While the former box stores of the abandoned Lloyd Center mall collected dust awaiting demolition, outside the building spectators lined the entrance two deep on NE Multnomah on August 15 and 16. They banged on barricades, devoured free hot dogs in Holladay Park, and sipped lagers in the beer garden. Above, a few dozen more lined the roof of a long empty parking garage. The mall—once a monument to auto-oriented commercialism that eventually and briefly morphed into a half-vacant, liminal space art gallery—had been permanently closed for one week. But someone taking a Sunday stroll through the park wouldn’t think so, hearing 50 perfectly lubed bike chains humming in unison after ascending from the depths of the mall parking garage tunnel, and a crowd yelling out words of encouragement from the sidelines.
This was the Portland Criterium, the city’s biggest weekend for bicycle racing of the season. It’s a circuit around the Lloyd Center, briefly dipping into a tunnel through the subterranean parking depths, before emerging and turning past the future Monqui music venue. For 70 minutes, the elite/pro men’s bicycle racers had circled the one mile loop, before approaching their final lap. As they took their final left hand turn down the straightaway, fans screamed out, the barricades rocking all the way to the finish line—with $2,000 cash, a six-pack, and a handle of liquor at stake.
The breakaway which led the penultimate lap around Lloyd had been caught, so now the final sprint was a rematch between last year’s winner Ama Nsek, and runner up Alex Murison.
Murison held a slight edge in the mad dash around the corner, sitting second wheel to his teammate from the Vancouver-based (Canada) Team Bici Squadra. But, Nsek, riding solo for sponsor Smith Optics, saved an extra gear for the final push. The duo slammed hard on the pedals for a hundred meters of glory, thrusting their bikes forward across the finish line. A photo finish revealed Murison crossing first, holding off Nsek by less than half a wheel length. The cyclists knew the result instinctively. Murison held up a triumphant fist, avenging last year’s narrow defeat.
“You can just feel it when you win, and I just didn’t have it,” said Nsek, the 2026 runner up who’d flown up for the weekend from Los Angeles.
This was pure criterium (crit) bike racing. While famous stage bicycle road races, like the Tour de France, are mostly television events showcasing pristinely maintained European roads and bucolic villages where tourists eat cheese and ski; crits are short, technical circuits on city streets—pot holes, manhole covers, tight corners, and all. They’re also timed races, typically 45 to 70 minutes in length, as opposed to three to five hour road races. The short duration and track lets the peloton, or majority group of riders, go full speed nearly the entire race, whizzing around in a colorful blur of spandex at speeds of up to 40 miles per hour.
“Crits are like a block party with racing in the middle,” said five-time US women’s criterium national champion Kendall Ryan, donning the US flag jersey after defending her title in June. “They’re always in a cool area of the city, or downtown, with lots of places to eat. It’s a real spectacle since the athletes go around [the course] so many times, and super fast from start to finish. It’s the best discipline for spectators.”
A grand prize for each categorized race was awarded to the winners ($2,000 cash in the elite men’s and women’s categories) and other top finishers. To keep the mid-race interesting, every few laps the race officials would ring a cowbell, shouting out to racers that the next lap would award a small prize. The prizes, or “Prime”—pronounced “Preem” (ooh-la-la, how French?)—ranged from $50 cash to a six-pack of beer from race sponsor Steeplejack Brewing. All of this combined to incentivize racers that might not win the whole thing to breakaway temporarily from the pack, or burst out into a full sprint for one lap. This constantly changed the racing tactics for other riders looking to conserve energy.
Crit racing is not for the faint of heart. The white-knuckle intensity, high speed surges, and need for technical bike handling makes races prone to gnarly crashes.
“It’s good to be back going fast again with all the homies,” said Nsek. “I broke my arm this past March [riding my bike]. When it happened, I just calmly snapped it back into place to realign the bone as close as I could before the inflammation set in. That’s what crit racing has done to my brain. In the moment, I’m not even stressing, because I had already broken my arm three times racing as a kid.”
Sunday’s crit was also host to a race-within-a-race, doubling as the Oregon State Championship for Oregon Bicycle Racing Association (OBRA) members. While the majority of racers and fans are from the Portland area, this year drew in a much larger volume of high level out-of-state participants who swept the overall podiums, with many coming from Canada, and even Mexico. As for the OBRA championships, Kent Ross from Portland took home the Oregon title for the elite men, and Sara Youmans from Ketchum, Idaho, won the elite women state title.
