Velodrome Dreams Chris Vogel Has Found A Track Bicycle Racing Niche That He Is Riding To National Acclaim

Bicycle racer Chris Vogel says he has no business competing at the level he does in a sport that essentially doesn’t exist in Spokane.

Yet there he was last week, placing as high as seventh in a national championship event in conjunction with the U.S. Olympic team cycling trials at the Lehigh Valley Velodrome in Trexlertown, Pa., just missing the cut for the Summer Games.

Track cycling differs from road racing, which became popular and more visible in Spokane after the city hosted the U.S. Olympic trials in 1988.

Racing one-speed bicycles without brakes, the sport requires strength, speed and tactics as well as a willingness for contact in confined spaces in order to succeed.

“It’s like running a 100 meter dash down a hallway and stopping your opponent from getting by anyway you can,” said Vogel, 31. “If you’re afraid of contact you won’t survive.”

The Valley native and 1982 West Valley High School graduate was seventh in Keirin, a race developed in Japan in 1948.

Cyclists are paced by a motorcycle for four laps, followed by a mad two-lap sprint to the finish.

After drawing the lead position in his heat but finishing fourth, Vogel came back through loser-out challenge races to place seventh.

“I was pretty happy with that,” said Vogel. “It was one of the highest Northwest individual places in quite a few years.”

He also finished 11th in the Olympic sprint - a national event but not a trials event - and was 19th during the Olympic trials kilometer time trial and 26th in the match sprint.

He did it all with no local track and without formal coaching. But he has had the support of his Mead grade school students, Two Wheel Transit owner Steve Loveland and the Greater Spokane Sports Association.

A football player-track athlete in high school and college, Vogel had looked for something else to do when his eligibility ran out. He tried road racing to remain physically fit and quickly discovered he wasn’t cut out for it.

“I tried races and was dropped (passed) by the men, dropped by the juniors and dropped by the women,” he said. “I was an athlete and just out of college and wondered what I was doing there.”

Vogel assessed his strengths, which were sprinting and weight lifting. He had set a school record of 39.2 in the 300 low hurdles time while at WV and squatted as much as 500 pounds.

An “unremarkable” college athletic career included the decathlon at Spokane Community College and the football scout team at Eastern Washington University.

That all played into his ultimate transition to velodrome racing.

“I’d never seen it before,” he said. “I actually walked into a bike shop and saw a piece of paper advertising Marymoor Park and thought, ‘My god, that’s me.”’

Marymoor, in Seattle, is the Northwest’s closest banked velodrome. Against his parent’s wishes he spent a summer in Seattle as a self-professed “bike bum” to discover his muse.

He began winning and became a U.S. Cycling Federation member. He attained Category I status by racing in the 1992 Olympic Trials and then in several national championships, where he placed in the top 10 twice and top 20 five times.

In order to do better, Vogel would have to leave Spokane, something he is unwilling to do. His immediate family and job is here. His parents, Maury and Irene, babysit his and wife Wendy’s daughters, Eva and Katie.

“I could race at a higher level but at what cost to them?” he said. “I race at a disadvantage and am good. I may not be the best but can’t sacrifice the things that count.”

His students at Midway Elementary conducted a spaghetti feed and silent raffle that raised more than $2,000 for his trip.

“That shows a lot of what Spokane is like,” he said. “Why not leave and go someplace else? That is why.”

Instead, Vogel would like to bring a velodrome track to Spokane in an effort, he says, to make the Olympics a reality.

Even if it doesn’t happen, as long as his family concurs, Vogel intends to continue racing.

“I have no business competing at this level. I have no hands-on coaching, no track and am not accessible to equipment,” he said. “But I can’t see myself falling out of shape. Couch potato-ism doesn’t look good.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo