If these garbage truck drivers can stay cool under pressure, they'll rule the ROAD-EO

Ignacio Torres jumped out of a bus on Tuesday morning, landing on the rain-dampened ground with both feet.

The crowd went wild.

"Nacho!" came an excited voice, yelling out Torres's nickname as he strode forth into the melee.

Torres, 42, was ready to put his skills to the test, to compete for a title, to show what he'd mastered as a garbage truck driver. But first, he had the world's friendliest gauntlet to run.

Hundreds of people had gathered to welcome Torres and 92 other garbagemen (their preferred title) to a football-field sized patch of bitumen at Wild Horse Pass Motorsports Park in Chandler. It was the kind of reception most only dream about.

Each man was greeted with thunderous applause, unflagging cheers and placards bearing their names. Some were even met with oversized cut-outs of their actual faces, floating disembodied above the crowd.

They cut a proud line through the whooping, poncho-clad masses, hugging and high-fiving as they went. A gentle but persistent rain did nothing to quell the enthusiasm.

Despite all the hoopla — or because of it — Torres was feeling nervous. His average workday begins at 3 a.m. and involves collecting trash from businesses and apartment complexes in South Phoenix.

But this day, he was here to compete.

'I'm a garbageman'

Actors have the Academy Awards, musicians the Grammys, and scientists and other scholars the Nobel Prize.

Lesser known, but no less fiercely contested, is the ROAD-EO National Championship, a biennial competition for employees of Republic Services, a waste management company headquartered in Phoenix.

The contest pits the company's best truck drivers, heavy machinery operators and vehicle technicians against each other, with cash and paid time off on the line. Employees from around the country compete at the local and regional levels to make it through to the big day. And this year, 93 guys — yes, all of them were men — made the cut.

There were 43 drivers, who would navigate a circuit where every inch matters, composed of orange traffic cones, imagined alley walls and, of course, garbage cans.

The 25 operators would take bulldozers and wheel loaders around a sandy course where large plastic barrels designated challenges such as Blade & Bucket and Pick Up Dirt.

And the 25 technicians would circle a vehicle where 10 elements had been deliberately disabled — a loose lug nut, for instance — and identify them as fast as possible, in 10 minutes max.

You could call them sanitation engineers, if you really wanted to.

But according to Bryan Fenster, the safety director at Republic Services, that's a "fluffy" phrase, one neither he nor the 93 finalists would use.

"When you talk to this group, they're garbagemen," he said. "You don't need to fluff it up for me. I'm a garbageman."

According to Fenster, who started out driving a truck before moving to corporate, the job garners respect and community connection, no matter what you call it.

"The pride in picking up garbage isn't what it used to be, where people might feel down on it," he said. "People are proud to be a garbageman."

Seven obstacles, turns and parallel parking

Torres and his fellow drivers, split into four different categories of trucks, would navigate seven obstacles.

There was the Serpentine, where the trucks would weave through four 96-gallon bins before stopping — and then doing it backward. With the reverse camera disabled.

The Right-Hand Turn, which is exactly what it sounds like, but taken narrowly, through a tight path marked by traffic cones that could not be touched.

The Parallel Parking Challenge, against a taped line on the ground that served as the wall of an alleyway. The closer you are to it, the more points, but cross the line or park more than 24 inches away, and you get zero.

Ditto the Alley Backing, where trucks must reverse — again, with no camera — and stop as close as possible to an imagined wall.

Then the Straight Line, which, simple, right? Actually, it involves 10 comically small cones, each just a few inches high, set out in narrow pairs. The driver must steer the truck's passenger side wheels through each set with pinpoint accuracy. If they don't, the tiny markers will tumble, or even become ensnared in the tire's heavy tread.

Next, the deceptively difficult Offset, a turn from one set of long barriers into another, no scraping the sides allowed.

"This one is really, really hard," Fenster said. "If you miss it by an inch up here, you're never going to gain it as you go through."

And finally, the Forward Stop, pulling up as close as possible to a line.

All of that within 10 minutes, or it's zero points.

