“Grassroots?”
I stood at the entrance and read the name again.
Grassroots Trust Velodrome.
I looked at Katherine.
“A national cycling centre — and they call it grassroots?”
The two ideas did not seem to belong together.
Katherine smiled and left the question alone.
A few hours earlier, I had asked her something similar.
“YOU’LL SEE”
We had just arrived in Cambridge.
For years, driving south from Auckland, we had passed through the town without really stopping. A sign, a few roundabouts, then the road carried us on. This time there was nowhere farther we needed to be. We were staying for a few days.
The first thing we did was find coffee.
Outside Paddock Café, I looked up at the sign.
“What does Paddock mean?”
Katherine smiled.
“You’ll see in a couple of days.”
Then she pushed open the door.
Inside, a blackboard covered most of the wall behind the counter. Breakfast, bagels, burgers, coffee — line after line in white chalk. A pink coffee machine worked in bursts. The display cabinet was crowded with cakes, bread and ready-made food; people waited to order.
Further in, the walls became busier.
A woman’s profile filled a mural. Her hair rolled out behind her in long layers, carrying houses, windows and fine lines through it.
A tūī sat among the hair.
Its head was black, the neck and wings catching blue-green, the small white tuft at its throat standing out against the darker feathers. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling. One warm yellow light sat almost directly above the bird.
Two people were talking at a small table beneath the mural. One of the women held a child. They paid no attention to us.
On another white wall hung a black bicycle.
Not leaning there. Hung there, both wheels off the ground.
Beside it, a painted tap.
H₂O →
The arrow pointed towards a place to refill a bottle.
I stood there for a moment.
A woman.
A bird.
A bicycle.
Water.
None of it seemed random, though I could not have said why.
Then I followed Katherine outside.
A COFFEE LEFT TO COOL
The autumn sun was warm enough to sit out by the street.
Katherine had sunglasses on. Her coffee came in a pale green cup, with a small stainless-steel milk jug beside it. Sunlight struck the metal hard enough to make me squint.
Mine arrived in a white cup on a pale green saucer.
Then breakfast: eggs, sausage, bacon, mushrooms, toast.
What caught me first was the plate.
White enamel, a dark rim, chipped in several places.
I knew that kind of plate. When I was a child in China, enamel cups, bowls and washbasins were everywhere. At some point they began disappearing from ordinary life, so gradually that I never noticed when they were gone.
I took a sip of coffee.
Still too hot.
I put it down.
We talked for a while.
I picked it up again.
People came and went through the café door. Someone found a table. Someone finished and left. Cars moved past the street, none of them very fast.
We had no deadline for the next stop. No list open on a phone telling us how many places were still left to see.
The coffee cooled.
We kept sitting.
Sometimes we talked. Sometimes we watched the traffic go by.
The sun moved across the wooden table.
Hot became warm.
Eventually the cup was empty.
Katherine finished hers too. She did not head straight for the car park. Instead she looked back through the café.
The black bicycle was still hanging on the wall.
She pointed at it.
“Come on.”
I followed her finger.
“I’ll take you to see bikes.”
NO BIKES
That was how we ended up at Grassroots Trust Velodrome.
The name still bothered me.
Later I learned that Grassroots Trust was exactly what it sounded like: a trust that puts money back into local communities, including amateur sport, education and other community projects.
Katherine was less surprised.
Sport in New Zealand, she said, was not quite the system I had grown up knowing in China. There were elite programmes and national teams, of course, but athletes did not always live inside a world sealed off from everyone else.
“Some are still students,” she said. “Some have to find their own sponsors.”
Then, after a moment:
“But don’t underestimate New Zealand.”
“The Olympic results are pretty good.”
We walked further in.
Glass cabinets along the wall held trophies, shields and old competition memorabilia. Some of the silver had dulled; wooden bases had darkened with age.
When I stopped to take a photograph, the glass caught our reflections too.
Behind us was a vast, almost empty building.
A few steps later the track opened below.
I stopped.
The timber oval ran for 250 metres around the arena. At each end the banking climbed until it looked less like a road than a wooden wall tipped towards the centre.
Rows of grey-white seats stood empty.
Steelwork crossed the roof.
The lights were on.
No race.
No crowd.
No bikes.
Katherine leaned on the rail and looked down.
I stood beside her.
We waited.
Nothing came around the bend.
PARIS
An empty track makes it easier to imagine what is missing.
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, New Zealand’s track cyclists won two golds, two silvers and a bronze — the country’s best track-cycling result at a single Games.
One of the names most closely tied to Cambridge was Ellesse Andrews.
She had already won silver in the women’s keirin in Tokyo. In Paris, aged twenty-four, she rode with Rebecca Petch and Shaane Fulton to silver in the women’s team sprint.
Then she won the keirin.
Gold.
On the final day she reached the individual sprint final.
Gold again.
Two golds and a silver.
The images from an Olympic velodrome are all speed: wheels running high on the banking, the bell for the last lap, riders dropping down the track, a sprint that is over almost before the eye has caught up.
Paris felt very far from the silent timber in front of us.
DOWNSTAIRS
I was about to step away from the rail when I looked down.
There was another training area below the track.
A young woman was there.
No bicycle.
She was doing leg-strength work. Someone stood beside her who looked like her coach.
She finished a movement and stopped.
He came closer, said something, adjusted her position.
She set herself again.
Another repetition.
I stayed at the rail.
One.
Stop.
Again.
Another correction.
She adjusted.
Started again.
No spectators.
The seats stayed empty.
The track stayed empty.
She finished a set, rested, then began another.
And I thought of the wall at Paddock Café.
The woman.
The tūī.
The tap marked H₂O.
And the bicycle hanging in the air.
When we had left the café, Katherine had pointed at it.
“Come on. I’ll take you to see bikes.”
I had believed her.
There was not a single bike on the track.
I looked down once more.
The young woman was still there.
So was the coach.
One repetition.
Then another.
It occurred to me that perhaps bikes were not what Katherine had brought me to see.