From the Archives - San Francisco Grand Prix Spectator’s Eye View - Part II

Introduction

My last post was part one of an old Daily Peloton story from my archives (it is alas, not in their archive anymore). This week I give you part two. I left off describing how a bike race announcer has the difficult job of amping up the crowd and making the complicated sport accessible to non-fans. Here I pick up that thread again.

San Francisco Grand Prix: A Spectator’s Eye View Part II – September 14, 2003

Michael Aisner, together with Jeff Roake, did a splendid job announcing the San Francisco Grand Prix from the finish line along the Embarcadero. It’s not an easy job, but they managed to keep the crowd engaged during the long spells between laps, explaining the tactics of the race as they unfolded, and providing interesting tidbits such as the role of the team car and of the Mavic neutral support. In what seems to be a tradition, they had longtime cycling fan Robin Williams get up on the stage for some impromptu comedy: “Look for me, riding with Team Viagra. You’ll see in the team poster that not many of the bikes have kickstands. There’s a reason for this.”

But the better race commentary gig was at the top of Taylor Street, where another announcer, Dave Towle, had his station set up. Here, the crowd was at least half a dozen deep all the way down the hill, and was curb to curb farther up Taylor beyond the point where the course turns left. The upward block of the street is like a natural set of bleachers, except that these spectators were content to stand for four and a half hours.

Dave and I go way back—we grew up together in Boulder, Colorado, where he still lives—so it was with particular enjoyment that I watched him stoking the coals of the throngs of fans. It sure didn’t hurt that his own enthusiasm was off the charts—I’ve never seen anybody yell into a microphone at a bike race before—but he also knew the right buttons to push. He sensed that the crowd’s awareness of its own power was one such button. “If I yell, ‘Okay, Taylor Street, let’s give it up for these racers, show ‘em what you can do,” he explained, “I can bring their volume from here” (hand held, palm down, at chest level) “to here” (hand above head). “Of course, you can only go to that well so many times.”

Dave doesn’t stop with the spectators: he also works to motivate the racers themselves. Lap after lap he led the crowd in cheering on Jason Lokkesmoe, reminding them that this was a young neo-pro from Oakland on Health Net, a local team. Dave was convinced that for Jason to hear his own name must have motivated him. “Think about it,” he told me. “When you hear your name over the loud speaker, time and time again, you start to believe that the entire crowd, the entire world, is focused on you. And how could you not dig just a little deeper, knowing that?”

Dave explained the need to gradually build a crescendo as the race develops. “If you’re telling them on lap three that you’ve never seen anything so amazing in your life, what are you going to tell them on lap six? There are only so many times in a day you can be the most amazed you’ve ever been in your life. These guys are going to think, man, this guy amazes easy. What, did he just get out of prison?”

The highlight of Dave’s announcing was when he spotted his fellow Boulderite Trent Klasna, who earlier in the race had done major work for his Saturn team, then had dropped out, and now had changed into street clothes and was strolling the course. (To even recognize a cyclist in regular garb is something of a feat; earlier in the day Lance Armstrong rode right through the start/finish area in civvies, having dropped out as well, and just about nobody noticed.) Dave jumped at the opportunity to collar Trent and ask him a few questions, to give the crowd some insight from a cycling expert who’d sized up this field from within less than an hour before.

“Trent, right now Saturn has two riders in the group: Chris Horner and Mark McCormack. Mark is the better sprinter. I predict that if it comes down to a bunch sprint, Chris will lead Mark out. What do you say?” Trent grinned and assured Dave that it wouldn’t come down to a bunch sprint. And indeed on the final lap, Chris Horner crested the Taylor Street climb all alone, on his way to a dramatic victory. Thousands of fans had just witnessed a prophet in action. Even off the bike, Klasna came off as a most impressive cyclist.

Naturally, any race announcer is subject to the limitations of his material. If a race isn’t tight enough, no announcer in the world can inject it with suspense. But when a rider tries something bold, a good announcer can help the crowd enjoy it. Today was an interesting one in that Horner’s victory was far from expected, even though he is by many standards the winning-est rider in the domestic cycling scene. For a time it really looked like Jason Lokkesmoe was going to sew up the race. He had an amazing ride, starting out in a group of five that dwindled until it was just Jason and the huge German Rolf Aldag, both clearly giving it everything they had. But the race was very, very long. Surely there must have been a point when Lokkesmoe’s s effort seemed quixotic even to himself. Maybe he stayed out longer, even when he knew he was doomed, just to put on a good show.

Showmanship is not only a matter of riding fast. I well remember the Killians team in the Coors Classic who (unlike their sponsor) hailed from Ireland. I was a young fan, by no means an expert on the rules of the race, but had been convinced ever since the early 1980s that these guys were cut some slack on the time cuts because they were so popular with the crowds. So today I challenged Aisner on this point. “It might have been,” he said cautiously. “I don’t remember what the circumstances were but it wasn’t just at face value ‘we let them back in  [after missing a time cut].’ But they were crowd pleasers, they did all sorts of stuff. [Killians rider] Alan [McCormack] had a ... squirt gun, he would shoot other racers in the pack. There was one year when Paul [McCormack, Alan’s brother and teammate] was off the back of the criterium in North Boulder Park and he had an umbrella that had ‘Killian’s’ on it. He had it open, he was racing with an open umbrella over his head. But these guys weren’t just for show either. Alan won, he won a ton.”

I asked about Davis Phinney, who had enchanted me as a kid through his pantomime of a clerk punching the “SALE” button on a cash register every time he won a prime. Aisner replied, “Davis was flavorful and he was a double whammy because he also delivered and he had this huge sense of self-confidence, and though many loved it, others liked to see him lose, but either way [these fans] were out there.... A sport thrives on the combination of both of those, those who simply excel and those that can bring more than just cycling to the table.”

