How the Richmond Cycling Corps Gets Kids on Bikes

RCC riders practicing at the Belle Isle Bicycle Skills Area

(Photo: Jared Soares)

The Kids from Cool Lane Just Want to Ride Bikes

Published: Feb 27, 2024 Updated: Feb 29, 2024

In May 2022, we took a spin with the Richmond Cycling Corps, a mountain-bike-racing team from the Virginia capital’s public-housing system. Coaches teach young riders how to shred trails and prepare for adult life. The kids, meanwhile, measure happiness one pedal stroke at a time.

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Pizza. At an Italian restaurant in a strip mall just outside an idyllic town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, seven teenage mountain-bike racers and two coaches crowd around a table. It was a busy Saturday in May 2022 at Virginia’s interscholastic mountain-biking series, known as VAHS.

The team, the Richmond Cycling Corps (RCC), consists of sixth-to-twelfth-graders who attend a variety of schools, but all have lived in or near public housing in the same part of Richmond, Virginia. I’m seated near the far end of the table. To my right, two eighth-grade boys talk excitedly: Chip, with his closely shorn hair and dimples, and Knowledge, a big, curious kid who’s somewhat new to mountain biking. Chip’s trying to persuade Knowledge to participate in a highly competitive racing series that’s part of the National Interscholastic
Cycling Association, or NICA.

Chip is serious about the idea. “Bro,” he says. “NICA?”

Knowledge enjoys mountain biking and loves being part of the team, but he’s on the fence about racing. “There’s college recruiters at NICA races. And I’m not going to college,” he says. “I’m going to do four years of high school, then another four years of college?”

Chip’s giggling, twisting his soda straw. “Bro?”

Knowledge: “I’m. Not. Racing NICA!”

Chip: “Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro.”

They both crack up.

Kamari, also in eighth grade and Knowledge’s longtime bestie, looks up from her pizza crust with light hazel eyes and whispers to me, “Where all have you been?” She’s shy—her sibling, Tawante, an RCC alum, told me, “She’s even shy with me, and I’m her brother!”—but she’s eager to explore the world beyond her home. Kamari described a favorite trip she’d been on with the RCC. “We went up to Bryce”—a skiing and mountain-biking resort about two and a half hours northwest of Richmond—“and we made a campfire. We played this game centipede. It’s kind of like hide and seek. The next day, we rode the bike park.” They did downhill runs with big jumps and took the ski lift back to the top.

The older boys are squeezed in together on the opposite side of the table. One of the team’s three coaches, 36-year-old Brad Kaplan, is across from me. He used to be a scout for the Oakland Raiders, but after 12 years he left pro football and decided to raise a family. In 2020, he and his wife and their new baby moved from the Bay Area to Richmond, closer to his wife’s family, where their money would go further. Brad took graduate classes in nonprofit studies. Before working for the RCC, he knew nothing about mountain biking. But he’s comfortable working with young athletes.

Between greasy bites, Brad turns to Wop, a slender freshman with tightly twisted locks that fall just below his ears. “I heard you lost someone this week,” Brad says.

“Yeah,” Wop replies. It was his older brother’s friend, Keshon.

“How old was he?”

“Twenty. He’d just gotten out of jail.” Keshon was shot in Creighton Court, the projects where Wop used to live, near a convenience store where a lot of kids get shot or shot at.

Wop doesn’t know if he’ll go to the funeral. It’s May, and he’s already been to four this year.

Richmond Cycling Corps coach and executive director Matt Kuhn loads bikes with Malachi Dewitt (left) and Tavon Baskerville at the group’s headquarters prior to a group ride. (Photo: Jared Soares)

Photos of competing riders sit prominently in the RCC headquarters in downtown Richmond. (Photo: Jared Soares)

To Wop’s right is Chip’s older brother, Joe, a sophomore and the first guy on the RCC team who shaved his legs. He fractured his left arm riding a motorbike and has been laid up with a cast. There’s also Naz, a freshman who celebrated his 15th birthday yesterday by going to a mall and getting a nose ring.

Just as we are all sitting there contemplating another slice, Naz’s older brother, Korey, who is seated next to him, gets a call from their dad, who does not yet know about the nose ring. Naz doesn’t know if his father will approve. Korey, who’s at the far end of the table, jumps up from his seat to take the call somewhere a bit quieter. A few minutes later, he sits back down and reports the conversation’s results.

