The Reggie Awards, our playful nod to “registration” excellence, celebrates event organizers who create extraordinary experiences within the athleteReg community. Each month, these passionate individuals share their stories, strategies, and the magic that makes their events uniquely special.
This month’s Reggie Award goes to an event built with intention from the ground up. Led by Drew Wilson, Marcus Fitts and Equip Racing, Chocolate City Criterium brings sanctioned bike racing back to Washington, DC while putting community, access, and local culture at the center of the experience.
Photos: Brian Rimm
Event Overview:
Event Directors: Drew Wilson & Marcus Fitts
Organization: Equip Racing
Event Name: Chocolate City Criterium
Event Registration Site: BikeReg registration page
How many years have you been organizing this event? Our first year was 2024, so 2026 will be our third year organizing the event.
How many participants attended your most recent event? Our 2025 event drew 600+ participants across the bike races and 5K, along with an estimated 1,000–2,000 spectators throughout the day. We still feel like there’s a lot of room to grow from here!
Tell us about Chocolate City Criterium in 3–4 sentences: We describe Chocolate City Criterium as the point where the highest levels of bike racing meet DC culture. It’s the USA Cycling Criterium Championship for the District of Columbia and a Mid-Atlantic Bicycle Racing Association (MABRA) Championship event, but it’s also much bigger than a bike race — it’s a cultural block party with music, local food, and the city showing up loud and proud. We set out to build a bridge between the highest levels of the sport and the broader community, creating a space where more people feel seen, welcomed, and connected to cycling, and we feel like we’ve been successful in that so far. At its core, CCC is about blending high-level competition with intentional community activation in a way that feels true to DC’s history and identity.
“At its core, CCC is about blending high-level competition with intentional community activation in a way that feels true to DC’s history and identity.”
How would you describe your experience working with BikeReg?
Honestly, the support team has been great. A lot of people know BikeReg as the platform you use to sign up for races, but running an event and managing all the moving pieces behind the scenes is a completely different experience. As first-time organizers coming into this from a slightly outside perspective, we were leaning on everybody we could — other race directors, friends, anyone willing to help — and BikeReg’s support team was a huge part of that. They were very responsive and helped us work through issues quickly (including a few of our mistakes before anyone else noticed).
“As first-time organizers coming into this from a slightly outside perspective, we were leaning on everybody we could — other race directors, friends, anyone willing to help — and BikeReg’s support team was a huge part of that.”
Community & Access
Increasing representation and lowering barriers to entry are core to your mission. What does that look like in practice at your event?
For us, that has to show up in real, tangible ways. We want CCC to be about action, not just words, so that means building race categories and prize structures that elevate women and underrepresented riders, including equal race times and equal pay between men and women, while also making sure youth and first-time racers have a place to line up without feeling like outsiders. It also means working closely with local teams, community organizations, and HBCUs year-round to bring more people into the sport through things like free race entry, loaner gear, mentorship, and, sometimes, just a very clear invitation that they belong. Even the location is intentional — we want it to be somewhere people can ride to or easily reach by Metro rail or bus. A big part of it is making the event feel like something the community actually owns and sees itself in.
“A big part of it is making the event feel like something the community actually owns and sees itself in.”
You’ve intentionally designed Chocolate City Criterium as a community-focused event built around racing. How do music, food, and local culture shape the experience for participants and spectators?
We didn’t want CCC to feel like another parking lot crit. From the beginning, part of the goal was to challenge the status quo of what a race can look and feel like, and to make this event definitively DC. The live music, local food, and festival energy help bring people out from the community who may have never come to watch a bike race otherwise, and we love that a lot of them end up getting exposed to the sport for the first time in a setting that feels familiar and welcoming.
We want to keep evolving and experimenting with the event in ways that cross-pollinate more communities. That was a big part of why we put the Legacy Loop 5K smack dab in the middle of the bike race schedule — so runners weren’t just showing up early and heading home, but were actually experiencing bike racing, and cyclists were out there watching and cheering on the 5K too. We even had some of our cyclists jump into the run, which is exactly the kind of overlap we love.
Innovation & First-Timers
Your clinics, community rides, and race-week programming help welcome first-time racers. Why is that progression important to you as an Event Director?
That progression is really about creating a place where people feel like they belong. If someone’s first experience with bike racing is intimidating, confusing, or isolating, there’s a good chance it’ll be the last time we see them. So the progression from clinics to race day is very intentional — whether that’s skills work, race start simulations, or hot laps on the actual course so people can get comfortable in a safer, lower-pressure setting before the event. We want people to feel prepared, supported, and confident before they ever toe the line, and we didn’t want to just guess at what that should look like — we talked to the women’s and youth programs in our community and built it around what they said they actually wanted and needed.
“We want people to feel prepared, supported, and confident before they ever toe the line.”
Real Talk
What has been the biggest challenge in producing Chocolate City Criterium, and what keeps you pushing forward anyway?
The biggest challenge has honestly just been how hard it is to build something new from scratch, especially in a city like DC. It’s stressful financially, logistically, and emotionally, and we’re constantly trying to balance risk, equity, and sustainability all at the same time. On top of that, a lot of people don’t really understand bike racing, so getting them to buy into the vision can be an uphill battle — it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem where you need funding to prove the concept, but the majority of people want proven ROI before they’ll join in. Thankfully, Events DC believed in what we were building early on and helped make it real, and that’s grown into a great partnership.
What keeps us going through all of that is the response from riders and the community — the positive feedback, the supportive comments, and seeing how strongly people showed up for us in the Reggie Awards voting reminds us this thing really matters to people.
“Events DC believed in what we were building early on and helped make it real, and that’s grown into a great partnership.”
Just for fun
What’s the signature element or tradition that makes your event uniquely yours? (The thing participants rave about year after year!)
For us, I think it has to be our packet pickup expo at the REI DC Flagship the evening before race day. Packet pickup is standard in a lot of other sports, but it’s still not all that common in bike racing, so it gives the weekend a different feel right from the start — and helps reduce race day stress too. We pair it with a community bike ride and shakeout run, and this year we’re adding a panel conversation with some great guests about what equity in action means to them.
If you’re ready to build an event your community shows up for, start a free athleteReg account and bring your vision to life.
