Marianne Kron has been sitting in turn one at the Ed Rudolph Velodrome since the early 1970s. She's a multiple state, national and world masters champion herself, but these days she's usually just a spectator, camped in the same corner of the track she's occupied for more than fifty summers, watching riders young enough to be her great-grandchildren chase each other around a quarter-mile oval at 40 miles an hour on bikes with no brakes.
If you've lived in Northbrook for any stretch of time, you've probably driven past Meadowhill Park a few hundred times without registering what's actually back there. It reads as a soccer field with a strange concrete lip around it. What's actually behind that lip is the only velodrome in Illinois, according to the Illinois Cycling Association, and one of 28 left in the country according to the Northbrook Park District. For three dollars, you can watch it in person, and this month is the last real window to do it before the 2026 season ends.
A track older than most of what's around it
The velodrome predates almost every business currently operating near it. Former Park Commissioner Ed Rudolph helped build the track around 1960, giving it a banked, quarter-mile oval for cycling with a grass infield for soccer. For years afterward, the Park District flooded that infield every winter to make a speed skating rink, and it doubled as a practice surface for members of multiple U.S. Winter Olympic teams before the district gave up the practice in the 1990s, when a lowered water table meant the rink no longer held water.
The bigger claim to fame came on the racing side. Northbrook hosted the National Amateur Bicycle Championships eight separate times between 1963 and 1979, according to reporting from the Daily Herald. The first of those, in 1963, happened in a town whose population was pegged at roughly 15,000 people. The Saturday night finals still pulled an estimated crowd of 5,300. One racer who competed that weekend said the town was the friendliest place he'd ever raced.
That history is easy to miss because nothing about the track advertises it. There's no marquee sign on Maple Avenue announcing that a small Illinois park district once hosted a national championship eight times. You just have to know.
What actually happens on a Thursday night
The modern version runs on a much smaller stage, but it hasn't slowed down. Races happen most Thursday nights through the summer, hosted by the volunteer-run Northbrook Cycle Committee, starting promptly at 6:45 p.m. and running until roughly 9 or 9:30. About 200 riders show up on a given night, and some of them hit speeds up to 45 miles an hour, according to the Park District, on track bikes that have a single fixed gear and no brakes at all. Spectators get in for three dollars, kids 12 and under are free, and there's seating right along the front straight.
The racing itself isn't one format repeated all night. A few of the recurring event types:
- Scratch races, where riders cover a set number of laps and whoever crosses the line first simply wins.
- Points races, which can run over 100 laps, with riders sprinting for points at set intervals and double points on the final lap.
- Keirin, a sprint event, often the shortest and fastest races of the night.
- Madison, a team relay format where riders hand off to a partner mid-race, one of the more chaotic and crowd-friendly formats on the calendar.
If you show up without knowing any of that, someone in the stands will explain it to you before the first lap finishes. That's part of the culture.
The people who never left
What's stuck with the track longer than any single race format is the roster of people who keep coming back. Kenny Labbé got hooked on the sport in Northbrook in the late 1980s, inspired by Itasca cyclist Mark Gorski's 1984 Olympic gold medal, and went on to race track twelve times a week at his peak, according to the Daily Herald. Between 2000 and 2004 he rode for the U.S. Postal Service team, training alongside Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis and Robbie Ventura. He's since spent close to a decade back at Northbrook, this time as the volunteer announcer calling races on the mic.
Younger racers describe the same pull. Palatine resident Darian Duchan, a category four racer who puts in 12 hours a week training, told the Daily Herald:
"The community here is extremely welcoming, open and inclusive."
The committee has also permanently retired car number 97, a tribute to George Garner, the longtime local bike shop owner whose Waukegan Road store still sponsors the season's Keirin race in his name. Ed Rudolph. George Garner. Kenny Labbé. Marianne Kron. Different decades, same track, same three-dollar gate.
Four meets left before the season closes
As of today, the 2026 State Championship schedule still has four dates on it, and every one of them lands on the track's usual Thursday slot except the last weekend event, according to the Northbrook Cycle Committee:
International Omnium on August 13. A Points Race on August 20. Sprints and Timed Events taking over the track for a full weekend on August 22 and 23. And the Madison closing things out on August 27.
That's on top of a season that already included the George Garner Memorial Keirin on July 23 and the DeLanghe and Neimanas Trophy Scratch Race on July 30, plus a 4K time trial that ran on the track just two days ago, on August 8, sponsored by a pair of Chicago-area training groups. None of this requires advance planning on the spectator side. Riders register ahead of time through the committee's online system. Anyone who just wants to watch can walk up to Meadowhill Park at 1479 Maple Avenue, pay at the gate, and find a seat.
Why this is worth your Thursday
Restaurants along Dundee Road and Willow Road turn over constantly. A takeout wing concept moves into a plaza that held something else. A lodge-style grill opens on Willow Road in the space a brewery closed years earlier. None of that is a criticism of the town, it's just how a commercial corridor works. What's unusual is that a few hundred yards away, behind a soccer field most people never look twice at, the same volunteer committee has been running the same three-dollar race night on the same track for more than six decades, through every version of what's been built and torn down around it.
Northbrook rewards the kind of attention that notices what's actually behind the ordinary-looking stuff, whether that's a track hiding a national championship history or a block that looks unremarkable until you know what it used to be. That's the same instinct The JG Group brings to reading this market street by street. If you're weighing a move into Northbrook or just trying to understand what a specific block or price point actually gets you here, we're happy to walk through it with you. Request a free consultation and we'll start with what you actually want to know, not the generic version.