“He wanted to know if he could take me to a movie this afternoon,” Korey says, looking a bit bashful. “Said, ‘I know you’ve got such a busy schedule and all.’ ”

Korey, who is muscular and has a bright smile, is the star of the team, and his phone has been blowing up with post-competition texts from high school friends who also race mountain bikes. Many of the messages were sent by Ella, a fellow senior with sandy blond hair who’d been leading the VAHS girls series. She’d placed second in her varsity race earlier in the day, and the result won her the overall series title. After she finished, Ella walked up to Korey to talk. Her eyes had dampened. He panicked, waving his hands and saying, “I don’t do that emotional stuff.”

To ride and race bikes every day as a job? “I would love it,” Korey says. But bike racing is expensive.

Across the table, the team’s head coach and executive director, Matt Kuhn, a 30-year-old with a beard and thick mustache, picks up his phone and opens the Whoop app, which displays data from the riders’ health trackers, similar to a Fitbit. Korey, who’s been suffering from allergies and taking standardized tests all week, has been registering off-the-charts stress scores. Out of curiosity, Matt looks at Joe’s data. “Sheesh, Joe, you didn’t sleep at all last night. And you slept three hours and four hours per night before that,” he says. “What have you been doing?”

Joe, busted, leans his head back and shakes it from side to side, then says: “I been out!”

In the parking lot after their meal, the team grades the pizza, which Matt had dubbed “the best mediocre pizza in the Blue Ridge.” Korey says it wasn’t bad, but not nearly as good as the Mellow Mushroom pizza they’d eaten in Richmond’s boutique-lined Carytown neighborhood earlier that week.

“That pizza was the bomb,” he says. “Except for that lemonade. That lemonade was wack.”

He follows his teammates into the RCC van, which is hitched to a trailer containing a dozen or so top-of-the-line mountain bikes. Korey grabs the van doors and, before closing them, shouts into the warm mountain air—as if to no one and everyone at once—a final, inarguable point: “They need to get a Black person to make that shit!”

RCC riders heading out to practice at the Belle Isle Bicycle Skills Area in Richmond (Photo: Jared Soares)

Korey taking a midride break near the downtown high-rises (Photo: Jared Soares)

It had already been a big week for the Richmond Cycling Corps. On Monday, the team held a fundraiser and silent auction at the Byrd Theater, a classic movie palace on the Carytown strip. More than 300 supporters, friends, and family came out to watch a short film about the RCC. Created by an award-winning, mountain-bike-focused production company, Anthill Films, the feel-good flick was funded by Shimano, one of the team’s sponsors. Released on the Shimano YouTube channel, the film and its title, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, reflects the attitude of the RCC coaches and riders.

Shimano gave each RCC team member concession-stand money for the showing. In the theater atrium, surrounded by gilded paneling and beneath a crystal chandelier, Korey and his crew worked their way through the crowd of cocktail-sipping cycling enthusiasts and filled their arms with boxes of candy and popcorn. Then they took their seats in the front row.

The crowd hollered as the red velvet curtains parted and the movie began. Korey appeared on the screen in his black, yellow, and purple RCC racing kit, riding past the redbrick row homes in “the courts,” the collective name for Richmond’s six remaining housing projects.

Built between 1941 and 1962, these developments exist as islands, hemmed in by busy roads and with little access to jobs, grocery stores, or health care. The typical household income ranges from $12,500 to $20,000 annually. Gun violence and homicides occur at a high rate in and around the courts, leading to what residents consider to be rampant overpolicing. Nationally, people in public housing are about twice as likely to be stopped and questioned.

In Fairfield Court, where many of the RCC kids live, the life expectancy is about 60—20 years less than in the wealthier neighborhoods on the city’s west side. In 2020, Richmond’s chief of police described the city’s decaying projects as “a jail without walls.” For years, Richmond’s leaders have considered demolishing the courts, despite the potential political consequences of displacing thousands of low-income residents.

On the screen, Korey rolls out of Fairfield Court and pulls his dual-suspension mountain bike into a wheelie, a trick he learned as a kid on an old Huffy without a seatpost or a seat, busting his ass again and again until he got it. He rides through the city’s gentrifying East End and then downtown toward buffed singletrack along the James River. There his teammates join him to shred. The audience in the theater whistled and shouted in applause.

