Ray Petro, who founded and built the revolutionary Ray’s Indoor Mountain Bike Park in Cleveland, Ohio, and the second of its kind in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sold his endeavor to Trek in 2010. While Petro still contracts with Trek to redesign and modify the parks, he now has a lot more free time on his hands.
According to the Ocala Star Banner, Petro purchased a fixer-upper near Santos two years ago, and spent much of his first year remodeling it. And then,
This year, Petro volunteered his services to the Ocala Mountain Bike Association and has helped design and build new challenging features on the Santos trails within the Cross Florida Greenway property in Marion County.
“I love to build, and what am I going to do, sit at home all day?” said Petro, who is 47.
Check out the latest feature that Petro and other volunteers are close to completing:
Petro’s presence and volunteerism, coupled with his skill as the most renowned builder of wooden mountain bike features in the nation, is undoubtedly a massive stroke of luck for OMBA. While the trails at Santos were already great, these new features and the reworked older features will only continue to fuel Santos’s rise as a regional, and even a national, destination.
“People don’t realize what great trails there are in this area. Florida has some of the best trails in the country. You get a lot of people who come here from all over for the trails. It’s one of the reasons I moved here,” Petro said. “I’ve ridden the trails out west and, by far, I prefer the ones in Florida.”
via The Ocala Banner Star, Ocala.com
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Jan 9, 2014
Jan 9, 2014