The Instagram post was provocative, no doubt. But also, Justin Williams is the kind of person who can’t resist the opportunity to talk a little shit.
The caption on the photo posted by Criterium Nation announcing that sprinter Danny Estevez was joining Best Buddies Racing read: This 🙌changes 🙌 everything 🙌.
Williams, who cofounded the rival powerhouse team L39ION of Los Angeles in 2019 along with his youngest brother, Cory, hopped into the replies almost instantly: “It. Changes. Nothing.”
Best Buddies rider Travis McCabe did not appreciate Williams’s audacity, and let it be known. What followed was a bizarrely specific thread 100 comments deep in which McCabe accused Williams of misrepresenting his achievements by wearing the Stars and Stripes jersey, and Williams accused McCabe of, essentially, whining about obscure distinctions that no one cares about, with fans joining in on both sides. The thread became so spicy that Crit Nation took the unusual step of closing the post to comments, but not before selling T-shirts with the hashtag #critbeef on the front.
Nonetheless a fire was ignited. Criterium Nation titled the next episode of their podcast “It. Changes. Nothing.” and the hashtag took off (as far as crit-racing hashtags go, anyway) on social media. The stage was set. Sides were chosen. It was Williams vs. McCabe, the upstart vs. the establishment. The next time the two would share a course would be about five weeks hence, Friday night June 11, at Tulsa Tough in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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The setting was significant for Williams, one of the nation’s few Black bike racers and by far its most prominent. Almost 100 years ago to the day, on May 31, 1921, Tulsa was the site of one of the worst incidents of racial violence in American history outside of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Over the course of 16 hours, an armed white mob attacked the Greenwood section of the city, a bustling Black business center known as Black Wall Street, after a Black teen had been accused of assaulting a white woman. (The charges were later dropped.) Some 1,200 buildings were burned, including homes and businesses. Historians estimate that nearly 300 people were killed. The incident was largely erased from history books, the Tulsa Tribune removed the May 31 front page story from its bound volumes, and police and militia archives of the event went missing as well. The Oklahoma senate didn’t pass a bill requiring that the event be taught in public schools until 2012.
Only recently, after a year of fierce racial reckoning, have many Americans become aware of the incident. And while it may seem to some that an atrocity like this could not happen today, it was only months ago that we saw a violent, mostly white mob storm the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election, fueled by a fear of losing power and disrupting the status quo. Politicians across the country are actively passing bills designed to further disenfranchise Black and minority voters, willfully throwing democracy under the bus and placing the country in a perilous position. America is continually at risk because of what and who it tries to deny.
None of this is lost on Williams, who, along with the rest of the L39ION squad in Tulsa, visited Greenwood Avenue in the days leading up to race weekend. They affixed Greenwood Ave. patches to their kits to acknowledge what they, as the only Black-owned team there, were racing for. The “39” in the team’s name represents 39th Street in South Los Angeles’s historically Black Leimert Park neighborhood, where the Williams brothers grew up. In that sense, Justin Williams is repping for his neighborhood. But for him it’s more than that. He has taken it upon himself to represent for every Black cyclist, every marginalized rider, every person who has been told, “You don’t belong here.”
You can’t call Los Angeles a bike-friendly city, at least not in the traditional sense. Wide boulevards host cars flying at breakneck speeds, traffic lights are sometimes as far as a mile apart, bike lanes are frequently nonexistent. The motorist attitude toward bike riders is less “share the road” and more “wtf are you on a bicycle?” And for recreational family biking, you can mostly forget it. At least, you might counter, there’s the scenery—the sparkling Pacific, the Malibu hills—which is true, unless you happen to live in one of the many parts of the city where the view is an endless pageant of drab stucco strip malls and beige stucco apartments.
So if you do happen to grow up there, let’s say, on the South Side, on 39th Street between the Leimert Park and Crenshaw districts, and you have the misfortune to develop an obsession with bikes and specifically road biking, then the bad news for you is that you cannot safely develop your obsession unless you become incredibly and intensely hardcore about it. That’s also the good news. Because to make a career out of riding a bike in a city like L.A. means you have to be forceful, competitive, hardcore. You simply have to not give a fuck.