Now in his senior year, Korey is 17 and soon will age out of the cocoon of the RCC, which pays his racing expenses. He’d joined the program in 2014 as a wiry ten-year-old, after noticing a white dude with spiky blond hair in his neighborhood. That was Craig Dodson, a former pro and the founder of the RCC, who was building a bike park behind Armstrong High, right across the street from Korey’s home.

Craig first discovered the courts in 2005, when the manager of his bike-racing team asked him to give a talk at the local Boys and Girls Club. For about 30 minutes, he spouted motivational clichés like We’re all in this together! Then he looked out at the faces of the assembled kids, who stared back at him like they’d heard all this before and had long since decided he was full of it. The disconnect between his intentions and their reaction haunted him. So in 2010, he came back and started a cycling team.

A racer myself, I’d competed against Craig in the early 2000s at national events up and down the East Coast. Later, after becoming a journalist, I watched a short profile CNN produced on his commitment to helping kids in Richmond’s public housing and began keeping tabs on the RCC.

Craig envisioned the bike park as a centerpiece of the program, and during that hot and humid summer of 2014, Korey showed up every day to pitch in, wearing basketball shorts and busted slides. Mostly, he wanted to drive the riding lawn mower that Craig used to haul dirt and tools.

That fall, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Armstrong Bike Park—its historic namesake high school dates back to 1865 and the days of the Freedmen’s Bureau—Korey stood beside Richmond mayor Dwight C. Jones. In recognition for all the work Korey had done, Craig gave him a golden shovel trophy—an actual shovel spray-painted gold.

After the ceremony, Korey peered out across the bike park’s two-mile track, with its bermed corners, rhythm sections, and jumps, and felt a sense of fulfillment. Then he got on a bike and soared, hitting a jump and whipping his rear wheel in the air. His older teammates looked on in awe. Innate body control or a natural connection with the bike—whatever it was that made someone a good rider, Korey had it.

People connected to the RCC recognized that Korey was among the first of the team’s riders to have the talent and ambition to race professionally. During his senior year, he consistently hovered near the top ten in Virginia’s super competitive high school series, so the idea didn’t seem implausible. To ride and race bikes every day as a job? “I would love it,” he told me one afternoon, smiling. But bike racing is expensive. And there’s not a lot of support out there for aspiring pros. It’s not like he can forgo an education.

In the RCC’s 13-plus years of existence, its coaches have helped riders gain admission to both junior and four-year colleges, or guided them toward the military or vocational training programs, but only one has gone on to complete a college degree. In 2012, the first RCC rider to enroll in college, at Virginia State University, dropped out after his younger brother was arrested on drug charges. He felt like he’d failed his family by not being around. Another rider joined the military, but he couldn’t kick his pot habit and was discharged. Another got into a Job Corps program, but then someone stole something and she wouldn’t give them up, so she was cut loose.

“We call it the trap spot,” Demonte Cosby, an RCC alum, says of Richmond’s public housing. “Once you’re in, it’s hard to get out.” Demonte is the first former team member to earn a college diploma. He graduated from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina in December 2021.

As someone who was allowed to visit the RCC’s small world and got to know these kids, I wonder and worry. Who gets to chase fun, frivolous, bold dreams like racing on the cross-country mountain-biking circuit, competing in a World Cup, maybe even making an Olympic team? Does Korey?

Korey practicing stunts at Forest Hill Park (Photo: Jared Soares)

Korey and I had plans to meet near his house in Fairfield Court on Tuesday and ride to a training race on the other side of the city, at a big nature preserve in north Richmond called Bryan Park. I was staying at an Airbnb, a three-story walk-up in the Chimborazo section of the East End, within walking distance of cool cafés.

The Airbnb’s owner, Brie, a social worker and longtime activist, told me that her family bought the home some 40 years ago, as the East End gradually gentrified. Because of Federal redlining—a New Deal–era mortgage-lending policy that rated communities of color high-risk—the predominantly Black community that lived in the East End struggled to acquire loans to purchase homes, and the Richmond government invested little in the neighborhood’s infrastructure. White people like Brie’s parents eventually bought houses for less than $20,000 and fixed them up. Today, homes in Chimborazo sell for up to $500,000.

