Our mission here starts with community program, community involvement and getting that built up and it becomes the pyramid. It gets narrow as you get closer to the top. Anyway, all so we’ve been talking for a while. We’re going to bring this thing to an end shortly, but it would not be a talk of the T-Town podcast if we didn’t have a lightning round of questions.
Rick Buettel:
These questions were developed and submitted blindly. I’m not sure exactly who wrote them, so here we go. Andrew, what’s your favorite food?
Andrew Paradowski:
I like a lot of food. Good food is great. I’d probably have to say, so this is a shout out to my mom, her home cooking there’s nothing like going home and having something that’s homemade that you grew up with. There’s quite a few Polish dishes that she makes that I like. Every time I go back to Canada, I’m sure I’ll be hitting her up with a list of all those that I want to have, but stuff that I make probably actually there’s a chicken Curry dish that I make that I really like. That’s okay.
Rick Buettel:
A little curry, a little spicy. That absolutely good. I like it. I like it. Favorite rock band?
Andrew Paradowski:
Well, I don’t know if this qualifies as rock, but my favorite band in the world is to Depeche Mode at the risk of dating myself again, I’m not quite old enough to say that I grew up with a band, but I certainly listened to them when they were playing on the radio. My dad listened to a lot of alt rock in the ’80s and I got into bands like that, the new wave and the post punk stuff.
Andrew Paradowski:
I’ve seen Depeche Mode on pretty much every tour since the early nineties and usually several times on that tour, I would say.
Rick Buettel:
Nice. We’re going to go from favorite rock band to favorite bike brand?
Andrew Paradowski:
Well, I’ll give a shout out to Fuji Bikes because we were kind of like a small time distributor of Fuji Bikes in Canada. But for me, it’s probably my racing bike. It’s a company that is no longer around, guru.
Rick Buettel:
I remember Guru.
Andrew Paradowski:
They made some excellent custom bikes out there and I’ve been on quite a few carbon frames and haven’t been on one that is compared yet, maybe somebody will surprise me and I’ll change my mind in the future, but that’s going to hold onto it for now.
Rick Buettel:
Guru it is. Here’s a question. Maybe it’s lost a bit if it’s lost or over the years, but can’t be your [inaudible 00:57:54]
Andrew Paradowski:
Can’t be.
Rick Buettel:
There you go. Old school, I like it. Preference in adult beverage?
Andrew Paradowski:
Well, beer’s probably the go-to for me, I’m a big IPA fan, especially a nice unfiltered hazy IPA with a nice citrus back.
Rick Buettel:
We do sell something like that.
Andrew Paradowski:
We do. You, we should check it out at the Shangy’s handlebar when you hear next Friday. In the summer, I’ll also be seen sipping on a gin and tonic with a nice cold gin and tonic with a nice lemon. Then if I have a nice steak, I think a nice pinot noir would be great.
Rick Buettel:
Hard to argue with any of that really. Best vacation you’ve ever taken?
Andrew Paradowski:
Well, I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t say my honeymoon.
Rick Buettel:
That’s a given. Where’d you go for your honeymoon?
Andrew Paradowski:
We went to the Dominican Republic.
Rick Buettel:
Dom Rep.
Andrew Paradowski:
Nice down there. Outside of that, probably every time I’ve been to Europe, I love going to Europe it’s great, and I’ve been there for different reasons across the continent. Looking forward to getting back and probably the best vacation ever taken is one that I’ve never been on yet.
Rick Buettel:
To look forward.
Andrew Paradowski:
I’m looking forward to some of the new stuff that it might happen in the future.
Rick Buettel:
What’s the best bike race you’ve ever seen?
Andrew Paradowski:
You mean live or on TV?
Rick Buettel:
Live.
Andrew Paradowski:
Man, I’ve been to so many. They just blur together. Now it’s really tough to say, probably one here, I don’t know. I think to be honest, the one that’s popping into memory right now, I don’t know why, because I think it’s an interesting story. Maybe not the best bike rides I’ve been to, but probably an interesting story from one if you’re okay with that?
Rick Buettel:
Sure.
Andrew Paradowski:
I was one of the motor commissaires at the Grand Prix Montreal up in Canada, those the two big UCI world tour races that happen up there pro tour where they keep painting the name. I don’t know what it is these days. I was on the bike and I was at the back and I think the Peloton had decided that they weren’t going to get too active and they weren’t racing really hard except there was this breakaway four or five riders, a couple Canadians in it, off the front showing off the hometown crowd, everything.
Andrew Paradowski:
Those of you who’ve been to the race, it’s a circuit race in downtown Montreal. I think maybe 20 kilometer circuit at most. It’s not very big. And I think they had put F 15 or 18 minutes on the pathway at this point, we’re getting sort of feedback from Moto info and stuff. And so the president of the commissaire’s panel gets on the radio and he says to me, it’s like, “I want you to stop and let me know how far behind they are.” They were getting close.” We knew the circuit time was probably around 20 minutes.
Rick Buettel:
Can you lap the field? [inaudible 01:00:42]
Andrew Paradowski:
You can’t. If they lap the field, they would’ve had to have basically pulled the entire field.
Rick Buettel:
They’re not going to do that on that level.
Andrew Paradowski:
I asked the motor pilot to stop and started the stopwatch and then sure enough, they come by two and a half minutes later. They’re literally 150 seconds behind the back of the Peloton. I get on the bike and I speed back to the front and I can hear on radio tour that the radio operator comes on and says, “Everyone, the president of the search panel has decided that if the breakaway catches the field, that they’re going to pull the whole group.”
