Colin Strickland: Red Hook’s newest don

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Colin Strickland lives three starkly different lives on and off of the bicycle. On weekdays Strickland, 30, is a day jobber, working at an environmental consulting firm in Austin, Texas. On weekends, Strickland hits Cat. 1 road races riding for team Elbowz, one of the strongest amateur cycling teams in the Midwest.

A few times a year, however, Strickland achieves something that even professional racers dream of: He stands atop a racing podium in front of thousands of fans. Strickland is the newest king of the Red Hook Criterium fixed-gear series, having won its three most recent races.

“At the [Tour of the ] Gila, I think it was Danny Pate who rolled up and asked me if I was the Red Hook guy,” Strickland says. “I couldn’t believe it — it was pretty rad.”

The fixed-gear series has traditionally favored sprinters who can survive the furious, crash-filled kicks to the line. Strickland, however, has won his three consecutive Red Hook events with dramatic breakaways.

Last October, he won the Milan, Italy round of the series after sprinting away at the race’s midpoint. In April, Strickland soloed away from the group to win Red Hook’s home race in Brooklyn. And this past Sunday in London, Strickland again broke away, this time with Romania’s road race champion Marius Petrache.

Strickland eventually dropped Petrache and then held off Cofidis sprinter Loic Chetout for the victory.

“I’ve ridden them more like a time trial than an actual criterium,” Strickland says. “Everybody is doing about the same RPM so you wear down evenly.”

The Red Hook victories stand in contrast to Strickland’s modest results in the domestic road scene. His fifth-place finish at the 2015 Thompson Bucks County Classic is his top result on USA Cycling’s National Racing Calendar. He was third last year at amateur nationals. This year he has raced at a handful of National Racing Calendar events, including the Redlands Bicycle Classic, Tour of the Gila, and Joe Martin Stage Race, but has consistently finished in the pack.

In Austin, locals know him as the top dog at the local Driveway Criterium Series. Outside of Texas, Strickland is relatively unknown.

Strickland said his ambitions on the road are secondary to his goals in fixed-gear events. Earlier this year he suffered …

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