Cycling enthusiast brings back racing

Once a bit of a hotbed for competitive cycling, Cape Girardeau has been without a racing event since 1997, the last year of the Tour de Girardot.

John Dodd wants to change that.

The owner of Cyclewerx cycling shop on North Kingshighway, Dodd is bringing a mountain bike event to Cape Girardeau this year and has plans for a road race in the future.

"We're into promoting cycling," said Dodd, whose business will be celebrating its second anniversary in April.

Dodd teamed with Dustin Groves and others last year to develop a 2-mile mountain biking trail at Delaware Park, located at Lexington and Old Sprigg Street.

"You had to go over to a place in Illinois 45 minutes away for any legitimate place to ride, or some other places 2 hours away," Dodd said. "If you're going to be into mountain biking, it's nice to have some place in the area to ride."

That trail and some nearby private land will make up the 5-mile course for the CycleWerx Cape Girardeau Race on Aug. 28. The race is one six on the 2005 Missouri State NORBA Mountain Bike Series.

Each stop on the series includes a variety of divisions, including races for those compiling series points as well as beginners, with age group divisions, and juniors and first timers.

Dodd expects about 100 to 150 cyclists to participate with 15 or 20 of those coming from this area.

Dodd has ideas for the return of road racing, perhaps as early as 2006.

"They're hard to put on," Dodd said. "In a closed mountain bike race, you don't have to worry about traffic. For a road race, you need marshals for the course. We'll try to bite off this one first, and next year we might do a road race."

Cape Girardeau's last competitive cycling event, the annual Tour de Girardot, ended in 1997 with two days of cycling events: a 4-mile time trial, a youth race, a criterium, a 63-mile expert race and a 42-mile amateur race. The event attracted more than 250 competitors, including 164 riders with the U.S. Cycling Federation.

Bill Logan, who was the director of the race and is now director of operartions for Southeast Missouri Hospital's HealthPoint Plaza, said a number of factors contributed to that race's demise.

"Road races, especially staged road races, are very expensive to put on," Logan said. "And the thing just takes a ton of planning. Unless you're on a closed course, you're always going to be concerned about traffic, and you have to man every intersection."

He said the Tour de Girardot took place annually for three years. He noted that a criterium -- a race of laps usually staged around some city blocks -- took place annually in downtown Cape Girardeau over roughly four years in the 1980s.

Cape Girardeau's cycling history actually has a rich tradition dating back to the 1890s and 1900s, when cycling -- which predominantly was either 1-mile races or 6-day events -- was one of the most popular sports in the U.S.

A quarter-mile track at Main Street, on the site that eventually was the International Shoe Company, hosted cycling greats from around the world. A Philadelphia Press article in 1898 listed Cape Girardeau as one of the outlaw tracks being used by the Cycle Racers Union, which had split from the League of American Wheelmen.

E.M. Doyle of Cape Girardeau became a world champion cyclist in the 1-mile in 1901, according to a Southeast Missourian story published in 1967.

Cycling in the Cape Girardeau region currently is of the recreational nature. The Velo Girardeau Bicycle Club, founded in 1979, has 60 members and offers recreational rides and tours. The Tour de Cape is a noncompetitive cycling event that takes place each fall and offers rides of various distances in the region.