The son of Belizean immigrants, Justin Williams was an athletic, energetic child whose early interest in sports helped keep him out of trouble in a neighborhood where the fate of young men was often dire. His surroundings also helped him develop the swagger that has come to define his career. “I was a really confident kid,” the now 32-year-old told me over pulled pork, cornbread, and whiskey at a barbecue spot just down the road from the nondescript office park in Chino Hills, California, that houses L39ION HQ. Williams looks larger than life in photos, but in person he’s a lean 6-foot-1 with an infectiously affable demeanor, a neatly trimmed beard, and an absolute refusal to censor any words that come out of his mouth. Quick-witted and loquacious, he talks kind of like he races: slashingly, fearlessly. He seems to almost vibrate with excitement. “If you’re not a confident person when you grew up in the hood,” he explains, “you’re going to fall into any shit that comes your way, or you’re going to get punked and want to join a gang.”
You don’t hear many pro bike racers talk about how they developed portions of their competitive strategy to avoid the pitfalls of gang life, but that’s part of what sets Williams apart and gives him a POV that puts him at odds with many of his fellow racers. By now most people have heard the story of how his father, Calman, a competitive amateur bike racer, took him for his first ride, a 75-mile jaunt along the Pacific Coast Highway, but left the boy, 13, when he cramped up at mile 50. Williams wants to set the record straight. “He knew my aunt was in the car behind us,” he laughs, “he was just being a hardass.” But the lesson stuck with him. Cycling is an expensive sport, and the family didn’t have money to burn on a passing whim. If his dad was going to invest, he had to make sure his son knew what it really meant. I point out to Williams that for a lot of people, having your body reach total failure on the side of a highway would be enough to make them swear off an activity for life. “Nah,” he fires back. “I’m a rebellious person, so I was like ‘I’m going to kick my dad’s ass one day.’ I love hearing ‘you can’t.’ It motivates me. So when he did that, it was like…challenge accepted.”
Williams began competing before he was old enough to drive, cutting his teeth on a weekly Long Beach crit after school to which his father would accompany him every Thursday, rain or shine. The chaotic cut-throat environment proved a vital training ground where the teen could practice holding his own amongst a combative field on a criterium course and master the fine art of angling around hairpin turns and throwing elbows in tight packs. For Williams, crit racing has always been as much about mind as about body. “It’s just more of my style…it’s more technical,” he says. “You can’t do road racing if you don’t have the fitness. But if you are smart enough…and you know how to use the course, you can still do well at crit racing.”
Williams won his first race about six months in and realized that he was good enough to take it seriously. He started going away to team camps and spending time with kids from backgrounds entirely different than where he came up in South Central. It was exciting, even as he had to overcome odds that his peers in the sport didn’t need to worry about. His commute to a training route took him down 39th Street, through the Baldwin Village housing complex then known by locals as “The Jungle,” through Culver City, then Venice to Santa Monica, and onto PCH, where he would join kids who had pedaled a mere two miles to get there. He looks back on this as a challenge that figured prominently into his current worldview, and helped him recognize how inaccessible the sport was to kids like him.
At 18, he joined the Rock Racing squad at the behest of team member and family friend Rahsaan Bahati. Williams recalls walking into the offices for the first time and seeing team founder and bad-boy clothing impresario Michael Ball (founder of Rock & Republic jeans) surrounded by fashion models and thinking, “Whatever this is, I want to be a part of it.” The team, with its black kits and tattoo-like skull motif, was known for hiring some of the sport’s most infamous characters (Tyler Hamilton, Mario Cipollini, and Kayle Leogrande, to name a few). And Williams loved being the baby of the group. From the grizzled old-timers to the devil-may-care up-and-comers who encouraged his swagger and audacious attitude, the team introduced Williams to the idea that American bike racing could be fun and flashy, a far cry from the grim and stuffy traditions of European racing he would later encounter.