Oddly, American cycling may be, from the standpoint of spectacle, a victim of its own maturity. There was an unpolished, youthful exuberance to domestic cycling in the 1980s that at its best was Phinney’s cash register and at its worst was Alexi Grewal tearing his 7-Eleven jersey down the middle as he crossed the finish line in first. Either way, it was a wild show. Since that time the phenomenon of the American cycling professional has steadily developed. Lance is now expected to win the Tour de France, whereas Phinney’s first Tour stage win was a shock to everybody. As they have adapted to the European sport, these American riders seem to have adopted its culture and tradition, which isn’t given to theatrics (beyond the traditional victory salute, of course). This modern professionalism may make it harder for the American spectator to connect with the cyclists.

For example, this morning I watched the women’s field assembled a couple of hundred feet behind the start line. I could sense the tension in that group, especially in the half dozen front-runners waiting about six feet ahead of the rest of the group. Clearly they understood the importance of this race. Handled properly, this excitement can be a huge benefit to a racer, but there’s no benefit to showing your competitors how nervous you are. I know from my own racing days that when my head was right, the pre-race feeling was one I think of as “frothy”—my own coinage, based on the image of a champion racehorse that is literally champing at the bit to start a race, has whipped itself into a lather of sweat, and must be calmed by the jockey or the trainer. To feel frothy, but not to show it, is  admirable—a result of experience and discipline. The problem is, to the untrained eye it just looks like somebody who just isn’t taking the race very seriously.

The women I watched today didn’t just have poker-faces; they were joking around with each other like this was a social event. If you saw this on TV, you wouldn’t have felt the real tension there. But there was an odd moment when the announcer had just run down the impressive bio of Mari Holden, and was about to announce her name to summon her to the line, when his microphone suddenly cut out. For several awkward seconds, all was silent. Then I heard Mari whisper to Jessica Phillips, “He forgot his lines.” Jessica laughed loudly, but it wasn’t the hearty laugh of somebody truly amused; it had the tense quality of somebody laughing to bleed off nervousness, a venting laugh, like that of someone watching the tasteless over-the-top comic violence in “Robocop.” Eventually the crowd got tired of waiting for the announcer and yelled out, “Mari Holden!” and she pedaled to the line.

There are other ways a non-savvy spectator can misread a bike race. For example, a strong performance made as a sacrifice to a teammate can make a good rider look bad. A cycling aficionado knows that when a great rider crosses the line in fiftieth, it’s probably because he led out his teammate and his job ended 200 meters from the line. But to the casual spectator, it just looks like a guy who isn’t that strong. I looked for Tim Larkin in the main bunch at the top of Taylor Street on the last lap today, and while he was still in contact, he was right on the back and looked pretty fried. Afterward, I asked what happened and he explained that a group of eight made it off the front of the main pack before the Taylor Street climb, and because his teammate was climbing better than he was today, Tim gave everything to drag him up to the group. As so often happens, this move galvanized the rest of the pack, and everything came back together, making Tim’s work for naught. But had he not done it, that group may indeed have stayed off. Tim likely changed the outcome of the race, but not in any way that made him look good. How many similar scenarios played themselves out today, unappreciated by the fans? Probably dozens. And when a rider blows up badly enough to lose contact with the group, there is nowhere to hide.

Whether this experience is mortifying to the struggling athlete all depends on the crowd. This sport has the unfortunate characteristic of looking far easier than it is, so the uninitiated onlooker may not sympathize with the rider. But if the energy is right, a bicycle race brings out the best in people: the crowds that turn out cheer on every guy, even the ones who get dropped, because after all they’re out there pedaling their hearts out.

It’s a wonderful thing about cycling: even though it’s very much a team sport, it’s not just two teams, one of which you hope wins. No riot ever broke out at a bike race because CSC beat Telekom. Ages ago, I watched TV coverage of unruly Denver Broncos fans who pelted their own team with snowballs because they were losing so badly. These were not people who stumbled onto a football game in progress—these are people who paid good money for a seat. They’re supposed to be the loyal ones! I can’t imagine such an attitude from bike race spectators, who are watching for the entire spectacle, not out of a tribal instinct to support their home team. This is true of seasoned fans as well; consider all the French people who camp out a full week in advance to watch the Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France, even though a Frenchman hasn’t won there since Bernard Hinault in 1986.

Granted, such devotion to the sport is far greater in Europe than in the U.S., but in San Francisco today it was easy to imagine that gap quickly decreasing. Today the magnanimity of the spectators was on full display. They didn’t have to be experts on race tactics—not when they were watching on Taylor Street. They recognized extreme depths of human suffering when they saw it. Lokkesmoe ended up struggling over the Taylor climb solo, well off the back, today, but the crowd hadn’t forgotten his earlier glory, and screamed their lungs out for him.

Of course the fans cheer on the superstars like Lance Armstrong, but perhaps no more enthusiastically than they cheer for the poor sods who are way off the back and just trying to keep their bikes going. You can see how the cheering animates the riders, too: about half way up a climb, just as one of these guys is about to grind to a halt, you see a little sheepish grin appear on his face, maybe he shakes his head a little, then gets out of the saddle and shoves a little harder. The crowd responds to this, cheers louder, the process repeats, and like a slow-motion hockey puck the guy is gradually buoyed up the hill, lap after lap. It’s like watching a butterfly smash against your windshield, and then—like a cartoon of some kind—unfold itself, try its wings, and fly off again.

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From the Archives - San Francisco Grand Prix Spectator’s Eye View

Introduction

Since 2003, I’ve been an occasional contributor to the Daily Peloton. A few years ago, I discovered that most of my stories there are no longer available due to some server problems.  It’s another slow news day at albertnet, so here is one of the lost articles, restored and preserved for prosperity. This isn’t race coverage per se; it covers the sport in general and subtopics that I hope you’ll agree are still relevant.

San Francisco Grand Prix: A Spectator’s Eye View – September 14, 2003

I attended the San Francisco Grand Prix bike race today, and was reminded how different these events are in person. Being a live spectator is much more exciting than just watching on TV.

