Baldwin ? The two boys shared laughs early Sunday afternoon, but only after first exchanging scrapes and damaging their bikes during their juniors 10-14 road race in rural Douglas County.

Alex Edwards and Josh Wade learned scrapes are part of the sport of cycling after they crashed into each other late in the final event of the Baldwin City Stage Race.

“I’m kind of hurting,” admitted the 12-year-old Edwards, whose cut face showed signs of the crash.

Two big sections of road rash covered his face and chest, but a fat lip didn’t stop him from smiling when fellow racer Tim Taylor cracked jokes while applying ointment.

“You know, girls dig scars,” said Taylor, a masters-division rider who is a physician from Iowa. “See, I have the same kind of mark on my shoulder, except I dislocated my arm when I did my face-plant.”

After his wreck, Edwards, a Parkville, Mo., native, got back on his bike and finished the 23-mile race.

Wade, who races for the Wichita-based Oz Racing Club, couldn’t finish, but not because of injuries.

“I wanted to finish, but I couldn’t,” said the 12-year-old, pointing to his broken helmet, which had five cracks in it. “And I’ll probably have to take my bike back to the shop.”

Junior and Lawrence resident Joe Schmalz said he hated to see Wade and his teammate, Edwards, go down.

Participants in the Cat 3/4 division leave the starting line at Baldwin High School. The cyclists competed in the two-day Baldwin City Stage Race, which concluded with a road race Sunday in Baldwin.

“It happens to everyone in this sport,” said the 14-year-old Schmalz, who won Saturday’s time-trial and criterium-course competition, and also was victorious in Sunday’s road race to complete the sweep of the juniors title.

“I think those two guys are tough enough to not let it affect them,” added Schmalz, who will race in next week’s state competition in Kansas City. “But you hate to see it happen to the younger kids, because you don’t want them to have a negative reaction to racing and then not continue.”

Edwards and Wade fared better in their brushes with the pavement than some of the older competitors did Saturday.

A handful of men went down in the Category 4 race.

Jill Tillman, of Springfield, Mo., suffered the most severe injury of the weekend in the open women’s race.

Riders in the junior category are framed by a Baldwin High School sign during the road race portion of the Baldwin City Stage Race. The two-day race concluded Sunday in Baldwin.

When Tillman got tangled up with another rider and fell, she broke her left elbow and suffered a cut on her leg so deep that it nearly severed part of her tendon.

“She was in bad shape,” said Tillman’s training partner, Melissa Cox, who escorted Tillman to Lawrence Memorial Hospital on Saturday evening.

After four hours of treatment, a cast and several stitches, Tillman was released.

While the wreckage might have cast a pall over the weekend, race promoter Chad Marshall said that wasn’t the case.

“All in all, everything went real well,” Marshall said of the nearly 200 competitors who attended the race sponsored by the Kansas City Orthopaedic Institute. “Wrecks unfortunately do happen, and often times the odds become much greater when there are bigger groups of riders challenging each other on a criterium course.”