When the team disbanded midseason in 2009—after money problems and an FBI raid of Ball’s residence—Williams landed on the Trek-Livestrong U23 team, then helmed by Axel Merckx. He found himself at the Tour of Qatar in 2010, and as a newcomer, he was just trying to support his teammates during the six-stage race and not get dropped. To everyone’s surprise, perhaps none more than his own, he finished 28th overall. Up until that point he felt he had been riding on raw talent, and the experience in Qatar made him want to seek out better coaching and the kind of training he would need for grueling stage races. But when he asked Merckx if he could live in and train at the team’s Colorado facility, he was told it was only open to team members from abroad. This was the beginning of Williams’s disillusionment not so much with the sport, but with its culture. “Y’all know y’all doing this shit for free, right?” he laughs, remembering overwrought tensions of his time racing for Team USA on the track. “We fucking suck as a country at bike racing,” he says. “Like [we’re] not winning the Olympic Games. Chill the fuck out.”
He raced in Europe, where he felt he was treated differently because he was an outsider to a tradition that may not have a lot of room for a Black kid from South Central. He loved the sport but hated the environment around it. “Directors have told me to my face, ‘Oh, we’ll put you on the team if the rest of the guys like you,’” he says. “Like what the fuck does that have to do with me doing my job?”
You’d have to be willfully obtuse not to notice that competitive cycling, especially road racing, is in no way, shape, or form a Black sport. A simple glance through Team USA reveals precisely zero Black faces among its ranks. At the end of 2020, only five riders in the UCI World Tour were Black. And the number of Black riders in the Tour de France usually hovers between zero and one. The historical reasons for this are less important at this point than the impact it’s had on the sport overall. The lack of cultural, economic, and racial diversity—the fact that everyone in the sport is steeped in the exact same cultural language—helps create an environment that to noninsiders appears as a byzantine maze of strange words, unwritten codes, and unnecessarily complicated rules and regulations. The irony, of course, is that over their lifetimes, it’s likely that as many people will ride a bike as will toss around a football or basketball, and the cost of a bike that is sufficient for crit racing is not that much beyond the amount families spend annually on football pads, uniforms, and shoes. It should follow that a sport in which bike riding is performed at the most elite levels would be wildly popular. Yet most American sports consumers would be hard-pressed to recall the last time they watched a professional cycling event on television.
After too many years of not getting the support he wanted, Williams walked away from racing in 2011. “I just needed someone to spend some fucking time with me,” he now recalls, still appearing to sting a bit. He enrolled in some classes at a community college and got a job in a clothing boutique, where he says he started to understand marketing in a new way. He watched the boutique owner leverage consignment and social media to expand the brand from one small store to a shop in Los Angeles’s prestigious Beverly Center. Still the non racing life didn’t agree with the hyper-energetic Williams. He recalls sitting in an astronomy class on a Friday night and wondering what the hell he was doing with himself. The lack of money wasn’t helping either. “I got a check [from the store] for like $75 after working like three or four shifts. I could make like $250 in a half hour in a race. I was like, ‘I could suck at cycling and make more than this!’” It was enough to make Williams resume his training.
He spent the next few years bouncing from team to team, doing crits where he could. “It was this emotional roller coaster and years of having okay years, and being on shitty teams,” he recalls. “What stood out to me the most was, it could be one asshole on the team, and if that person was in the right position, they could ruin the whole year.” By 2018, he was functioning largely as an independent, doing crits in Europe and the U.S. He landed an $18,000 sponsorship from the Specialized-Rocket Espresso fixie team, and between that, other marketing deals, and his winnings, he says he was eventually able to make six figures. The financial boon made him reconsider how cycling could work for kids struggling to make money. For him, the traditional sponsorship-for-gear scheme wasn’t practical for people who didn’t have the luxury of living off family resources. “Companies got used to saying: ‘Hey, I’ll give you some stuff and you post it on IG.’ But you’re doing stuff for free! Trying to break people out of that mind-set has been…” here is one of the few times he searches for a word, “interesting.”