The SF Grand Prix covers a 10-mile circuit of downtown city streets, largely shutting down all normal traffic flows. Attendance was impressive—as always, the sidewalks were clogged with spectators, estimated today at over half a million. If you showed up early enough—and this year the first-ever women's edition started at 7:30—you got a good position along the scenic waterfront Embarcadero where the Start/Finish line is. I got a great spot, and if I’d stayed put for the next eight hours, I'd have had a great view of the finish of both the races.

But this stretch really isn't where the race is won or lost—that happens on the brutally steep climbs of Fillmore and Taylor streets, roughly on the opposite end of the loop. Last year I watched Charles Dionne win the race on Taylor Street. Of course I didn't know he was winning it at the time; nobody really did, not even the other riders in the lead group, or at least not all of them. That's because Dionne didn't do anything obvious, like drop the rest of the group, on that hill. All he did was manage not to get dropped himself. Dionne is a sprinter, and his superior sprinting ability is like money in the bank, a simple and incontrovertible fact of nature. If he's there to contest the flat finish line sprint among a bunch of climbers, stage racers, or time trialists, he'll beat them. The sprint itself was a formality for Dionne. The climbs are where the action is, so staking out a good spot on Fillmore or Taylor makes a lot of sense.

Still, it's not totally satisfying to see the defining action on the backside of the course only to miss the moment of victory, the winner throwing his arms up as he crosses the line. But since you can’t see the action on the climbs and still make it to the finish line in time, and you’re thus doomed to miss so much of the action, what is the attraction of being there? Any spectator, of any sport, will tell you that these things are just better live. You're not just there to watch the athletes; you're there for the entire spectacle of the thing, for the atmosphere. Just like the smell of popcorn at the movies, or of suntan lotion at the beach, there’s a sensory bonus to being at the race in person: sound. TV coverage gives you great voice-over (if the announcers are good), but you don’t hear the tires on the ground, the panting of the riders, or most importantly the cheering of the spectators.

When I worked as a general purpose gofer for ESPN covering the 1988 Coors International Bicycle Classic, my first assignment was to point this giant phallic microphone at the pack as it went by. After one stage of this, the recording was deemed unusable and I was off the hook. An even stranger request I got was to run up and down a flight of stairs a few times and then let a sound guy record my panting. This would be dubbed over footage of a pro cyclist climbing some grade. I must not have sounded authentic enough, because the recording was never used. But the fact that they tried to get it says something. And yet if you are actually there at the race, the sheer noise factor is almost overwhelming.

This year at the SF Grand Prix, sponsors such as Clif Bar and Saturn gave out cowbells, which created a huge and pleasant din. When I sat at a restaurant bar to have lunch, and watched the race on TV, what I got for sound was less than nothing: the one screen showing the race was muted, and all the other screens were showing a football game, with sound. Between the TV sound and the cheering football fans, it was hard to enjoy the subtle pleasures of cycling coverage. It struck me, when the 49ers scored a touchdown on fourth down with eight to go, that the yelling and cheering in the bar was nothing like what I’d heard outside. These guys weren’t cheering on the players, who after all can’t hear them anyway. Their cheering had a strangely turned-in quality, like they were cheering themselves on for living in San Francisco, the home of the 49ers, and thus basically deserving some of the credit.

Beyond the noise factor, at any sporting event the presence not only of your sports heroes but of the throngs of other spectators creates a certain energy that far surpasses what you get at home, or at a sports bar. I went to a Diamondbacks/Giants game years ago, and managed to miss every big play—I was fighting with the relish dispenser when Barry Bonds made an amazing catch that was on all the evening news highlights—but I still had a good time (better than I’d have had seeing it on TV). And the thrill of actually being there is even more pronounced in cycling than in any stadium sport, because the athletes and the action are so accessible—nobody has to watch through binoculars from the nose-bleeder seats. You're as close as you manage to get, often (ideally) with nothing between you and the racers but your own discretion.

Lance Armstrong commented some months ago on the vulnerability of cyclists in the Tour de France (a comment that many misconstrued as terrorist-attack paranoia). And we all watched in horror as Lance's handlebar hooked a spectator's musette bag on the Luz-Ardiden, crashing him. But I have to agree with Tour director Jean-Marie LeBlanc: it would be wrong to overreact to this incident and place new constraints on the spectators. The absence of ubiquitous crowd control is one of the things that makes bicycle racing special. And you don't see Lance complaining to LeBlanc, either. Doubtless he recognizes that without the spectator-friendly culture of the Tour de France, you won't get as many fans, and if you don't get enough fans, teams don't get the corporate sponsors, and without the sponsors, Lance doesn't get a paycheck.

Beyond their livelihood, the peloton surely appreciates the fans on a more human level. This is what we, as spectators, need to believe to thoroughly enjoy the event: that we are not just watching, but participating, having a connection with the athletes and creating the special energy that defines a big race. But do we? How much do the spectators really matter to the bicycle racer? Are we actually any different from sports fans in a bar congratulating ourselves for what the athletes are doing ten, a hundred, a thousand miles away? There's a simple answer, which would be yes, but it's not actually a simple matter.

First, we have to differentiate between two basic spectator scenarios: teeming masses vs. sorry handfuls. The fact is, there’s a critical mass required before the racers could possibly be inspired. Today certainly measured up. After the race, I talked to Tim Larkin, a professional on the San Francisco-based Ofoto / Lombardi Sports team, who is by any account one of the best bicycle racers in the Berkeley area. Though Tim was clearly fried from the race and couldn’t have been operating on more than 20% of his brain power, he immediately commented on the crowds. “The crowd was phenomenal,” he said. “You don't expect it in cycling over here, and to see that kind of turnout . . . from the first time up the hill they're going nuts, and they keep that intensity up for four and a half hours, just yelling their heads off, it's pretty amazing. Everyone’s ringing the cowbells, so you can't hear anything, just this din. What was new to me were those balloon things, that were big last year in the world series—the Anaheim Angels started that, got everyone in the stadium banging those together—so to see them at a bike race, to see them cross over from a mainstream sport, makes it feel like what you're doing gets more respect than racing in the middle of nowhere with, you know, people's parents there. Even if it's an important race for other reasons, if there aren't many people there, you're like, well, how important can it be?”

