The Rare Break that Stays Away in Prospect Park
Photo by Sebastian Vidal
Bike racing in Brooklyn is back. This weekend’s Lucarelli & Castaldi Cup marked the first race of 14 hosted in Prospect Park this year and TBD was on-hand to test its early-season form. Our race plan was simple: I’d go for the break and try to make it stick. If it failed, Clay Jones—holder of the 2018 L&C series yellow jersey for a few races—or Alvaro Soltero would try to sprint for the win.
Here at TBD we like math. Some time ago we did some calculus about “how often breakaways stick in Prospect Park.” The answer is: Not as often as you’d hope. According to our less-than-scientific analysis, only about one in six elite race breakaways stay away from the pack in Prospect Park, and even fewer lower category races have successful breaks. But this math has all been based on large 123 fields and large category 4-only fields—this year’s L&C Cup series features a new 3/4 field—so we thought, “Perhaps it’s time to retest this theory?” And lo, this is how I came to be in the winning break.
The move went early—only 20 minutes into an hour-fifteen minute race—and by the last couple of laps we had nearly two-minutes on the main bunch. Our last lap featured more mouse than cat—it’s early in the year, after all, and we’d been out front for over 50 minutes.
Photo by Marco Quezada for Lucarelli & Castaldi
Despite our slow-down, we ended up gapping the main field by 50 seconds. Angelo Calilap from 5th Floor took the win over fellow breakaway members from Vela Society, E2 Value, Rockstar Games, myself and a member of the newly formed team “42x21ATQ”—which is likely one of the toughest team-names in the peloton to remember, say out-loud or put onto paper without spelling incorrectly.
We’ll see you next week in Prospect for the start of the Castelli Series.
A 6th-finish for Clark Fredricksen in the breakaway. Photo by Sebastian Vidal
