From the Archives - Portrait of the Young Cyclist: Part 4

Introduction

This post continues the tale, from my archives, of how I became a bike racer. In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3, I described how my early infatuation with the sport led to actually participating; the disastrous results of that doomed effort; and, how even learning how to train failed to vault me to glory, with all my friends easily passing me by. In this post I describe my third season and how my minor triumphs were offset by more salt in the wounds (figurative and actual).

Portrait of the Cyclist as a Young Man – Part Four: Insult to Injury (written in February 2003)

As I described in my last post on this topic, after the 1982 Red Zinger Mini Classic I tried my hand at some USCF races and didn’t really get anywhere. The next year I decided it made sense to race the Mini Zinger again, even if my friends N— and J— had moved on to racing USCF all year. (To refresh your memory, they’d finished first and third, respectively, in the ’82 Mini Zinger, and cleaned up in USCF races for the rest of the season.) Frankly, their absence was part of the appeal: they wouldn’t be around to crush me again and rub my nose in it. (To be fair, I was pretty good at rubbing my own nose in it.) Besides, the Mini Zinger races seemed a bit better organized than the USCF ones. An added bonus is that in the less elite field I could learn some tactics. The 1982 races taught me that strength wasn’t enough and I had a lot to learn. It’s hard to do that when you’re off the back, so why would I want to race USCF all year?

Over the winter I borrowed $750 from my dad and bought N—’s “old” bike, a Mercian Colorado with full Campy. (He’d gotten the pro deal on a fancier Mercian, that matched his teammates’ bikes, and didn’t need this one anymore.) The color of my “new” bike was light brown, which they called “champagne pearl.” It was, more precisely, the color of a perfect young fawn. It was the prettiest bike I’ve ever had. I rode it for a few weeks and then (riding at night without a light) crashed it into a curb, ruining the frame. The down tube got rumpled, the head tube steepened, the top tube creased slightly. Even the fork was bent. I was inconsolable.

My brothers were really sympathetic and rallied around me in my despair. Ha. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. Of course that’s not true. In fact they gave me endless crap, insisting that the frame was defective and I was a moron to have bought it in the first place. They contended that because the framebuilder had used pins to hold the tubes in place while brazing the frame, instead of using a jig for this purpose, that he’d introduced horrible strains into the structure that caused it to be inherently weak. (For some reason, we were all steeped in this kind of lore and knew for a fact that Mercians were pinned.)

My brothers teased me so much I finally wrote to Frank Berto, the technical guru at Bicycling magazine. I described the scenario in detail, mentioning my weight and size and the approximate speed of the impact, and how I hit the curb in a “perpendicular fashion” (I remember this phrase because I had to look up the spelling on “perpendicular”). Frank, or somebody on his staff, wrote me back directly, assuring me that the frame was not defective, that the pins are a widely accepted way of building a frame, and that any impact of that kind would bend any frame made of such lightweight tubing. The letter went on to praise my writing ability. “Sign that boy up!” he’d written.

Naturally this didn’t satisfy my brothers, who shifted their mockery to my letter, making up quotes like, “As I hit the curb, in an exactly perpendicularly fashion, my lightly muscled body slightly tense, a grimace on my perspiring face….” I guess they were paying me back for buying that Mercian in the first place. I had broken some unwritten rule by having a better bike than any of them did. In any case, I couldn’t borrow any more money from my dad to buy a new frame, so Geoff gave me a loan on the condition that he choose the make. He chose Miyata.

So in 1983 I had a Pro Miyata, which should have thrilled me except it was clearly inferior to the Mercian and I now owed money on two bikes. Still, I had to live up to such a cool bike, so I trained harder than ever, still riding with N— and J— much of the time. That year I made a couple of new friends, Spencer Crouch and Aaron Pickett-Heaps, and put together a Mini Zinger team with the two of them along with John Lynch, the good racer (and good friend) from my first year.

Here’s a photo of Spencer and me. I can’t recall what race this was. Look how great his jersey is. That thing I’m wearing? Not even a jersey. I think it may have been a pajama top. Also, note how suavely Spencer is posing for the camera. That didn’t occur to me. Perhaps I was still unaware that, as a teenager, I was supposed to look cool. Emotionally I think I was still like ten. I was just happy to be around. What an idiot.