I’ve known that feeling myself, and it’s more common the further you get from Tim’s level. Let's face it, it is the reality for the majority of local races in the U.S, and it can be demoralizing. A race can feel an awful lot like a bunch of guys riding fast around a residential street or office park, if there isn’t someone there besides a referee keeping track of the results. It makes a huge difference if a critical mass of spectators manages to assemble itself, and seems to care about the action and the athletes, if not the outcome, regardless of how important the event is to the racing calendar. And this is why U.S. races should be held on city streets in places like Boulder, Colorado where cycling is in the blood of 90% of the residents, or tiny, quiet places like Sterling, Colorado, or Casper the friendly Wyoming, or Nevada City, California—places where the spectacle of a bike race is honest-to-God exciting to the small-town folk who turn up in droves with their Igloos and lawn chairs.

This enthusiasm certainly matters to any racer. Tim races all over the country and finds that good crowds are seldom a given, even when the race draws top talent. “Only a couple of other races in the country that have a really good crowd; Philadelphia has the long tradition there but [the SF Grand Prix] even takes that up a notch. To be fair to other races, criteriums can have a very loud crowd but it's a 1 km course, and this is a 10-mile loop with half a dozen places where it's just packed, so there’s no comparison to road races where you may expect people at the Start/Finish line and that's it. Very rarely do you get to have a race downtown, and this one happens because you have Lance and Thomas Weisel behind it to get the city’s buy-in. If promoters can keep on working to bring races to bigger cities, it can only be good for the sport.”

Cycling in the United States simply doesn’t have the strong tradition and national identity that it does in other countries, and as sports like soccer increase in popularity here, it must continually fight for a place in the national psyche. Certainly Lance’s phenomenal success has helped the sport, but I’m disappointed it hasn’t provided an even bigger boost. The road bike has gone from a standard to a specialty item. Junior fields in big races like the Nevada City classic have dwindled alarmingly. To keep the sport healthy will require that the spectators cease to be small gatherings of already interested people. It needs to bring in curious onlookers and hook them on the action, so they won’t change the channel from OLN once the bronco riders have finished up.

Of course it would be unfair to put the burden solely on the race promoters and the communities that can choose to put on races or not. I talked today with one of the race announcers, Michael Aisner, about what it takes to create excitement among the spectators of a bike race. Michael announces for various top U.S. races, but formerly had a much larger role in U.S. cycling than that. He essentially put the cycling on the map in this country, taking over the fledgling Red Zinger Bicycle Classic (sponsored by Celestial Seasonings, when it was a much smaller company than it is now), landing Coors as its new main sponsor with a much bigger budget, adding many more stages to the race, and drawing a world class international field.

I grew up watching this race, and even at a young age could see the progression each year. There’s nothing I can see that was a revolutionary change in the approach to the race; Michael’s formula seemed to be fairly simple: make each stage exciting to watch, show the crowd a good time, and next year the crowd will be bigger, the TV coverage better, and the race will increase in prominence. This in turn brings a better field every year. But what did this race do to achieve these ends? For one thing, there were plenty of criteriums, always held on downtown streets where crowds can find them. Purists criticized the format, trying to champion the more traditional point-to-point road races popular in Europe, but (as Tim Larkin pointed out) this format isn’t conducive to large crowds. It works in Europe because the sport is already huge there.

But beyond the format, the success of the Coors Classic depended on harnessing the elusive potential of the sport. “Cycling is kind of a rock and roll sport in a way, and its energy level was built on people being able to really exploit it in a big way,” Michael told me. “And I really credit the announcer for having done what he needs to do in order to make a race huge. I think you need to bridge the gap through your announcer, and through music and energy levels … so that cycling can become comparable to other things that people relate to that are exciting.”

This is a core difficulty with popularizing bicycle racing in America: making people relate to it, helping them understand that it’s far more complicated than it appears. Other sports have surpassed this obstacle, of course; a colleague of mine took a foreign client to a baseball game and explained the rules to him. “It’s really quite simple,” he started out, but by the time he’d explained the sacrifice fly, the bunt, the walk, and the strike zone, he realized that it’s really not simple at all: it just seems that way because we take our own knowledge for granted. It should be possible with cycling as well; after all, anybody who’s tried to ride a bike fast knows the challenge and the thrill of this sport. But it takes a good announcer to really amp up the crowd.

Click here for the second and final part of this article.

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A Tribute to Steve Tilford

Introduction

This post is a tribute to the late cyclist and blogger Steve Tilford.  I have a tale of his to share, which I wrote down shortly after hearing him tell it a decade ago.  It’s the kind of amazing story he’d have eventually told on his blog, if only.  If only.

Steve was tragically killed in a car accident this past week.  Friends and fans are reeling.  Fans include not only those who have followed his decades of cycling exploits, but those who have enjoyed his popular blog, stevetilford.com.  He was one of my cycling heroes as a teenager, and I’ve enjoyed his blog for years.

Getting to meet Steve

I met Steve only once, at a Coors Classic bike race reunion held at University Bikes.  (I snapped the above photo that night.)  The occasion was a party that longtime Coors Classic director Michael Aisner threw to celebrate the release of a DVD set—all the original Red Zinger and Coors Classic movies.  Aisner opened the party to the public and it felt like everybody in Boulder was there.  Afterward, he invited my brother Max and me along to get some pizza and beer with Steve Tilford, Steve’s partner Trudi, Todd Gogulski, and a few others.

We lingered for hours swapping bike race stories, until the busboy was practically vacuuming under our feet.  Steve’s stories were particularly good because for one thing, he was a natural-born storyteller, and for another, some of his stories were totally new.  This was a guy who never stopped racing, and whose everyday life was like some crazy story.  For example, just four days before this night, he’d been in a cyclocross race and veered off-course, rolled out onto a frozen lake, watched in horror as the ice broke, became completely drenched, and yet climbed back on his bike and raced six more laps—his hands totally frozen and unable to work his bike’s shifters—and won the race!  (Steve’s account is here; the cyclingnews story is here.)

