SLAUGHTERAMA
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Photo: Nicholas Chatfield-Taylor
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When you arrive on the banks of the James River, next to a munitions factory from the Civil War (that’s not a smokestack, it’s a cannonball forge), a walking bridge extends, hanging from a highway overpass. Open gates bid you forward, and cyclists of all colors, shapes, and sizes swoop forward toward Belle Island. This location once quartered prisoners of war and then housed a hydroelectric plant. Now, covered in trails and toking hippies, it hosts Slaughterama.Upon crossing the bridge, madness unfolds before you. A large, open-air, tin-roofed structure around the size of a football field sits surrounded by a mounting chaos. Saffron flags proudly flutter in the wind, and the bikes, by God, THE BIKES! You’ve never seen such contraptions, from double-frame tall bikes, recumbent tricycles, and bike chariots to a kid’s bike welded inside a giant steel wheel so that the rider can slam on the brakes and do a forward flip. Let the games begin!
And games there are, games aplenty. Cheating is encouraged in all games—pushing, throwing beers, and pretty much everything else short of firearms (although M80s have been used and not contested). The day usually starts off with a few healthy rounds of footdown, a slow race where (duh) putting a foot on the ground disqualifies you. Then it’s on to the bike-throwing competition, the bike-chariot races, and the tallbike jousting. Tallbike riders are equipped with football armor, are armed with a padded pike, and hurtle toward each other. The first to hit the ground loses, although they are showered with beer and praise, so it’s hard to quantify this as truly losing.
This is merely the most visible portion of Slaughterama. The previous day holds a very ludicrous scavenger hunt, a cross-town cannonball run of sorts after which most contestants are freshly tattooed with the name and year of the event. Pictures of landmarks and riddles told by booksellers complete the hunt, and may the craziest fuckers win. Spoke cards are given to those who complete the event and are proudly displayed intertwined in the wheels of the victorious riders throughout the year.
Organized by local bike gang the Cutthroats, Slaughterama attracts bike-club chapters from all around. This year, chapters from as far as Minnesota, NYC, Boston, and Florida were in attendance, in addition to hundreds of Richmonders. The event isn’t officially sanctioned by the park police (Belle Island is legally a park), however, as the Cutthroats provide trash cans for waste and beatings for those who litter, the booze at the event has been formally ignored by authorities thus far. As the sun sets and the park closes, the event moves to a local venue for a metal show, with Richmond’s gods of thrash Municipal Waste usually headlining.
IAN GRAHAM
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