Hundreds of fans lined the streets of downtown Bend as Central Oregon’s favorite bike race returned for the second-straight year on Saturday night.

The Cascade Cycling Classic Criterium featured bike racing all afternoon and into the evening, culminating with the pro women’s and pro men’s races.

Alex Murison, of Vancouver, British Columbia and the Bici Squadra team, won the pro men’s race. Ryan Gorman, of Orinda, California and Cyclesport.com, finished second, and Zachary Kovalcik, of Portland and POA Racing, took third.

Kaitlyn Agnew, of Montpelier, Vermont and UTC-Butcherbox Cycling, won the pro women’s race. Holly Breck, of Claremont, California and Legion of Los Angeles, finished second, and Brenna Wrye-Simpson, of Portland and S&M CX, placed third.

In a criterium, racers ride as many laps as they can in a time determined by their category. The pro men raced for 80 minutes and the pro women raced for 60 minutes. Juniors and masters races were held earlier in the afternoon.

The course was a .7 mile lap through downtown with the start and finish line on NW Wall Street.

Last summer, the race was held in August, but due to air-quality concerns from likely wildfires during late summer, the race was moved to June.

The downtown criterium was a perennial favorite among local cycling fans, drawing thousands of spectators, but had not been staged since 2017 until last year. Part of that is due to the demise of the Cascade Cycling Classic stage race, which ran from 1980 to 2019 on five days in July in Central Oregon. The criterium was just one day of the five of professional road racing, but it was by far the most popular.

Elite-level racers came from all over the country to race the iconic downtown criterium course on Saturday, testing their technical skills and endurance. The event is produced by and a benefit for the Bend-based Horner Cycling Foundation, founded two years ago by Bend’s Chris Horner, who is one of the most accomplished U.S. road cyclists ever. The mission of the nonprofit is to “create a junior road cycling team that is inclusive, accessible to all socioeconomic statuses with the focus on skill development, team building and fostering a life-long love of cycling,” according to hornercyclingfoundation.com.

The prize purse for the Cascade Cycling Classic’s pro men’s and women’s fields is the biggest purse for a one-day race in the U.S., according to the foundation. The purse included an equal payout between the pro men and the pro women of $20,000 each.

The Cascade Cycling Classic, formerly produced by the Mt. Bachelor Sports Education Foundation, was North America’s longest consecutively running cycling stage race until its hiatus in 2018. It returned in 2019 as a multi-day stage race with a criterium in southwest Bend, but has not been held as a stage race since for a variety of reasons, including lack of sponsorship, the difficulty of closing roads in Bend during the summer and the increased popularity of gravel racing.

Horner, who often raced in the Cascade Classic before his rise in the European ranks, finished as high as eighth in the Tour de France and won the Tour of Spain in 2013 at the age of 41, becoming the oldest winner of any of cycling’s Grand Tours.

For more information, visit cascadecyclingclassic.com.