I was planning a freelance article about the Coors Classic party, so I wrote down the best of these stories the next morning, as close to verbatim as I could get.  Some of them are on Steve’s blog, like this one about bunny-hopping a stream at 60 mph during the Milk Race, a huge stage race in Great Britain.  On his blog, Steve wrote, “I have millions of stories from my time in England. I could do a month of posts on them.”  I wish he had!  But this wasn’t a guy who lived in the past—he had too many new things to blog about.  Thus, my favorite of his stories isn’t on stevetilford.com, so I’m going to share it here as a tribute.

(I feel as though I have Steve’s permission, because I asked him that night if I could recount his stories in my article.  He said sure, and joked, “You can even make stuff up if you want—just make me look good!”)

Steve’s story

Here is Steve’s story, presented just as I heard it, to the best of my recollection.  It’s about the 1985 Milk Race:

It’s the last big stage of the race and the last chance for somebody to win the race away from us.  We’re really worried about the Russians, who are supposed to be really fast on the hills, but when we get to the first big climb they all just get dropped.  I said to Andy Paulin, look, the Russians are all dropped!  And of course he’s a huge guy so it’s not like we were going that fast.  We get to this descent and are just flying down it, and when we come around this curve some guy is coming at us with his car.  Andy hits the car and just goes flying.  I figure he’s probably dead. 

Now, everybody says I laid my bike down on purpose so the crash wouldn’t be so bad, but that’s not really what happened.  When you break a leg and a collarbone, it’s not because you crashed gently.  I go sliding under the car and stop when my bars get stuck between the ground and the bumper.  I’m pretty f---ed up but I know it could be worse.  So when they put me in the back of the ambulance I can tell I’m about to lose consciousness, it’s like a black tunnel is collapsing over me, and I look up at Trudi and say, “What about Andy, is he gonna live?”  She says, “Oh, yeah, he’ll be fine.”  Now I’m slipping away but before I do I’m like, “Wait—what about me?”  But it’s too late, I don’t even get to ask.

            So they take me to this tiny hospital in the middle of nowhere where every other patient is an eighty-year-old man, and at first I’m stoked because I’m this young American guy among all these good looking English nurses.  I’m getting these nice sponge baths and everything, but then they tell me the doctor only comes once a week!  I’m pretty sure my leg is broken but all I’m getting is sponge baths.  Finally the doctor comes and tells me, yeah, it’s broken, and I’m looking forward to the plaster cast, but instead all I get is a nurse wrapping it in an Ace bandage!  Even so, I made out better than Andy.  He was at the other hospital and got sick of being there, so he just left, only to pass out at a train station that afternoon.  He made his way back to the hospital, but they wouldn’t let him back in!

Further reading

Here are a few links to Steve’s blog featuring (or mentioning) the Milk Race:

The British Milk Race

I Don’t Bounce So Well Now

One of the Coolest Race Moves I Ever Made

A close friend of Steve Tilford’s, Vincent, is maintaining the blog, providing news in the aftermath of this terrible accident, and offering friends a way to share their own stories.  You can click here for details, and visit the main site, stevetilford.com, for the latest updates.

The Best Advice I’ve Received

Introduction

The final page of this month’s Southwest Magazine is a column called “One Question.” The question—“What’s the best advice you’ve received?”—was directed toward Hilary Duff.  Her reply ran 73 words, of which 62 had just one syllable.  Including this sentence I’m already at 52 words, with only 29 one-syllable words.  This is why Hilary Duff gets to be published in a magazine and I don’t.  Perhaps it helps that she’s an attractive actress whose photo deserves to take up 3/4 of the page.

Since I can’t be an attractive actress or published writer, I’ve decided to comfort myself by answering the One Question myself, but better.  “Better” in this context means “more words, bigger words, and no photo.”  If that’s not enough to keep you reading, here’s another hook:  I didn’t even follow the advice I’m about to cite.

The advice

The best advice I ever received was, “You don’t need to go to college.”  I did go to college, and I would advise each and every high school kid to attend college if he possibly can.  So why do I appreciate this advice?

Let’s back up and look at the mindset I had when I received this guidance.  It was the 1980s and I was a teenager in Boulder, Colorado (where everybody was middle-class or higher, well-educated, and white).  The conventional wisdom was that if you went to college you would get a white-collar job and be happy and successful.  Oh, and we were generally encouraged to attend the best college we could.

Contrast this to the mindset of what appears to be the typical teenager today in my kids’ demographic (Albany, California; middle class or higher; well-educated; white or Asian).  The conventional wisdom here is, “If you ever get a single B in high school you will never get into a decent college and you will have NO FUTURE, and by the way, grades aren’t enough so you should be taking at least four or five AP classes and also doing all kinds of extracurricular activities that will look good on your application, but no matter what you do you’re probably doomed and will never go to a top college and you’ll never achieve the standard of living your parents now provide for you, you miserable wretch.”

Okay, that’s not entirely fair.  I don’t think our current crop of teens uses the word “wretch.”

The matter of perspective

As a teenager, I appreciated the odd “skip college” advice because it opened the door, just a crack, for an alternative point of view.  Of course it helped that this point of view came from a successful person.  Obviously if a homeless dude gave me that advice, it wouldn’t mean a thing.  But by “successful” I don’t just mean “has a nice house in Boulder and some cool toys like an actual Model-T Ford that actually runs, an actual NASA space suit, a cool working jukebox, a working parking meter, and an immaculate 1950s Pontiac 8 car with fins and chrome and an in-line 8-cylinder engine so the hood goes on for days.”  By “successful” I also mean “has a really wild career that he obviously loves.”

