A plate of half eaten nachos sat on the table, Doug leaned back and quoted W.P Kinsella’s book, Shoeless Joe, “If you build it, they will come.” It wasn’t the first time I had heard him repeat the line. Unlike the novel’s protagonist, Ray Kinsella, whose dream was to build a baseball diamond, Doug’s was to build a velodrome. For over a decade he’d looked for a field within riding distance of his hometown of Boulder, Colorado, where he could build a track.
In his dreams, this wasn’t a fancy facility that would cost a fortune, but a board track in a yard with a few port-a-potties, an announcer calling the races, dozens of riders whirling around, and a small crowd of spectators in the stands that are munching on popcorn and drinking beer under the summer sun. When I first met Doug Emerson, he’d described it just like that. (Continue reading)
