VS April 10 final.indd - Vermont Sports Magazine

E
KING OF
PAIN
GARY KESSLER IS KEEPING
BICYCLE RACING ALIVE IN
VERMONT
BY KIRK KARDASHIAN
Cat P/1 rider Andres Diaz, winning
the 2009 Mad River Road Race.
Photo by Gary Kessler.
verybody has an anxiety nightmare. You know, the
one where you wake up in the middle of the night,
sweating because you dreamed you’re playing the
lead role in your high school play and have forgotten your
lines. Gary Kessler’s goes something like that, but the
stakes are higher in his dream. “I jolt awake, thinking the
race is tomorrow and that I haven’t arranged for the police
to be at a certain intersection, and I freak out,” he says. So
go the unconscious torments of a bicycle race organizer.
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It would be an exaggeration to say that Kessler, a
wiry, kinetic 50-year-old who lives in Fayston, is singlehandedly
keeping road bike racing alive in Vermont. But
not much of an exaggeration. After all, he pretty much
runs the Green Mountain Stage Race, and this year
is organizing the revival of the Killington Stage Race.
Kessler is quick to point out that his longtime friends Sam
Hoar and Tom Moody of the Green Mountain Bicycle Club
are in charge of the Burlington Criterium, so he can’t take
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Riders on Route 100 in Granville during
the 2009 Mad River Road Race.
Photo by Ilke Van Genechten.
all the credit for GMSR, a four-day stage race that most
New England-based riders put on their calendar.
Still, the fact remains that at least 75 percent of the
details of the event, which drew 850 riders last year, fall
on Kessler’s narrow shoulders. Then there are the emails
from the inquisitive bikers; he gets hundreds of them in
the weeks leading up to the start of the race. “I enjoy the
interaction,” he admits. “But the problem is, the race is
over and I’m still getting hundreds of emails, and usually
by then I’m pretty smoked.” It’s a good thing that, at heart,
he’s a bike-racing fanatic. Otherwise, he would have given
up years ago.
Kessler, whose day job is as an attorney for the
Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, moved to Vermont
in 1987, after his illusions of living a glamorous LA Law
lifestyle were dashed on the rocks of reality. He was
hired by a big law fi rm in Los Angeles upon graduating
from Boston University Law School, installed in a big
offi ce with a view of the ocean, and paid handsomely. In
exchange, he was assigned to a senior partner who dealt
with an obscure, dense federal statute. The assignment
was supposed to be temporary, but after a few years had
gone by, Kessler started longing for Vermont, where he
had spent a lot of time skiing as a kid. So he packed his
stuff and moved to the Mad River Valley.
Fast forward to 1994. Kessler had found a lively
biking scene and made a lot of friends while racing in
Stowe, Putney, and Killington. The GMBC had been
organizing the Burlington Criterium, but a poor turnout
in 1993 had caused them to get creative. “GMBC realized,”
Kessler recalls, “that people didn’t want to drive all the
way to northern Vermont for one race.” So the bike club
asked Kessler to help organize the fi rst Mad River Road
Race, to be held the day before the criterium. It was, in
the style of the time, low-budget. “We had no permits, no
police, no nothing,” Kessler says.
But the race was a hit, and when the Killington
Stage Race was discontinued in 2000, Kessler decided to
make the leap from a road race/criterium weekend event
8 Vermont Sports April 2010