I rode over to the meeting spot, an intersection on the edge of Fairfield Court, and waited for ten minutes or so, dressed in Lycra and seated on my race bike. Eventually, Korey pinged me, apologized profusely (“for real my fault”), and suggested I meet him at his house. His family lives on Cool Lane in a subsidized housing complex called Townsend Square. The homes border Fairfield Court and are zoned for a Henrico County high school six miles away.

Armstrong has a proud history and has produced some of Richmond’s most esteemed leaders and thinkers, but these days it’s one of Virginia’s lowest-
performing schools. The more suburban and socioeconomically diverse Henrico County district ranks modestly higher. Thus, because Cool Lane is linked to Henrico County schools, it’s become a more desirable place to live within Richmond’s public-housing ranks. Kids like Korey tend to experience fewer disruptions at school and have a more stable home environment. “It’s the hood, but not really the hood,” explains Demonte, who grew up in a different part of Fairfield Court. (When I told Korey this, he said, “He ain’t lying.”)

I ask Matt: “What is this place? A preserve?” He smiles. Wouldn’t that be nice? No, he tells me. “It’s an old landfill.”

Still, residents on Cool Lane aren’t insulated from violence and crime. A few years back, Matt told me, a couple of RCC riders who lived there didn’t make it to practice. “They couldn’t get out of their house because there was a dead person on the doorstep, and there were bullet holes in the front door,” he said.

Korey raced with Demonte on the RCC team for four years. They still speak regularly, often while playing video games online. Demonte studied outdoor recreation at Warren Wilson, earning straight A’s and riding for the school’s varsity cycling team. But his path wasn’t easy. At 13, he lost his father to drug addiction. Then his uncle overdosed. He still suffers from PTSD from the gun violence he’s witnessed.

“A body missing its arm,” he says, describing the aftermath of a shooting. “I take pills for this shit.” Energetic and outgoing, Demonte got kicked off of the RCC more than once for inciting mini rebellions within the team, acting out as a result of his trauma. Demonte’s mom encouraged him to attend counseling, and Matt checked in with him regularly and invited him back.

For a few years, prior to the pandemic, the RCC ran its own high school for its riders. Team officials hired two full-time teachers and saw seven students graduate, including Demonte. He went on to complete a semester of junior college, then got a full scholarship to Warren Wilson. The team’s coach slowly introduced Demonte to the other riders on the college’s cycling team and told everyone, “You all have differences, and I want you to spend some time learning about each other.”

“It was culture shock, for me and them,” Demonte says. “My first year, using my slang, they didn’t understand the words, but they wanted to learn what I was saying.” Demonte appreciated the effort. Matt hopes Korey will apply to Warren Wilson, too, since members of the cycling team already know and respect Demonte there.

Korey and Matt hanging out in Forest Hill Park (Photo: Jared Soares)

Korey during a ride at dusk (Photo: Jared Soares)

Korey and I navigate downtown Richmond, riding past murals and art installations honoring Black history, and then arrive at Bryan Park for the first of two events that night: a B race for the less experienced, and an A race featuring the city’s fastest riders. Korey rides the B race and sprints into third place. Stoked with the $20 in prize money, he plans to do the A race, too. But so many fellow racers and friends approach him to talk that he misses the start. The Shimano film’s growing number of YouTube views have made Korey and his teammates a little famous in the regional cycling scene, something they’re learning to graciously navigate. “I didn’t want to be rude,” Korey later explains.

Before we leave the park, Korey sees Ella, rolls over, and pokes her on the shoulder. Every week they meet up at a gym where Ella is a member and do workouts she designs. Her lifting regimen can leave Korey drenched in sweat and flat on the floor. But that doesn’t stop him from talking smack, challenging Ella to ramp it up. In the fall, she’ll head to Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, where she’ll race for the country’s top collegiate mountain-biking team. During our ride back from Bryan Park, Korey tells me he wants to go there, too. Ella knows he’d love Durango, with its tight-knit cycling community and endless miles of Rocky Mountain singletrack, where it’s not uncommon to bump into a world champion or two.

Ella’s been helping Korey with his application essay, which delves into his life in Fairfield Court. Reading about the sound of gunfire every night, and how much the RCC means to him, she began to understand how vastly Korey’s circumstances differed from her own. “You hear stories. You hear a lot of white-savior stuff,” Ella told me. “I’m fortunate to know Korey.”

