gsteinb

and even those people aren't really pro, or likely to be

when you look at the landscape of NY cycling over the past few decades who went to the world stage pro level

Mike McCarthy
Hincapie
Evie Stevens

there's a guy who lives in 'upstate ny' named Norton I think who rode for a domestic pro team.
Marc Gullickson was a hardcore cross rider, but basically got spanked when it came to world stage stuff

There are a host of masters in NYC who raced on pro teams in the 90s, but none of them really made anything of it in Europe. A few got caught for doping. Merlito Heredita won that late season PA Pro/1 UCI race (it's now the doylestown crit, instead of being a huge RR) which was a big deal until he got popped in the after race drug test for EPO. He's married to a racer that Psimet knows. Still hangs the winning poster in his shop, and most of NYC acts like the cheating never happened.

There was guy in the NY area who ended up on Chipotle because he knew the sponsor, and the contingency for the money was that he got put on the team. But he didn't start a single race with them. The following season he got on the champ-systems team which was basically created so a bunch of rider and older guys could live the dream of having a pro team. But they were a domestic crit squad (they might have gotten to race Philly) and while they might have had the budget one year to pay the guy who the series, but I forget. I knew the 'owners' and it basically broke up their friendship, cost a ton of money, and they had to deal with major prima donna issues once they started trying to recruit riders who could actually get anything done in those races. And again, those riders were racing domestic crits because they couldn't make it elsewhere. When you look at the number of guys who are racing the domestic crit circuit vs choosing another form of racing they could make it at, the number is very few.