The Wooden Wall Inside the Rec Centre

Behind a plain door at the Harry Jerome Sports Centre is a wooden track banked at 47 degrees — a near-vertical wall you can walk up to and touch. It is the only indoor velodrome west of Ontario, and almost nobody driving past knows it is there.

From the parking lot at 7564 Barnet Highway, the Harry Jerome Sports Centre reads as the kind of building any suburb keeps: low roof, wide doors, a gym smell that starts at the threshold. Then you step inside, past the everyday business of a rec centre, and the floor rises. It keeps rising. In the corners the wood tilts up to 47 degrees, which is steep enough that standing at the bottom you have to look up to see the top of it, the way you would look up at a roof from the sidewalk.

This is the Burnaby Velodrome, a 200-metre cycling track built of strip planks laid over plywood, six metres wide, banked at 47 degrees through the turns and 15 degrees along the straights. Roughly 150 people can sit around it. Empty, on a weekday afternoon, it has the hush of something built for speed and caught at rest.

A wall you have to earn

The banking is not decoration. A rider has to hold about 30 km/h just to stay on the steep part of the corner; slower than that and physics stops cooperating. So the wall is a wall until someone is fast enough to make it a road. Walk up to it and press a palm flat against the boards and you feel the pitch in your wrist, the sense that the surface wants to send you back down. Then a rider comes through the corner with the tyres humming on the wood, sitting sideways to the ground as though the rule about which way is down has been suspended for them, and the whole strange geometry of the place makes sense for about two seconds before they are gone into the next turn.

The track went up between 1991 and 1997 and opened on 17 November 1997, at a cost of around $1.5 million. It has been run since by the non-profit Burnaby Velodrome Club. It is the only indoor velodrome in the Pacific Northwest — the only one west of Ontario — which means that for a good part of the country, if you want to ride a banked wooden oval under a roof, you come here, to a corner of Burnaby most drivers pass without a glance.

The wood has needed looking after. An engineering report in October 2000 flagged structural concerns, and the track closed in May 2001. It sat quiet until the club's repair proposal was approved and it reopened in November 2002. A wooden track is a living thing in that sense, something that has to be kept, not just kept clean.

The track that came before

The Burnaby track exists because an older one did not survive. Before the wall inside the rec centre there was the China Creek Velodrome, an outdoor track built for the 1954 British Empire and Commonwealth Games and used from 1954 to 1980. It was open to the sky and the Vancouver rain, and it did not last: it was demolished to make room for Vancouver Community College's Broadway campus. Riders lost their oval, and for years the region had no proper track at all. The indoor track on Barnet Highway is the answer to that absence — the same sport, moved under a roof and up onto steeper boards, half a lifetime later.

The names that have come through the place carry more weight than the plain building lets on. Brian Walton, Tanya Dubnicoff, Lori-Ann Muenzer and Mandy Poitras all trained or raced on this track — riders who went on to race at the top of the sport, learning the wall in a Burnaby corner first. The record does not tell us, in a single tidy line, how many local kids first pushed off from the rail and discovered the trick of the banking on the same boards. That part is quieter, and it is still happening on club nights.

What stays with you is the ordinariness of the wrapper. You could drive Barnet Highway a hundred times and file the sports centre under the same category as every other one — hockey, badminton, a snack bar. And inside, holding its breath, is a wooden wall you can walk up to and touch, steep as a staircase, waiting for someone fast enough to ride it.