With everything shut down, including the Driveway Series, Bill stopped charging me rent. But when the governor of Texas opened the state back up in June, the rent was due again.
I started delivering for DoorDash to cover the monthly payments for the track. At the behest of many of the Driveway Series’ longtime financial supporters, I decided to run a six-race series that same month. Even with all the COVID precautions we took—pre and post-race masks, temperature checks and socially distanced starts—the decision elicited outrage from other Driveway Series participants.
One week after George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was murdered by police in Minneapolis, a cycling website called the Radavist published an op-ed titled, Bike Racing, White Privilege and the Coronavirus. The article accurately assessed the inequity and structural racism that’s inherent in amateur bike racing, and scrutinized my decision to put on mass-start events as the virus disproportionately ravaged marginalized communities.
With the world seemingly in flames, I began receiving dozens of death threats online. People wrote that they hoped me and my family got COVID and died. My daughter, who was a teenager, saw some of the comments on social media and became upset. Our sponsors got tagged in many of the negative posts and comments, and it wasn’t long before Life Time discontinued its sponsorship. Eventually, Kelley and I decided to end the mini-series early.
It would have been easy for me to get puffed up, roll my eyes, and mutter something about snowflakes. I hadn’t thought too deeply about how my own gender and race potentially affected my life’s trajectory. But, how many sponsor deals had I closed with other white dudes who liked bikes?
Of the roughly 300 starters at the Driveway Series, maybe two or three of the racers were Black. And only one in ten were women. Though I wanted more women racing, I’d prioritized the races with the largest field sizes, which were almost entirely men. Then, a friend made a simple suggestion: I was already ahead financially for the night, why not reinvest in the fields that need growth?
When the Driveway series returned for a full season in 2021, I put the women’s open race at a more accessible start time at the end of the evening, right before the elite men’s race. To make room on the schedule, I took away the stand-alone men’s 40 plus masters race. The women rallied, getting more racers to come participate. An introductory racing program, the Leadout Foundation, organized a women’s specific cycling clinic that focused on riding confidently in a pack. On the evening of the clinic, the Driveway Series had its highest ever number of female starters, 53.
Near the end of the 2021 season, I learned that Bill had sold the racetrack. The City of Austin wanted to turn the entire compound into a public park with the track as the centerpiece, a plan strongly supported by a city-wide referendum. To me, it was another major obstacle in organizing the series for the upcoming year.
I’d also noticed my relationship with the participants changing. Instead of feeling inspired by their enthusiasm and passion for the sport, I began to see entitlement. I knew it was unintentional, but it seemed racers rarely made a distinction between their hobby and my job. So, when a younger racer, Chris Tolley, reached out to me with some questions about promoting events, I suggested we meet up at the track.
During the change in ownership, not much maintenance had occurred at the Driveway. Chris and I walked down the back straightaway, past all the downed branches and the grass growing up through cracks in the pavement. I’d known Chris since he’d started bike racing at the Driveway in 2015. He’d managed his own team, and developed a popular social media persona, tolleyallways, where he posted videos of his BMX tricks, as well as all the entertaining and inane stuff that spun through his vortex.
Coming up the little corkscrew hill, Chris turned to me, “I want to take over the Driveway Series. I want to buy you out.” I raised an eyebrow, “Don’t you want to dig into the finances?”
“Who’s going to clean all this up?” I asked.
“I will,” Chris said. “I’ll make it work. It will be my problem, not yours.”
These days, Chris will sometimes call me sounding pretty defeated. In a weird way, it gives me hope for the Driveway Series. In his voice, I can hear how much he cares. I also know that some of the highs and lows he’s faced in his first seasons running the series—the hottest summer on record, for example—are just the beginning.