The person dispensing this advice was Michael Aisner, who at that time was the director of the Coors International Bicycle Classic, which was the biggest, most important cycling stage race ever held in this country (and which to date has never been surpassed).  I’m going to throw in a caveat here:  I won’t put words in Mike’s mouth and claim that he’d still give this advice today (though I suspect he would), and I’ll add that he wouldn’t necessarily have given this advice to just anybody (though I suspect I wasn’t a special case).

I got to know Mike because I worked as a volunteer for his race—not just when it was going on, but year-round at their headquarters in Boulder, Colorado—“the race office,” as we all called it.  I wouldn’t say I worked as an intern, though I suppose that’s what I was, because at that time I’d never heard the word “intern,” and had no idea that volunteering your time at a company would “look good on your college application.”  If you’d asked me at the time what this job would do for my college prospects, I’d probably have  just shrugged, or said, “I guess it slightly damages my college prospects since I’m so distracted from my schoolwork.”  I volunteered at the race office because it was a cool place to hang, and there were great people there, and I would get to use a computer, and figured I’d learn a lot.

My perspective going into that job was thus fairly compatible with Mike’s.  He just took it up a notch by suggesting that if you like to work, and you are surrounded by great people, and you learn a lot, and you just keep that up, you’ll eventually start getting paid, and will go on to have a fulfilling career, and it would be pointless to halt this progress in its tracks to go sit in lecture halls for four years and incur a bunch of debt.

A couple of paradoxes

Here are a couple of paradoxes introduced by what I’ve written so far.

First, Mike himself did go to college.  (Did he graduate?  I’m not sure … when I asked him he laughed and said, “Do you know you’re the first person who’s ever asked me that?”)  The point is, he’s had this great and diverse career history based on his ability to execute, not his formal education.  Working in his office, which had no walls and no cubicles, I got to hear him in action, mostly on the phone, and probably learned more about business than if I’d studied it in college.  (I’m tempted to apologize here to any business majors who might be reading this, but who am I kidding?)

The second paradox is that I didn’t follow Mike’s advice—I did go to college.  I ignored his advice for two reasons.  One, I didn’t have the balls to believe what he was telling me.  I felt in my very bones that without a college degree, I’d never amount to anything, no matter how inspiring his example was. (I’m still glad I have that degree, even though my most important mentor, in my current career, dropped out of college because he couldn’t bear to leave a great internship at the end of the summer.)

The second reason I went to college is that even then, I loved literature and I loved writing.  Studying English for four years under brilliant professors was something I wanted to do for its own sake.  I recognized even at the time that this was a departure from the typical results-oriented mindset that would have me studying engineering or business.  I was prepared to accept that my major wouldn’t automatically lead to good career prospects.

Why Mike’s advice was so good

What made Mike’s advice so good is that it conveyed a simple but evasive message:  there are many paths to success.  This is true even with conventional notions of success (e.g., big money, big house, cool toys, respect and prestige).  I’ll concede that college is probably more important to one’s prospects than it was a generation ago, but Mike’s basic idea still holds true:  the path everybody assumes is mandatory—that is, Perfect grades à AP classes à extracurriculars à great college à great career à happy life—isn’t the only path, never was, and never will be.  While I didn’t follow Mike’s specific advice, his overall message may have emboldened me to choose the major I wanted, and worry about my prospects later.

I try to pass along this wider perspective to my daughter Alexa, who’s in high school now, but she won’t listen.  After all, my cred as an alternate-path happy person is ruined because I graduated summa cum laude from a great college.  Nor does it seem to matter that I took an alternate path to get there:  my high school grades weren’t good enough for Berkeley, so I went to UC Santa Barbara for a couple years and transferred in later.  She counters that it’s harder to get into good colleges now, and you practically have to have perfect grades even to get into UCSB.  (I have no idea if this is true.)

The problem, I think, is her peer group.  These are high-achieving nerds (a lot like I was at that age, except higher-achieving and more socially comfortable, because nerds are cool now).  But evidently somebody is feeding them doom-and-gloom scenarios involving the necessity of perfect grades, the importance of AP courses and extracurriculars, and the implication that any deviation leads to being a hopeless miserable wretch.

Why should this be?  In general, the parents in my community don’t preach this perfection-or-else paradigm.  A number of my fellow parents went to non-elite colleges and more than a few like to laugh about what screw-ups they were in high school.  That said, the parents of some of Alexa’s friends came here from other countries, had to work really hard and make serious sacrifices to get here, and never had the luxury of growing up in Boulder and just assuming everything would work out fine.  I can’t fault their perspective, but I also can’t compete with it, because it’s easier to apply pressure than to remove it.

The best advice I can give

One of the great things about Hilary Duff’s column is that, in just 73 words, she not only passed along her mother’s advice (“do as much as you can in one day”), but turned it on its head with contrapuntal advice of her own (“I’ve learned the importance of stillness”).  So I’ll try my hand at dispensing advice, too.

The best advice I can give is “Take on a hobby that is fun but competitive.”  The point of this hobby isn’t to “look good on a college application,” but to learn how to stare failure in the face instead of trying to avoid it all the time.  As a recovering bike racer, I’ve had to accept failure hundreds of times, which has really sweetened the deal on those rare occasions I’ve managed to succeed.  The pressure here comes from within, not from some rule of thumb like toeing the line and keeping your school transcript in order.

This isn’t to say I don’t accidentally put pressure on my kid.  For example, I inadvertently added to her stress in the moments before her very first mountain bike race, by the very act of trying to help her relax.  It was a cold and rainy morning, and the race course—highly technical to begin with—had turned to mud.  Figuring this alone was a lot for any kid to take on by itself, not to mention the head-to-head competition, I casually said, “The important thing is just to hang in there and try to finish.”

Who know this simple statement was like lobbing a grenade into Alexa’s pre-race psyche?  Here is her own eloquent description of this exchange, taken from her race report: 

My dad looked about as nervous as I felt, and mentioned offhandedly that his goal was for me not to drop out.  This was worrisome for a number of reasons:  a) my dad clearly wasn’t super confident about my abilities, and b) it honestly hadn’t occurred to me that I could drop out.  The fact that I was [now] aware it was a possibility made it seem likely, and I was suddenly convinced that I would be possessed by forces beyond my control, forces that are less stubbornly competitive and ambitious than I am, and these would cause me to quit.