Williams found himself wondering if he and Cory might fare better striking out on their own. Soon he was envisioning a team that would be a vast improvement on what he had experienced racing with other teams, and the idea for L39ION of Los Angeles began to take shape. A cool squad of athletes who would support one another, do away with toxic vibes, bring color to the sport, represent L.A. and South Central, diversify the game, and kick ass on every possible course.
“My mission is simple,” Williams tells me. “To change the game.” For him crit racing is the most logical and most accessible path by which to do that. A format easily understood by fans and urban riders alike, it doesn’t require young kids from the city to navigate international travel, passports and visas, or a gauntlet of foreign customs and cultures. “No one thinks crit racing is important enough,” Williams says. “Everyone wants to build a team for Europe, but I’m trying to make it accessible for people here. I know football players who could hop on a bike and it’s a wrap!”
And with crit racing, the cost to play can be relatively low. You don’t need to spend 10 grand on a carbon-fiber race bike with the lightest, most aerodynamic parts. “I raced a lot of the big national criteriums on an aluminum bike that cost like $1,500,” Williams says. “Which is a lot of money, don’t get me wrong. But if that bike is three years old? Probably is $600. You know what I mean? I’ve won big-ass races on this bike. I’ve won one of the biggest races in the country on this bike.”
His enthusiasm is catching, and regardless of what you think of Justin Williams’s approach, he brings visibility to a sport that desperately needs it. He holds 12 U.S. national titles and is the current Belizean national road champion. His Instagram followership hovers around 111k, a number that has increased by about one thousand in the time it’s taken me to write this article. This is greater than pretty much all his competitors’ and detractors’ (Travis McCabe had 12k followers when I began research on this piece but is now down to 11.8k). Perhaps more meaningfully, Williams alone has a bigger social media audience than both USA Crits and USA Cycling. It’s not hard to figure out why. He has managed to tell a story that can reach a wider audience than most cyclists. L39ION very consciously represents a combination of hopefulness, positivity, style, and swagger that works well in the social media age. Partnerships with powerful brands like Red Bull, Rapha, Specialized, Zwift, and most recently the headphone company Jaybird, generate slick videos of the squad patrolling city streets with lens flares and Lamborghinis, the whole team posing like the coolest bike gang to ever squeeze themselves into spandex. The group is Black-led, multicultural, advocates strongly for its women riders (Williams reportedly led the charge to extend the women’s course to be the same length as the men’s course at this year’s Tulsa Tough), and is not above being photographed in diamond-encrusted jewelry when the occasion calls for it. In short L39ION threatens to make pro bike racing something it’s not and has never been: urban.
For many the very word “cycling” means aggro REI dads screaming at pedestrians and clomping around the local café in cleats and wraparound sunglasses. This is a problem for a sport that is missing out on an opportunity to leverage would-be fans. The NBA rebounded in the 1990s by aligning itself with larger cultural trends like hip-hop; while NASCAR and the NFL, with their military flyovers and salutes to the troops, have tied themselves to a brand of Americana that pulls at patriotic heartstrings, forever linking their product to the spiritual identities of millions of Americans. Cycling in this country, on the other hand, faces a crisis. There is no tradition. The portion of its identity that aspires to European status is a dead end. Stage races here do not draw a fraction of the crowd they do overseas, municipalities lack the interest and will to shut down roads for extended periods, and viewers largely don’t care to watch people riding bicycles up and down hills for days at a time. Yet many in the sport still seem to resist the pull of people like Williams who envision a uniquely American version of cycling built around street races and the personalities that represent it.
These tensions seemed to be just under the surface of the Instagram fracas between Williams and McCabe. To McCabe’s point, Williams was frequently photographed in the Stars and Stripes jersey reserved for national champions, while most casual observers aren’t aware that it was McCabe, not Williams, who held the distinction of being the Pro national criterium champion at the time. Williams was the amateur champ, a category that in most sports is a notch below professional. Adding to the confusion, because the way races are structured in the U.S., it’s possible for both jerseys to appear in the same event. The difference clearly matters to McCabe, but does it and should it matter to anyone else?