"In real life, it's parked cars, it's mailboxes, it's buildings," Fenster said. "This stuff actually simulates what they do in real life 10 hours a day. So coming out here and doing this really isn't that difficult for them."

What is difficult, though, is the pressure.

'You can't overthink it'

Before each contestant takes the wheel or begins an inspection, they are introduced over the loudspeakers.

Their name and a fun fact is read out for all to hear, their photograph displayed on huge screens dotted around the event.

Each also chooses a walk-out song to briefly blare over the speakers before they start their engine and drive.

On Tuesday, these ranged from the brash (Queen's "We Are The Champions") to the invigorating ("Jump Around" by House of Pain) to the intriguingly touching (Puff Daddy and Faith Evans' 1997 hit "I'll Be Missing You").

Torres had chosen "It's Goin' Down," a 1996 tune by California rapper Celly Cel.

He was early on the runsheet, driver number four. It was just past 10 a.m. when Celly Cel blasted across the event.

Watching on from the sidelines was his proud manager, Alberto Guardado.

Two of Guardado's staff in the company's South Phoenix division had made it to the 2023 championship: Torres, competing for the first time, and David Talas, a company veteran of 18 years and the 2021 wheel loader champion.

Guardado described Torres, who has worked at Republic Services for a decade, as a family man with a great safety record, a driver who knows his equipment and is never complacent.

"He has a cool confidence," Guardado said. "He drives in alleys at 3:30 in the morning in the dark. He's driving through parking lots when they're busy. His head's got to be on a swivel all the time."

As Torres took off, he was cheered on by wife, Liliana, a stay-at-home mom to their four children. Guardado filmed on his phone.

Torres took the Serpentine fast, weaving forward through the residential bins with pinpoint accuracy. Once past them, he began to reverse, the truck beeping loudly and flashing amber lights.

He adroitly maneuvered back past the first bin. The second. The third.

And then he nudged the fourth. The bin remained upright, but tipped at a precarious angle against the truck. It was an unmistakable hit.

Torres kept going, making it through the sharp right-hand turn and nudging as close as he could to the invisible wall in the parallel parking challenge.

He hit three out of 10 tiny cones in the Straight Line obstacle. One of them got caught in a rear wheel, traveling up to the next challenge before falling off onto the course.

Finally, Torres pulled up to the finish line.

To a layperson, the driving was impressive. But after his run, Torres wasn't feeling great about how he did.

"I think I needed to just relax," he said. "I was trying to approach it safe and be very calm. But you just got to let it flow. You can't overthink it. And that's what I was doing, so."

When he's driving on his own, navigating alleyways and parking lots in the dark, early hours of the morning, it's easy to focus on the task at hand, he said. People are often impatient around the trucks, and maintaining constant vigilance is a must.

"You've got to be safe and alert at all times because you can easily change someone's life in a second."

He's used to that burden. The competition, though, was something else.

"I thought I worked out some kinks yesterday in the practice run," he said. "But the pressure of all these people here, you know, it gets to you."

"It's pretty big."

A job taken for granted

Torres didn't win, or come in second or third. But making it to the competition in the first place?

"It felt great," he said. It made him feel appreciated as a driver, that his work was being noticed.

"I knew he would make it," Liliana added. "He's confident. He's good at his job."

And even though he and Liliana live in Phoenix, they still got the expenses-paid, three-night hotel stay offered to all finalists. On Tuesday, they had one more night to enjoy.

"This is our little vacation away," Liliana said.

Talas, the other South Phoenix contestant, won his category a second time, running with a perfect score. Talas usually works at the 7th Street transfer station, moving trash post-collection after drivers like Torres pick it up.

Guardado said people tend to take their work for granted, even though safely using large machinery requires a lot of skill.

"I always jokingly say, you know, the trash fairy, right?" he said. "Like people put their garbage out and the trash just disappears."

But behind every vanished load, there's a driver. Perhaps one who started at 3 a.m., spending the early hours maneuvering through tight streets, sometimes with just inches to spare.

Lane Sainty is a storytelling reporter at The Republic and azcentral. Reach her at lane.sainty@arizonarepublic.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Garbage truck drivers compete in contests of skill and safety