Before the Red Zinger proper, the promoters held qualifying races to determine who’d be in Division 2 (the slower group) and who made Division 1. The first qualifier was the Kittredge Criterium, on the University of Colorado campus in Boulder. I went into the race with high hopes, and for the first time ever, things seemed to fall into place. I got into a four-man breakaway and felt like I was the strongest guy in it. In fact, I started to believe I could actually win the race! Then, with just a few laps remaining, I suddenly didn’t feel so well and totally puked. The barf was bright red and went everywhere, scaring the crap out of my breakaway companions. You can see a smear of it on my lip in this photo. (That’s Spencer behind me.)

John and I had eaten a whole bunch of spaghetti for lunch, at his house, right before the race. The sauce was made with ground beef, which I never got at home, and I totally overate. We lost track of time and had to haul ass over to the race. At least we were warmed up, but it would have been great to have digested our food.

So … surprise, surprise, I did not win the race. You may be tempted to infer causality between the vomit and me losing, but there was none, or little. Granted, barfing was distracting, but I felt better afterward. To be honest, the winner, Allen Copeland if I recall correctly, beat me for no good reason. I think when it came down to it I just didn’t have the nerve to win. For someone stooped in failure, with an upbringing based on the cult of inadequacy, victory would have seemed like overreaching. All the same, I was thrilled with my first podium finish (even though, this being a prelim, they didn’t actually bring out the podium).

After that promising start, things got tough again. The more I rode with Aaron, the stronger he got. Same with Spencer, actually, and in fact he bet me $5 he’d beat me in the Mini Zinger. That seemed pretty cheeky because he’d just taken up the sport. But then, this was all par for the course.

So, on to the Mini Zinger. I don’t actually remember that much, other than the podium continued to elude me. Aaron had become super fast and was trading the race leader’s jersey back and forth with this kid named Kevin Smith. Going into the last stage, Aaron trailed by a few points (points being the basis for the Mini Zinger’s general classification, perhaps so a kid could crash out during a stage and start back up again the next day). This final stage was the National Bureau of Standards criterium, an 8-shaped course on a bit of a hill. Thrillingly, I got into a three-man breakaway with Kevin and Aaron, and we seemed destined to stay off. (Kids tended to give up pretty easily in those days, I’d noticed. Until this day, I’d always noticed this from the perspective of the one giving up.)

It started to rain, first soft and then hard. This didn’t bother us a bit, though it’d have bothered me if I’d known better. I’d punctured right before the race and borrowed a wheel from my brothers’ friend Dave Towle. Little did I he realize, he’d glued a track tire to it. That tire surely got great traction on a track, in a velodrome. In the wet? Not so much. Bombing a 90-degree turn on the descent I totally slid out. Game over, man!

I had the good sense to get out of the road before 50 guys ran me over, but then I foolishly slumped on my back on a wet lawn. Somebody summoned the race medics, who went straight to work assessing my injuries. A small crowd gathered, including my brothers, a course marshal, and (I seem to recall) my poor terrified mother, along with a few random spectators with a yen for schadenfreude. The medics seemed to overreact a bit, either because they’d been bored, or because they mistook my shivering for going into shock. Actually, I was just cold, because I was lying in wet grass and had about 2% body fat.

The medics cut my shorts open, which I came to learn is standard procedure for some reason, and as I lay on my back, with all these people looking down at me, I felt my unit fall out from under its flap of lycra so it was in plain view of everybody. I poked it back under there, and for some reason this seemed to my brothers to be damning evidence of my obviously faked injury. They figured that if I had the presence of mind to cover Raulo, I should have been able to get right back up on my bike and finish the race. I suppose a more heroic racer would have done just that, but frankly I was not that heroic racer. I was a thirteen-year-old kid, and it hurt to crash, and when the adults took control of the situation it didn’t occur to me to shrug anything off and get back in the race. I suppose I could have at least told everybody I was okay, but maybe it didn’t occur to me I was okay, at least not at the time.

I was ambulanced to the hospital, and at some point my dad materialized and sat next to my gurney in the ER, helping to fill out the insurance paperwork. He was remarkably cheerful, and he didn’t even take the opportunity to remind me that he’d warned us of this, that the chickens had come home to roost, that my own stupidity had done me in. [If you don’t recall it from Part 1, my brothers and I took up bike racing despite our father having forbidden it on the grounds that, as he put it, “You boys are too stupid to be bike racers. You’ll get yourselves killed.”]