“It’s a respect thing,” McCabe told me over the phone from Tulsa. “I’ve spent my last 10 years pursuing this career, and what bothered me is that he built this image that he’s the only national champ. That national title means a lot to us, like we spend hours daydreaming about every scenario that relates to winning it.” McCabe made it clear to me that he respects Williams and what he’s done in the sport, and he happily conceded that Justin’s visibility is good for crit racing as a whole. “But there is a distinction between the pro championships and the amateur championships,” he maintains. (Just before press time, McCabe lost the jersey to 18-year-old Luke Lamperti of Trinity Racing at 2021 USA Pro Nationals in Knoxville. The race was marred by a massive crash on the last lap that took out McCabe and nearly the entire L39ION squad. Williams was not racing, opting instead for the Belizean national pro road race, which he won a few days later.)
To Williams, the handwringing over this difference is one of those unnecessary aspects of cycling culture that make the sport inaccessible to potential fans and athletes. Few in the sport know better than Justin Williams that you can make money, get sponsorships, and build a prodigious platform without ever having a UCI pro license. In the absence of real material difference between amateur and pro status, the designation only serves as another form of cultural segregation. Or as Williams put it to me: “All of their value comes from gatekeeping. And I just don’t give a fuck.”
Other pro athletes I’ve interviewed seem to spend minutes searching for the safest words, treading carefully, making sure not to say anything that can be taken out of context or used as bulletin board material by their competitors. I’m surprised at how candid Williams is with me, a reporter for a national magazine. He interviews like a lone wolf in a sport with minimal coverage, which to an extent, he is. He comes out of the gate confident, garrulous, smiling, and blazing. And he does not seem capable of mincing words when it comes to the Travis McCabe situation. “Why aren’t we on the same page and building the sport together?” he wonders, loudly yelling over the din of the packed outdoor patio. “Like, why are you attacking me because nobody knows who you are?” And perhaps more to the point, “I don’t need to wear the jersey,” he laughs, “I’m still going to beat your ass.”
Indeed, much of McCabe’s accusation that Williams was falsely representing himself seems to hinge on the fact that while Williams has never represented himself as the pro national champion, McCabe feels he hasn’t done enough to make sure people know he’s not the pro national champion, a complaint Williams dismisses. “He’s mad at me because I haven’t been his PR person, telling the world that he’s the pro national champion when that’s not my job…and it’s like, at the end of the day…no one cares.”
Although Williams is mostly easygoing about all of this, it’s clear he is acutely frustrated by the culture of cycling. “They’re playing this stupid game that they’ve failed at, then they watch the sport die, watch people exit in droves, and you’re talking to me about a fucking jersey?”
I can’t help but ask, “What happens if you talk all that trash, and still lose to McCabe at Tulsa Tough?”
“Then I lose!” he fires back, his laugh echoing around the patio. “When I play football and basketball, you know how it goes, you talk shit to people and sometimes you lose. I’m going to catch you at some point, you know what I mean?”
I do know what he means. He means that shit-talking is part of the game for him, and he maybe wishes that others were more willing to play.
Williams’s vision for crit racing is simple. It would be mainstream. It would be regional with teams representing cities around the country that fans could claim ownership of. Names on jerseys, good guys and heels, beefs and showdowns. “You can build a community around a jersey,” he explains. One central body would run all crit events. They would own all the equipment, barriers and podiums, clocks and banners. They would go from town to town setting up courses. Maybe there would be a point system so fans could keep track of the race over the course of a season. “Like Moto GP,” he tells me. “But with localized teams of six riders.” And most of all, none of this petty griping about UCI pro versus amateur.
I ask him what governing body would manage this. USA Cycling? He laughs. “USA Cycling is to crit what the DMV is to NASCAR,” he tells me. “They hand out licenses. They don’t govern the sport.”