Andrew Paradowski:
The reason they did that was to light a fire under your [inaudible 01:01:26] Let me tell you, they caught that break in two laps. It was just bang.
Rick Buettel:
It rattled wide open.
Andrew Paradowski:
I admit it back to the group by that point when they did that. Now, I’m on the motor we’re trying to catch up. Luckily I guess, or luckily I don’t know my motor pilot, great guy. He was the ex Moto GP guy and he is like, “Strap in.” I’m holding on for dear life when he’s doing 120 kilometers an hour on a motorcycle up and down the University of Montreal. Life flashing before my eyes.
Andrew Paradowski:
That was a really cool race. A lot of those neat scrappy one-day races can certainly be interesting.
Rick Buettel:
Maybe you just foreshadowed. What do you like better classics or grand tours?
Andrew Paradowski:
Neither.
Rick Buettel:
Neither.
Andrew Paradowski:
Neither. I’m going to throw a curveball at you.
Rick Buettel:
Go ahead.
Andrew Paradowski:
2.2’s. For those of you in the radio and that’s sort of the lowest level of stage racing that can happen on road cycling. [inaudible 01:02:28] for example is a 2.22 and class two dot two, meaning it’s a multi-day race. I like it because that’s the same kind of thing I like in most other professional sports. I don’t necessarily like the top level. I like watching mid-tier sports because it’s kind of like in any given Sunday, weird things can happen.
Rick Buettel:
It’s not unscripted.
Andrew Paradowski:
Especially, you look at some of the racing nowadays rider goes off the front stays out for 180 kilometers gets caught within [inaudible 01:02:54] “Cool, I knew the outcome of this race before it even started. But with these lower level races, we have the up and coming stars, which is also another benefit. You get to see people well before they’re prime. If you looked at some of the Canadians that happened, the tour Hugo Hugh and Michael Woods are now top contenders in the tour.
Andrew Paradowski:
I saw these guys racing when they were just starting and that stuff was fun to watch because they tried stuff and it was scrappy.
Rick Buettel:
You can tar stuff and people let you go. Then finally, back to where we are now, what’s your favorite competition on the track?
Andrew Paradowski:
I like them all. I think if I had to pick one, I’d probably say the Omnium. I think that’s probably the most interesting one just because of the nature of how the tournament is structured. It’s four races. I like all of them. A lot of people complain about the tempo race. I think it’s an interesting race. It certainly can change the outcome of the race.
Andrew Paradowski:
It’s evolved over time since they’ve introduced it. Obviously the UC guys is trying to fix it a little bit and try to make it fit the mold a bit better elimination race. It’s got all the greats, all the great endurance race in one. Elimination is a great race to watch. Then all those points that you’ve just earned now come into the points race, which is probably my favorite single race as well.
Andrew Paradowski:
Then just the strategy, the tactics that go on riders get a road race riders get let go off the front. These guys who are down and they’ve only got 20 or 40 points. Nobody cares if they go off and lap the field and riders are marking themselves. You even see it earlier on in the early races when riders don’t care if they finish third or fourth in a tempo, because all they needed was that one point just to get in the top five, just so they can get those 36, 38 points, whatever. The strategy is really important and obviously you need to be able to stay in the race, but it’s a great race.
Rick Buettel:
No, I love the Omni and we just had our Tokyo Omni and Olympic champion here for a couple of weeks. Jim Valente was here for UCI block, came back for nationals. That was really cool. It was so maybe final question. People, when you leave, you leave a legacy, you leave your mark and I know you just got here, but what is it that your view of the most important thing to do to leave your legacy when 10 years from now, when we talk to you again and you’re running Cycling in Canada or president of the UCI?
Rick Buettel:
No, I wouldn’t wish that on you. What’s important for you in your tenure here at T-Town while you’re in the chair? What is it you really want to accomplish? You want to look back fondly on and people want to say, “Wow, when Andrew was here, this changed and this changed really, really for the better, and we’ll always remember you for that.”
Andrew Paradowski:
It’s interesting because I’ve never considered myself an out front kind of guy. I’m behind the scenes, try to help build stuff and make stuff work and all that kind of stuff. To say, people remember me for doing something I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with that, I want to continue building the community that’s already here and engage everybody to help and make it be like a group effort kind of thing.
Andrew Paradowski:
Maybe when Andrew is here, this happened not Andrew did this, for sure. I think we touched on it earlier we talked about the pyramid, you mentioned the pyramid and this can’t build the top of the pyramid and then expect it to float in midair. You start with the base and you build everything up and everything will build from that. If people remember the tenure that I was here, that the group, the community, the staff, the volunteers, we all helped to build that base layer, the community programs.
Andrew Paradowski:
Getting new people into the sport, getting new people to the track that I would consider a successful time here at the track, because everything will just build on top of that. It’ll almost happen by itself. You build that base, it’s easy to then go, and just build the next level and start trying out new things and building racing, and getting bigger stuff happening. You can’t build from the top down. I think if I’m known for having rekindled that community spirit here, then I think I’ll be satisfied with that.
Rick Buettel:
That’ll go a long way for sure and I look forward to that. Andrew, thank you for the time today to all of our listeners, thank you for the time and for your years, for our valuable sponsors and our supporters. Thank you very much. Have a great rest of your day.
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