Dad made light fun of the redundant and poorly conceived questions on the insurance form. The form could have simply given a place for the patient or his guardian to write a brief description of what happened, but instead tried to shoehorn him into shaping a narrative out of multiple-choice or short-answer questions. The one I remember best was something like, “Did you/patient encounter an impact with any object?” My dad asked whether I thought “the ground” was an appropriate response. I did. He wrote it down.

Then a doctor or nurse (heck, maybe it was an orderly) came and scrubbed my road rash with a toothbrush. Somewhere there is a photo of this, which would be very handy now because I remember the road-rash as having been the size of an orange. Perhaps I inflated it in the telling so that it became a grapefruit; in any case in my brothers’ telling it started out a tennis ball and in successive retellings became a plum, then a cherry, then a raisin. Ask them today and they’ll probably say I didn’t have any road rash at all. You should totally ask them … they’d love to tell you this story in their own words, especially the part about how I was obviously unscathed because I’d had the presence of mind to cover my male member when it flopped out in front of the hoards of disgusted spectators. I’d be delighted to learn what new, shocking details they’d add to the story now.

So, on the basis of that crash, I dropped from 4th or 5th overall in the Mini Zinger to 7th. I was pretty disappointed, having really thought the podium would be in reach. At least I did beat Spencer, who as you’ll recall had bet me $5 he’d beat me in the general classification. I spent the rest of the summer trying to get him to pay up. Eventually I had to settle for $2 and a little sunglasses leash. (He had an extra.)

But there’s a silver lining! The day after crashing out of that criterium, as I spent the day in bed convalescing, I decided to have lunch brought to me. One of my prizes for the Mini Zinger was a gift certificate at Quizno’s, good for lunch-for-two. I offered J— a free meal if he’d go fetch it. He borrowed my 3-speed and headed out. Well, he was gone a lot longer than I expected, and when he finally returned, he had road rash of his own; the Cokes were pretty much empty; our sandwiches were soaked. On the ride back, going pretty fast despite balancing our lunch (in its cardboard tray) on the handlebars, he’d run over a squirrel and totally stacked. While he was lying there in the bike path, the wind knocked out of him, some typically pro-animal Boulderite stopped to bawl him out for having maimed the squirrel. Shoot, did I say my cloudy Mini Zinger tale had a silver lining? More like pewter or even lead.

To be continued

Check back in a month or so for the thrilling finale: my brave return to the USCF circuit and how my ongoing mediocrity undermined my closest friendships.

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Bomb Pop - A Bicycle Retrospective

Introduction

I’m enchanted with the spoken track “The Pontiac” on the Tom Waits album Orphans (Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards). I won’t try to describe it—just click here to listen. I played it for my daughter who said, “You should do your own, about your bikes!” So here it is.

Bomb Pop

So, first of all I had the Fuji Junior. It was a tiny little bright red ten-speed, 24-inch wheels, stem-mounted Suntour shifters with little plastic condoms on them. I was ashamed at the “Junior” part and painted over it with touch-up paint. Now, your uncles all had Motobecane Nomades, which kind of made me jealous at the time because they were French. They all had those shitty plastic Simplex derailleurs and shifters but my brothers pretended they were kickass. Your grandpa had a weakness for French bikes. His was this weird crappy Gitane, I couldn’t tell what color it was, I even asked my dad, he couldn’t say either. Even your Grandma Jude had a French bike, also a Gitane, women’s mixte frame, narrow rock-hard plastic saddle—she hated it, I only saw her ride it once.

So, after the Motobecanes, Uncle Geoff and Uncle Bryan upstaged me again with these Libertas racing bikes from Belgium. Now they were pure shit, terrible lugwork, little specks of excess flux the builders couldn’t be bothered to sand off, but the bikes had flashy head tube decals and really skinny tires and I was in awe.

My next bike was like sensible shoes, a Miyata 310, $265 plus tax in 1981—gosh, two decades before you were born. I tricked it out with Suntour Superbe Pro brakes and pedals, handbuilt wheels I bought off your Uncle Geoff: Phil Wood hubs and Weinmann rims, laced radially which was almost unheard of back then. Stronglight cranks, drilled-out chainrings which was pretty badass. Concor saddle which had just come out, kind of radical at the time, I had the Supercorsa which had steel rails. I sold that 310 to Joel Linsky for $515; his mom was furious.