Like Demonte, Korey will need to complete a semester or two of community college before applying. He did well with remote learning during the pandemic, but his grades slipped during his senior year. Some days he didn’t bother showing up to class, which he thought was pointless because of the abundance of worksheets and the lack of individual instruction. Demonte advised Korey to take one community college course in the morning and one at night, to prepare himself for the kind of uneven schedule he’d encounter in a university. Sit in the front. Take notes. Ask questions.

Leaving downtown Richmond, Korey and I ride across the Leigh Street viaduct, which crosses over the sprawling interstate separating his neighborhood from the rest of the city. The construction of I-95, begun in 1954, resulted in both a physical and a metaphorical barrier that contributed to the isolation of Richmond’s Black population in the Jim Crow era. The freeway led to the demolition of 18 blocks of Jackson Ward, a thriving Black community with five Black-owned banks, and funneled affluent white workers into Richmond’s expanding suburbs.

We make our way through the East End and back toward Fairfield Court, and I ask Korey if he’s confident about college. He nods and says he might want to study engineering. “I just need to focus,” he says.

Chip (left) and Naz ride in the alley behind the Richmond Cycling Corps headquarters in Virginia’s capital. (Photo: Jared Soares)

A few days later, on Friday evening, I join the RCC team for a chill warm-up ride at the Armstrong Bike Park, meant to loosen their legs and settle their nerves ahead of Saturday’s race. The race is last of four events in VAHS’s annual spring series, which runs from April through May. Virginia’s fall high school series, NICA, also comprises four races, spanning September and October. At the end of each series, team and individual state championships are awarded.

Rolling out from the park, we round a corner onto Creighton Road, where smoke billows up from grills and beats crack out of Bluetooth speakers. Kids zip around on Bird scooters, sometimes two or three to a ride. The community has gathered in animated conversation on concrete stoops overlooking airy lawns.

Chip is intently practicing wheelies—a rite of passage for high school mountain bikers—repeatedly popping his front tire a foot or so off the ground. A woman spots Wop, who used to live here. She shouts, “Yeah, Wop!” ��ϳԹ�� the convenience store at the end of the street, Wop sees his older brother, who throws him a big wave. Matt and I are the only white people in sight.

Matt’s sporting a pair of pink and blue socks that read TRANS RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS. He came to the RCC around the same time Korey did, as an assistant to Craig. A bit aimless back then, studying sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, “learning a lot about communism,” he says, and riding mountain bikes whenever he could, Matt started as a volunteer and eventually became RCC’s director. One of his first jobs was to transport a single rider to an early-morning tutoring session on time. To do that, he had to climb onto the roof over the family’s porch and bang on the kid’s window until he woke up.

We take a left down a hill, into a neighborhood with small homes bound by chain-link fences, then dip under a pair of steel barriers onto a dirt service road. Matt tells us, “If anyone says anything, just keep rolling. I’ll deal with it.” As we bump through a sun-dappled meadow, someone spots a deer with newly sprouted antlers grazing in the knee-high grass. Korey leads us into the woods, down singletrack winding alongside a creek. On a steep hill, Chip’s back cramps up and he falls behind a little. Matt rides back down and talks to him quietly. We wait. Wop shouts, “C’mon, Chip. Fast legs, fast legs. C’mon, Chip.”

Verdant ferns frame a narrow trail that leads us to a place the team calls “the spot.” Wop clarifies: the jump spot. An unofficial bike park built beneath towering pines, the spot is a dirt playground of imposing kickers, step-ups, and tabletops. Matt’s mountain-bike buddies built a lot of the jumps. He tests out a new one. “Be careful, it’s got a steep lip,” he yells.

Aware that low-income and minority communities often lack access to greenspace and recreational opportunities, I ask Matt: “What is this place? A preserve?” He smiles. Wouldn’t that be nice? No, he tells me. “It’s an old landfill.”

Naz makes his way to the starting line during the Virginia High School Mountain Bike race at Blue Ridge School in Saint George, Virginia. (Photo: Jared Soares)

On Saturday, in the morning twilight, the RCC van trundles its way through the courts. Matt stops in front of each rider’s apartment, and one by one they pile in with blankets and headphones. We drive toward the Appalachians, and the riders’ curled-up bodies barely stir before we reach Woodberry Forest School, an all-boys boarding academy that’s hosting today’s race. White-columned buildings and carefully manicured grounds, spread out over 1,200 acres, reflect the school’s pricey tuition. It costs upwards of $60,000 annually to attend.

