Perry ? James Grooms’ cycling comeback was quite the celebratory event Sunday afternoon at Perry Lake.

“It feels pretty good,” said a smiling Grooms, who, after taking six years off from the sport, won his first race back, taking the Cat 4-5 class title at the annual Perry-Roubaix Road Race at Perry Lake. “This is just a great event. It is quite a rush battling the wind, the gravel and those hills. Those hills put up quite the fight.”

The 50-mile race is modeled after the fable Paris-Roubaix race in France that winds along old cobblestone streets.

Sunday, the gravel replaced the cobblestones, but a long twisty hill by the Perry Lake dam is where Grooms made his move thanks to the help of a handful of Velo-Tek teammates who were neck-and-neck with him on the last lap.

“It’s not like it’s all that surprising. He was pretty darn good beforehand,” race promoter Jim Whittaker said of Grooms, winner of the fourth installment of the event which had a record 60 competitors.

Grooms, who had been training with Whittaker’s Velo-Tek team for the past few months, said getting back in competition pretty much was like riding a bicycle.

“It felt great to get back in the swing of things,” said the 41-year-old Grooms, whose job as a publishing editor in Overland Park kept him from racing over the last few years. “It was a really challenging race that came down to the very end.”

That was a fact not lost on Velo-Tek teammate John Sieczkowzki, who helped push Grooms.

“Last year, I raced in this event by myself, and I had to fight off all comers by myself,” Sieczkowzki said. “It’s kind of nice to be able to help a teammate fight off the competition and then watch him win.”

James Grooms celebrates a victory in the Cat 4-5 division of the Perry-Roubaix bicycle race. Grooms won the event Sunday at Perry Lake.

While winning the Roubaix was quite the reward for Grooms, he credited his teammates and Whittaker for the successful afternoon.

So, too, did sponsor Bill Anderson of Lawrence.

“It was a wonderful day. The course was really tough. I thought that it might rain there for a while, which truly would have made the epic race an epic,” he said.