Now your Uncle Max had the Univega Viva Sport, he took off all the decals, slapped on some Dia Compe 500G brakes, tried to pass it off as a Colnago.

My first pro bike was a Mercian Colorado, Reynolds 531 with an SL fork, a beautiful color they called champagne pearl, really gorgeous, a bit like the color of a fawn actually. Bought that from my pal Nico. A couple months later we were riding at night and I piled into a curb, bent the frame—crumpled the downtube below the shifter bosses. Heartbreaking.

I had another Mercian, white with red panels, gorgeous, and I had my first victories on that bike before selling it to your Uncle Max who’d fallen in love with it and couldn’t live without it. From there I got into more Miyatas, there was the ’83 Pro, then the ’83 Team I bought off of Towle, he got it from Andre Claussen, I traded that to your Uncle Geoff for the ’84 Team he’d become too short to ride after the car accident. I had eight Miyatas … loved ‘em all. Not that they were actually that good … kind of heavy, top tubes too short, and the 73 head angle wasn’t aggressive enough.

After my ’86 Team Miyata’s fork broke at nationals I bought the Guerciotti SLX from Dave Feingold for $400. It was a 10 Speed Drive team issue, red white & blue fade paint job, so I named it Bomb Pop. God I loved that bike. Long top tube, 74 head angle, 72 seat, low bottom bracket, it just handled so beautifully. Indexed shifting never worked on that bike so I ran it with the Simplex Retrofriction shifters. I had some of my best races on that bike. In ’96 I bought a brand-new Dura-Ace gruppo for it, laced up a fresh set of wheels. Two weeks later I was riding on the Golden Gate bridge, sprinting, and the fork broke. Steerer tube sheared clean off—I piled face-first into the concrete, headset bearings rolling everywhere, I needed a bunch of stitches. Still, that was one of my favorite bikes. Well, that was a long time before you were born.

Photos & notes

Here I’m on the Fuji during the 1981 Red Zinger Mini Classic. Look how small we are.

Here’s my dad’s Gitane.

Here’s my mom’s Gitane. Man, what a hateful bike. She didn’t even want the mixte-style frame but Dad insisted.

Here’s Bryan on his Libertas at the ’81 Mini Zinger.

Here’s that Libertas head tube decal.

Here’s Max  on his Univega, also from the ’81 Mini Red. Notice how his poorly pinned number is coming off.

Here’s the Dia-Compe 500G brakes Max had.  He was so proud of them. I can’t find a photo of the drilled levers, though.

Here’s the Miyata 310—I’m #62, straddling it—and also the Mercian Colorado with Nico on it (in the race leader jersey), at the 1982 Mini Zinger. I bought the Mercian off Nico later that year.

Here’s my dad’s Subaru (which did not run off gasohol, by the way) with (from left to right) Max’s Univega Viva Sport, Geoff’s Univega Superstrada, our dad’s Trek, and Bryan’s Libertas (which he got from Geoff after his own Libertas broke).

Here’s my college roommate on my ’86 Team Miyata.

Randomly, here’s a pair of pages from a bike magazine showing two of the bikes featured in this post.

Here’s Bomb Pop during its heyday.

I still have it, but it’s not safe to ride.

Acknowledgements and errata

Of course my daughter Alexa gets a shout-out for suggesting this post & the recording. I am grateful also to my daughter Lindsay for doing the excellent camera work, holding my phone very still with it trained on the slide show playing on my laptop while I did the audio.

There are a couple of severe goofs in the video that you probably laughed at already, owing to my needing to get this done in one take. First is complaining about the 83 head angle on my Miyatas being too shallow; of course I meant 73 (as 83 would be impossibly steep). I also stated that the head tube on Bomb Pop sheared clean off; of course I meant the steerer tube.

If you enjoy “The Pontiac” as much as I do, I’m sure you can’t help but be disappointed in my tale and moreover my delivery. What can I say? I’m not Tom Waits. But then again who is?

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From the Archives - the Panache of Italian Bicycles

Introduction

I have a new road bike. The frame is from Taiwan. This is a first for me (other than my rain/backup bike, which doesn’t count). I’ve been told, and I believe, that the Taiwanese are now the best in the world at making carbon fiber bike frames. Taiwan has come a long way … not so long ago, I wouldn’t have even settled for a Taiwanese mountain bike.