Matt gives the riders an option. “Do you want to set up in the team area or over by the parking?”

“Team area,” everyone says.

Matt nods. They weren’t always so confident about being around other kids. Korey told me that when he started racing, “I didn’t walk around at all. I didn’t interact with people. I felt like an outsider.” In the program’s early days, riders set up away from other teams. “They weren’t really interested in socializing,” says Matt. “It was a rowdier crew, lots of cursing. There would be a lot of shocked faces.” Back then, riders talked frequently about code-switching—adopting the norms of predominantly white spaces. Matt says it was Demonte who decided he wanted to be friends with everybody: “He created a culture in the team around actually being a cyclist.”

Later I track down the head of the VAHS series, Peter Hufnagel, an educator and former pro racer who also coaches Virginia’s most dominant team, made up of riders from the Miller School of Albermarle. I share some of my own anxieties about potential land mines—class, race, culture.

“Yeah, but kids don’t think like that,” he says, because they don’t carry our adult baggage. Hufnagel says that, these days, the other high school teams view the RCC as one of the most buttoned-up high school mountain-bike teams in the state.

As the team starts making camp in a grassy field, everyone contributes, setting up the tent, arranging a table with snacks and sandwich supplies, and hanging the carbon-fiber bikes on a rack. They don their matching helmets and shoes, adjust their custom sunglasses just so, and head out to ride a recon lap. The course is a twisting, roughly three-mile circuit of wooded singletrack interspersed with stretches of open dirt road.

Matt tells me that the RCC’s attitude has long been: We will not be the Bad News Bears, meaning that the team holds itself to a high standard of behavior. In 2014, back when high school mountain biking was just getting started in Virginia, Kamari’s older brother, Tawante, won the freshman boys title, and the team placed third out of fifteen overall. Well-heeled recreational cyclists and corporate sponsors took note and asked how they could help. Donations from affluent corners of the cycling scene still give the RCC financial stability. Unlike a high school football program, the team operates as a nonprofit outside the school system, and its funding comes almost entirely from private donors. The annual budget is currently $180,000.

Almost under his breath, coach Brad Kaplan tells me that there’s an irony to all this: “We don’t really care about bike racing.” The RCC primarily exists to support some of the most vulnerable kids in Richmond. Bikes are simply the hook. Tutoring, helping a kid write a résumé, getting riders to dental appointments, therapy sessions, or court appearances—RCC staff are active with all that, and the club’s reach extends far beyond bikes.

The team, which varies in size from about six to twelve riders each year, regularly works with some of the most traumatized kids in the housing projects. In fact, Matt feels frustrated that so many of the current riders hail from Cool Lane. He’s actively recruiting from public housing and lower-income neighborhoods.

At one point, Matt shows me an Instagram video from a fifth-grade boy who’d expressed interest in joining. In it the boy softly waves a handgun at the camera. It’s not uncommon for preteens in the courts to start carrying early, usually for protection—to not get “caught lacking.” Matt sent the video to RCC founder Craig Dodson, who responded, “Yep, that’s the kid you want.”

The team races hard. And when they’re not racing, they’re zipping around the course, cheering on their teammates, and taking videos.

The eighth-grade boys race first at Woodberry Forest. Matt stands in the staging area with Knowledge. Knowledge is a little frazzled. It’s been unseasonably hot, almost 100 degrees, and the electricity and air-conditioning went out at his house last night. He didn’t sleep well.

“Matt?” Knowledge asks. “You know in the film how you explained the idea for the team’s legacy? That one day one of the members would hopefully take over the program?” Matt, listening with one ear to the announcer call-ups, says, “Yeah, for sure.” He’s aware of his whiteness. He knows that someone from the kids’ world would connect with them better than him.

“Well, I was thinking maybe it would be me?” Knowledge says. “But then I was thinking it will probably be Korey. I mean, it will definitely be Korey. But, you know, Korey wants to race pro. So maybe it could be me?” Matt looks at Knowledge with full attention. “Yeah, it could be you.”

The announcer calls Knowledge’s name, and he rolls to the back of the crowded field.

The team races hard. All of them. And when they’re not racing, they’re zipping around the course, cheering on their teammates and friends, and taking videos for social media and one another. In the junior varsity race, with a field of more than 100 riders, both Naz and Wop get caught up in crashes right at the start.