“Red Truck [another Vancouver, BC team] had a big team of five strong guys trying to attack and muck up the pace all day,” said Murison, after taking home the win. “We just wanted to cover all the moves, which we did, and my teammate [Sam Morris] did an awesome job setting me up for the sprint, and I just managed to hold on.”
The elite women’s race finished with domination by Ryan’s team, Caldera Medical-Aurea Racing, based out of California. Ryan cruised to victory by several bike lengths, after launching from a leadout by her teammate Laurel Rathbun, who took second. Finishing in a close sprint for third place, Kimberly Lucie, an Arizonian riding for the Portland-based Team S&M, rounded out the podium.
“We came here with three rides and decided early to make the race really hard and be aggressive, setting a breakaway with a select group,” said Ryan. “This is such a great course: the chicane (an S-shape curve used to calm traffic in a turn), the tunnel. It bottlenecks in a few places, then opens up for a lot of [tactical] opportunities. It should really be a part of a major series. [Our team] had never been to Portland before, but it’s such a wonderful place to visit. We’re all coffee snobs.”
The real fun for the hometown fans came in the form of a painstaking effort from Team S&M and Sellwood Cycle Repair mechanic Brenna Wrye-Simpson. Wrye-Simpson won last year’s race at the Lloyd, though this time found herself off the back of an eight-woman breakaway setting a grueling pace. To the surprise of many new to bike racing, road cycling is actually a team sport. And much of the team tactics come down to setting the pace of the race, and taking turns “drafting” your fellow races to conserve energy. The cyclists who are not pedaling directly into the wind typically only have to give 70 percent of the effort to maintain the speed of the racer at the front of the peloton.
For nearly the entire hour of racing, Wrye-Simpson found herself all alone, with a daunting solo effort to close a ten-second gap. Finally, after constant cheers from the Portland faithful at the barricades, and the breakaway slowing down with the lead racers not wanting to waste energy for the final sprint, the local Portland favorite managed to catch the group at the front with two laps to go. In the end, she was able to offer some help to her teammate Lucie’s final push for third place.
“I made some tactical errors with my energy on the day,” said a laughing Wrye-Simpson, who ended up with the second place medal in the Oregon state championship. “I was struggling in what we call ‘no man’s land’ between the [women in the breakaway] and the field behind. Maybe not the ideal way to get back in there, but I sort of snuck into the back of the group to take a little breather, and not make it obvious I caught up. Super happy Kim [Lucie] was able to pull out a podium spot in the end.”
The Portland Criterium restarted after the pandemic in 2022 with a Saturday race in the North Park Blocks, with the help from a city grant intent on bringing community events back downtown. Four years in, and the race has expanded to two full days of racing with the Lloyd circuit in its second year. Race organizers partnered with local groups like Go Lloyd and Lloyd Eco District to provide activities in Holladay Park for families, a DJ, and live commentary from drag performer Kimberly Michelle Westwood, as well as free hot dogs for attendees. Year over year the race has grown, particularly with out-of-town athletes and fans coming to visit.
“Portland is very much slept on,” said Nsek, the Los Angeles professional who marks this race on his calendar every year. “I love the mindset of all the people here, it’s one of the most bike-friendly places I’ve ever been to. We went to the soap box derby before our race Saturday and there’s thousands of people just being weird in the park, it’s amazing. I could be sitting alone in my hotel room getting stressed about racing, or I could throw on some cologne and go salsa dancing at Aztec Willie’s.”
I asked Nsek how his legs feel after a bike race and a long night of salsa.
“The hips are loose, I feel great,” Nsek concludes.
An event that’s one part pageant for Portland fans and cycling tourists, one part nostalgic send-off for the mall, and one part high level athletic showcase, the Portland Criterium looks to continue growing. Race Director Seven Beardsley hopes the event can also shift our perspectives on how public space can be used—namely for things other than cars.
“The Lloyd is such an important place for Portland’s public transportation plan and, with the mall closing, the neighborhood is sort of reimagining itself right now,” says Beardsley. “The cycling community can feel siloed; between commuters, people going to Pedalpalooza rides, people doing bicycle advocacy, and competitive bike racers. A Pedalpalooza ride finished at the race course, and we got to open it up to whoever wanted to ride for 30 minutes. Besides Sunday Parkways, when else do we get time to ride our bikes on a street completely closed to auto traffic?”
Next year the Portland Criterium is set to maintain its steady pace, anchored by the Saturday race downtown, though the future of the race at the Lloyd Center remains uncertain. Yet, for an afternoon, the forgotten parking structure was full of cyclists, free hot dogs in hand, watching some of the best racers in North America duke it out. One can hope Lloyd and the bike race don’t end with a demolition.