Caring where my bike came from goes back to my very first one, a Fuji I got for my ninth birthday. I loved the bike but my brothers teased me constantly about how, being Japanese, it lacked the flair and panache of their French bikes. (For details click here.) My next bike was also Japanese, a Miyata, because my parents were still buying. But at the young age of thirteen I borrowed some money from my dad and bought an English Mercian frame with all Italian components. I was absolutely besotted with it, and then tragedy struck: I crashed it into a curb and ruined it. I was still paying it off years after this. Worse, my dad wouldn’t loan me any more money, so to replace the frame I had to borrow from my brother Geoff. Oddly, Geoff would only loan me the money if I bought a Pro Miyata. So I did. Going back down to a robot-built Japanese frame really chafed, after that gorgeous hand-built Mercian. Perhaps that experience predisposed me to take extra pleasure in my first Italian bike frame, a hand-built Guerciotti, which inspired the following essay.

(A quick note on this essay: it suffers from a lack of clarity about what is real and what is made-up. Though I can’t prove this, the old Campagnolo slogan is real; perhaps some of you will remember it.)

Italian Bikes - September 18, 1990

I don’t claim to fully understand what’s going on in Kuwait right now, but I gather Iraq is getting too big for its britches. But you know who else is getting too big for its britches, at least economically? Japan. Back in the early- to mid-‘80s, the yen was really weak against our dollar, which mattered to me because it meant bike stuff was really pretty cheap. (The Italians had to lower their prices to compete, I think.) In 1985, simply because I was jaded after years of devotion to Campagnolo and could afford to, I bought a full Dura-Ace gruppo. I mean, why not, when it was only $400 mail-order? Of course, in those days, Japanese bike stuff was always considered second-rate, the bargain alternative to Italian. But now Dura-Ace is considered as good as Campy, and Japanese bikes are everywhere, even at the high end, and everything is expensive. There are no more good deals in cycling. So, after five years of Team Miyatas, I’m going back to Italian. I might as well.

The best thing about Italian frames is that they’re the only ones left that sport a large ornamental hole cut in the bottom bracket shell. Sure, the hole may jeopardize the structural integrity of the frameset, but can you say style? And check out this quote from “Bicycling” magazine:  

We could detect no structural improvement in the “cut” frame; in fact, this model flexed between .5 and .6 microns more than other frames under a load of 150,000 foot‑pounds on our Tarantula frame-stressing machine. However, our test riders all agreed that the “cut” frame “just felt faster.” Time trial times were typically 5 to 10 seconds faster over a 20 kilometer course.

The tradition-bound, mystique-rich flair of the Italian bike industry is widely respected. Consider the reverent tone of this excerpt from an article in “Bicycle Guide” about Petruccio Cycles, a tiny operation in Milan:

Everything about the shop is typically Italian. A half-full bottle of Cinzano and some bread sticks lie on the front table. A faded black-and-white poster of Alfredo Binda hangs on the cracking plaster wall, and an old grey cat (whose name we found out is, of course, Fellini) sleeps in a patch of sunlight. The frame jigs and mitering tools are old, black, and in fact barely visible under the single dangling bulb lighting the shop area. But there is one thing completely unique about this one‑man operation: the master framebuilder Giuseppe Petruccio is blind.

Even the marketing is beautifully absurd; take this actual slogan, for example: “Campagnolo Technology to Love Bicycle. Even Only on Sundays.” What does that mean? But then who really cares? A Clément tire ad features a woman, whose appearance falls halfway between Italian allure and brazen smuttiness, engaged in a tug‑of‑war over a tire with her male equivalent; oddly, her expression is blank. A well-dressed gentleman in the background looks on. It’s as though the struggle over the tire continues only because of inertia; everybody involved has mostly lost interest.

The point is, you’re not supposed to choose Italian products based on features and technology and other rational criteria. It’s more of a feeling, man. So you can do one of two things: you can be a fitness-minded sport tourist who studies product catalog spec sheets to decide what Japanese robot-built, shrink-wrapped component or accessory to buy for his peacock-pastel colored bicycle, or you can be Euro and ride a classy bike built by a starving-artist type who, thirty years ago, inadvertently settled on a frame design that seemed to work so he’s passed it on to his apprentice, or his cousin, or any of his bambinos who needed a job. The choice is yours.