Wop gets buried under a pile of kids and can’t untangle his bike. When he’s up and rolling again, he’s well behind the leaders, but he tries to pass as many kids as he can. Coming into the finish, he sees Korey and Joe at the edge of the woods, urging him to catch the rider ahead. Wop accelerates as he flies past and says, “Gonna spark him up!” Korey and Joe find this hilarious. After the race, the boys watch the video again and again, doubling over with laughter each time.

In the lazy moments between races, waiting for the varsity boys and girls to start, Knowledge and Kamari lie on a blanket spread in the shade. Kamari’s race went well, much better than last year, when her handlebar caught a tree and tossed her off the trail. Now she is methodically munching on Funyuns. Korey takes off his shirt in the heat and lounges in a folding chair. A tattoo on his right shoulder says MOM DUKES, an homage to his mother. The rest of the older boys take their shirts off too, the sweat beading on their chests. Joe, with his arm in a cast, sulks a bit, scrolling on his phone.

Joe dreams of going to the Miller School, where life revolves around riding. Matt’s trying to make it happen. He tells me that Joe recently got into a fight, “defending a friend”—no big deal by itself, but such incidents can escalate. So Matt and Joe and Joe’s mom visited the Miller School, where the teachers are happy to accommodate the school’s cyclists and their racing schedules. Miller has a high-tech indoor training facility that made Matt drool—RCC riders, who don’t have anything like that, struggle to maintain fitness every winter. Joe could attend the Miller School as soon as next semester, the team’s coach told him. But they’d need to figure out financial aid, and even then he’d need a sponsor to cover the remaining tuition.

Chip rolls past the older boys, working on his wheelie.

“Put it in a lower gear!” Korey yells.

Then Ella comes over, wearing the VAHS leader’s jersey. She needs to place first to take the series.

“You’re gonna win,” Korey tells her.

“I dunno,” she rolls her shoulders.

“You always say that, and then you win,” Korey says.

Chip rolls up to the edge of the conversation. Thinking out loud, he says, “I’d love to win a race.”

Naz (left) and Chip (Photo: Jared Soares)

Naz after the Virginia High School cycling race (Photo: Jared Soares)

The varsity boys head to the starting line, and now Matt’s standing next to Korey. Matt knows that Korey puts a lot of pressure on himself, dissecting every race, the mistakes he made, how he could have gone faster. Korey tends to start with the leaders and then fade. He doesn’t train as hard as many of the other kids, some of whom have private coaches. Korey, meanwhile, works part-time at Panera Bread, and helps his mom watch his little sister.

Last night, gearing up mentally for the race, Matt looked at all the old pictures of Korey on his phone. “He started out this tiny kid surrounded by a bunch of huge dudes, the original group,” Matt told me. Over the years, he said, Korey continued to ride with each cohort, until they, too, graduated from the program. “He’s been in every group until this group, and now it’s his team.”

“When he was younger, the older guys were wild,” Matt said. “One team member would go steal cars. There was a disconnect, because Korey wasn’t interested in that. But they also kind of saw what he was doing, that it was different and good. And now the other kids look up to him. That’s his legacy.”

Matt says Korey’s background has its challenges, but it also comes with opportunities. “It’s not like the nineties,” he tells me. “There are so many scholarships out there for marginalized youth.” But getting them requires commitment. Every year a few ambitious kids from Fairfield Court receive thousands of dollars in scholarships. Every year a handful leave the neighborhood—escape the cycle of poverty. Matt is cognizant that organizations like the RCC are a start, not a solution. They won’t unwind centuries of institutional racism, or an economic system that’s kept generations of Black people poor and stuck in one area.

“A guaranteed basic income would be a start,” Matt says, so a parent can make a PTA meeting instead of working two jobs. The city has already begun making changes. Bulldozers are razing Creighton Court; mixed-use developments interspersed with subsidized housing will replace the projects.

The announcer calls Korey’s name. He rides to the starting line. Fulfilling dreams is fraught, and I suppose it’s chasing them that really matters. Korey warned me not to discount his agency. “I don’t hate where I’m from,” he told me. “It made me who I am today.” Weeks later he would send me his college essay. “I am no longer waiting for chances,” he wrote at the end. “I am making my own.”

From March/April 2024

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Lead Photo: Jared Soares

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The Kids from Cool Lane Just Want to Ride Bikes

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