Of course she did finish, and placed higher than I think either of us expected, and she even took it upon herself to write a self-deprecatingly funny essay about it all.  I’m cheered to see that her embrace of the “perfect-transcript-or-NO-FUTURE!” ethos hasn’t turned her into a complete CV-building, book-pounding drone.

Again with the alternate perspective

I suspect that, whatever success my daughter ultimately has in cycling, it won’t end up on her college application, and I applaud that—it means she’s doing this for its own sake, as I had.  Meanwhile, this pursuit will give my daughter something more important than bragging rights:  the all-important opportunity to fail at something without the world ending.  She will drop out of races, and will lose races, and she will get the kind of results that don’t earn an A—but none of this will besmirch any written transcript.  Moreover, as Alexa races her bike over the next four years she will realize that the traditional path toward sporting excellence—which is something like The right parents à big talent à big drive à small victories à big victories à big glory—isn’t the only one, and that alternatives exist, such as Wrong parents à embarrassing mediocrity à fighting spirit à venom à big drive à technical mastery à cunning à small victories à moral victories à ability to eat a pile of tri-tip the size of a human head and still hear people say, “I wish I had your metabolism.”

And maybe, just maybe, that accumulation of experience will give her some peace and help establish the radical idea that there are many paths to take, and an alternative path can still lead you to the success you sought, or perhaps to an alternative success you hadn’t even thought of.  This process may ultimately have the same effect as Mike Aisner’s radical, incendiary words—“You don’t have to go to college”—and their subtext, “Dive in, do something you love, do it for its own sake, do it well, and you’ll be fine.”

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Simplex Retrofriction

NOTE:  This post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

I just installed Simplex Retrofriction shifters on Full Slab, my commuter bike.  It’s been way, way too long since I’ve had them.

Other websites, like this one and this one, provide technical information about these legendary shifters, but they don’t tell the whole story.  To capture the full mystique, you need a little history.  Personal history.  This post unravels the mysterious flow of this schematic:

(Maybe you stumbled on this post because you’re a fan of the Simplex tea kettle from England.  Well, I am too!  Even though these are different companies, you should read this post anyway because if that kettle were a shifter it would be Simplex Retrofriction.)

If you couldn’t care less about bike shifters, read on, because you should care, and maybe this will help.  Meanwhile, anyone with a love of bike lore and nostalgia for cycling in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and a fascination with this improbably wonderful French bike component, will find here many nuggets of gratuitous trivia.  Zut alors!—it’s lore galore!

Simplex sucks

Simplex sucks, for the most part.  The Retrofriction shifters are the exception that proves the rule (and proof that even a  blind squirrel finds an acorn once in awhile).  As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, my brothers’ first bikes had Simplex shifters and derailleurs, and they were made of fricking plastic!  They didn’t shift for beans, of course—the chain was just dragged across the cogs like a clattering crab trying to get traction on a polished tile floor.  These components were also hideous to behold.

Working at a bike shop in the late ‘80s I came across a plastic Simplex derailleur on a ‘70s-vintage bike that was in for an overhaul.  I didn’t try very hard to make the derailleur work; I simply replaced it.  I told the customer, “I noticed that your derailleur was Simplex, so I replaced it.”  She said, “Simplex?  What’s that?”  I said, “It’s a brand.  It’s French.”  She said, “Is that bad?”  I replied, “Oh, yes.”

The French aren’t known for great bike parts, or great engineering in general.  At one shop I worked at, one of the mechanics liked to sneak up behind another guy and suddenly whisper in his ear, “French … nuclear-powered … submarines.”  The guy hearing this would, according to an unwritten script, scream in terror.  (The exception is rims.  The French are really good, perhaps eerily good, at rims.)

My first Simplex product was a front derailleur on an ancient Schwinn commuting bike I bought at a police auction.  Oddly, this derailleur was operated by a handle, not a shifter and cable.

It didn’t say “Simplex” on it, by the way.  Schwinn was in the business of fooling patriotic Americans into buying foreign stuff by putting their own label, “Schwinn approved,” on whatever parts they provisioned for their bikes.  (I had another Schwinn with a Huret derailleur; also French, also terrible.)  Needless to say, that front derailleur shifted terribly, and also tended to get caught on my pant leg.  In fact, that’s how it met its death—it got snagged so hard it was torn from the bicycle, after which I shifted the front chainwheels by hand.

My historical components of choice

Prior to owning my first pair of Simplex Retrofrictions, my bike component choices were determined mostly by economics.  My first ten speed, bought by the ‘rents, had cheap Suntour , as did my second.  By 1983 I was ready for some real racing components and, like almost everybody, coveted Campagnolo but, on my paperboy’s salary, could only afford Suntour Pro Superbe.  In 1985 I finally got my dream bike, an English-made Mercian with full Campy Super Record.  I was perfectly content with the Campy shifters, which I’d also had on my previous bike, because they were affordable and looked cool.  Over the years I somehow acquired several pairs, the oldest of which were made in Vicenza instead of Milan and had raised, rather than engraved, lettering.  My friends and I made keychains out of our extra Campy shifters.  We should have had girls throwing themselves at us for this reason alone, but oddly did not.

The only non-Campy component on my Mercian was the brakeset.  For some reason, Modolo was really popular at the time, despite being ridiculous, and I got swept up in its popularity.  (One of the features of these brakes was that each brake caliper was stamped with its own unique serial number; this should be a case study for business majors in the difference between a feature and a benefit.)  When, in 1985, Shimano came out with its totally revamped Dura-Ace line, on a lark I bought a new Dura-Ace brakeset and liked it.