Having a vision and running an organization are two different skill sets, though, and often those who excel at one do not excel at the other. Perhaps the closest thing to Williams’s vision was the Red Hook Criterium. The Brooklyn-based series operated from 2008 to 2019, growing significantly each year. At full strength it boasted a sponsorship from international video game conglomerate Rockstar Games—makers of Grand Theft Auto and a brand worth an estimated $5 billion—and held races in Brooklyn, Milan, Barcelona, and London. The operation went on hiatus before the 2019 season, but like Tulsa Tough, Athens Twilight, and other high-profile crit races, it had a Friday Night Lights vibe to it. After-work start times, collisions, and plenty of beer. The fact that Red Hook was fixed-gear kept the culture of the event tied to a reckless, urban style more closely associated with ’90s New York City bike messengers (of which, full disclosure, I was one) than with the stately pomp and circumstance of European racing. But in a country that lacks a grand cycling tradition, building one from scratch is a heavy lift.
Williams believes that all the ingredients are there to make crit racing succeed as a popular and uniquely American take on cycling. But for him it has to do with something more than the love of the sport. “I keep hearing, ‘What do we do to bring more Black people into cycling?’” he says in one of his more serious moments. “You can’t do shit! I’m not gonna tell some little Black kid to spend his only token on cycling because there ain’t shit there for him. Ride for fun. This isn’t your future yet. My job is to create a sport so when people get here, they have somewhere to go.”
Hours before filing this story, the results from the first night of Tulsa Tough, site of the much-anticipated showdown between Williams and McCabe, come to me in a flurry of texts. Even people who know nothing about bike racing are messaging me.
“Apparently Justin Williams won something,” one friend says, “but I don’t know what?!”
“Lol, he won #critbeef!” I reply.
Justin Williams ended Friday night’s race taking the top spot on the podium. His brother and teammate Cory took second, Danny Estevez third, and L39ION’s Tyler Williams (no relation) held down fourth. Travis McCabe, decked out in the contested Stars and Stripes jersey, came in seventh. Moreover, L39ION riders Skylar Schneider and Ama Nsek both won their respective races, and the team would effectively sweep the entire weekend. Williams took to Instagram on the final day of the weekend: “100 years later L39ION is the only Black-owned Pro team in the world,” his post reads. “Last night is dedicated to Black Wall Street and the incredible people that lived and thrived there. The injustice hasn’t been reconciled but absolutely needs to be.” I couldn’t help noticing how many Black fist emojis were in the replies.
McCabe, for his part, seemed to be taking the loss in stride when I spoke to him the next day. He did note, however, that it was one of the best crowds he’d ever seen at a crit. “It was lined up the entire course with people, like there were probably four or five thousand people cheering us on.”
Back in Chino Hills, the barbecue has been delicious, the mood lively, and Justin is playfully encouraging me to abandon my holdover ’90s bike messenger habit of riding in cages and try clipless pedals. I ask him to sign an autograph for a friend of a friend. It is notable that of all the celebrities and athletes I’ve interviewed, this is the first time someone has asked me to get an autograph for them. Feeling somewhat awkward about the exchange, I hastily shove a receipt across the table, lightly dotted with Carolina sauce. He waves it away. “You gotta have something better than this, man,” and invites me to the L39ION headquarters for a proper signature.
His directions to the place, “Just go down the road and turn left!” hollered from behind the wheel of his BMW before peeling off, prove trickier than they sounded, and when I finally arrive, he is seated behind a stately desk, Sharpie in hand, poised over a Red Bulletin magazine bearing his face on the cover. The room is filled with trophies, posters, and L39ION merch. “Who do I make it out to?” I tell him, and he signs it with a flourish.
It seems fitting that the online skirmish between Williams and Travis McCabe centered on the right to wear the American flag. As I drive away from the L39ION offices, it occurs to me that American cycling has the same problem that America itself has: Its survival may very well rest in the hands of the people who have been excluded from it.
Carvell Wallace is an author and podcaster who covers arts, culture, sports, and human issues for a variety of news outlets. His 2018 book The Sixth Man written with NBA forward Andre Iguodala was a New York Times bestseller and his podcast Finding Fred about the spiritual work of Mister Rogers was nominated for a Peabody award and named #1 podcast of 2019 by The Atlantic. He lives and rides in Oakland, California.