A year later, my brother sold me his Team Miyata frame and begged me to build it up and ride it.  This was when the dollar was really strong against the yen, so for $400 I bought a full Dura-Ace gruppo from Colorado Cyclist.  (Back then, Colorado Cyclist was a garage-sized outfit in Estes Park; they’d recognize my voice when I called them.)  So now I had two bikes, one with Shimano, the other Campy.  Living the dream, really.  This was a bit unusual:  bike people are often fiercely loyal to one manufacturer over the other, so this was like being a member of two different religions.

I became disillusioned with Campagnolo when they came out with their disgraceful first-generation indexed shift levers, which were called Synchro.  We called them Stink-ro.  The click-action was awful—it felt like you were breaking glass inside the lever—and the whole system was a miserable failure.  I might not have cared except for a traumatic experience involving them.  I was at the big bike industry trade show in Anaheim with the Coors Classic director, Michael Aisner, a diehard Campy fan, and delighted in showing him, in the giant, gorgeous Campagnolo booth, how bad Stink-ro stucked.  On a stationary trainer, pedaling a slick-looking bike with a gleaming white disc wheel, I could make the derailleur mis-shift at will.  (With indexed shifting, of course, it should be impossible to miss a shift.)  Mike told me “wait right there!” and disappeared. 

I instinctively started trying to make the Stink-ro shift properly, and was still fighting with it when Aisner reappeared with a small, swarthy fellow in a beautiful chocolate-chip-ice-cream colored suit.  They watched for a minute as I continued to mash away with the gears.  Finally I dismounted and walked over to them.  Aisner turned to the gentleman and said, “This here is a big fan of yours.”  Turning to me, he said, “Dana, meet Valentino Campagnolo!”  It was indeed the company’s president, who was also the playboy son of the company’s founder, Tulio Campagnolo.  I shook his hand and mumbled something bland and hoped he didn’t speak English.  After he left, Aisner said, “If you had any balls at all, you’d have told the man to his face that his stuff is shit!”

What you can’t have failed to notice through all this history is that (except for the police auction bike) I never considered buying Simplex.  But why would I have, given the horrible plastic crap on my brothers’ first bikes?  What happened instead is that the Simplex Retrofriction shifters found me.

Another bike I didn’t need

Though I was perfectly happy having just two pro-quality racing bikes, a third one came sniffing around.  It was just a frameset, actually, and my friend Dave Towle (whom you might have heard announcing bike races) was trying to sell it.  It was a Panasonic team issue Raleigh that he bought from a friend on the team.  I sure didn’t need that Raleigh, but it was so damn cool I couldn’t resist.  It looked like these bikes:

Besides how cool those bikes look, what do you notice about them?  That’s right:  both have Simplex Retrofriction shifters!  Now, this is actually kind of remarkable.  You’ve got a Dutch pro team riding English Raleighs, and the team’s component sponsor  is the Italian company Campagnolo, but their guys are using French shifters made by Simplex.  I don’t know if all those Raleighs had Simplex shifters, but those two clearly do, and so did mine:  though it was otherwise a bare frame, the shifters were already mounted on there, so Dave threw them in.  I built up the rest of the bike with a mishmash of parts, just to have it on the road, and that’s how I became introduced to the Retrofrictions.

Instantly I realized they were the greatest friction shifters ever made.  They have a spring in them that works against the spring in the derailleur, so they don’t require so much friction to keep the chain from slipping out of gear.  This has two benefits.  One, the action is glass-smooth.  Two, the shifter doesn’t work its way loose, a chronic problem with friction shifters that you often don’t discover until your bike jumps out of gear.  Remember in “Star Wars” how Darth Vader, in the final dogfight sequence, keeps fiddling with these knobs on his Tie-fighter’s joystick?  Racers used to do the same thing with the D-rings on their Campy shifters toward the end of a race, just to make sure they didn’t have any unpleasant surprises.

Simplex was the first company to make a spring-loaded shifter, but not the only one:  Suntour had their “Power” shifters in the early ‘80s:

I had these on my second road bike.  The problem with the Suntour Power shifters was that in addition to the spring they had a ratchet, which was pointless and noisy.  Plus, they were cheap and pretty ugly, whereas the Simplex Retrofriction are beautifully made.  I can’t figure out how a company as generally lame as Simplex managed to produce such an excellent product.  I’d be no less astonished if Burger King introduced a grass-fed Kobe beef burger with prosciutto and imported Gruyere on an artisanal semolina bun.

My second pair of Retrofrictions

Alas, it was too good to last.  My best friend, Peter, won a Rossin frameset in the Red Zinger Mini Classic and—being on a paperboy’s salary himself—built it up with Suntour Pro Superbe.  I can’t remember if he begged me to sell him my Retrofrictions, or I just took pity in him for his terrible Superbe shifters, but suffice to say I felt honor-bound to help him out.  In retrospect, I’m surprised I felt that magnanimous, given that if it hadn’t been for him, I’d have won the Mini Zinger and that Rossin!  Then again, this was his flagship racing bike, and I barely rode the Raleigh.  (By the time I got it, that bike had been all ridden out.  I’d describe its road feel as “cadaverous.”)   So Pete got the Retrofrictions, and by the time I bought the Rossin off him five years later, he’d worn them out. 

(The Retrofriction springs have a lifespan.  I have it on good authority that you can replace them, but am warned that “the spring is a tight fit around the central shaft and its removal and replacement will test your ingenuity and patience!”)  I didn’t need the shifters anyway; I was firmly committed to indexed shifting by that point.  (I was the first guy around to have the new Dura-Ace 8-speed drivetrain, because the shop my brother worked for was gradually going under and his paychecks tended to bounce, so he paid himself in components, which he ordered via the shop’s line of credit and then sold to me.)

Not needing any more shifters didn’t stop me from getting another pair of Simplex Retrofrictions when I got the chance.  While working at a bike shop in Berkeley I stumbled across a pair in a box in the office.  They weren’t for sale; oddly enough, these shifters never seemed to be available in any shop or mail-order outfit.  After the demise of the Peugeot pro team, I don’t think any team officially used them (though at least a couple of teams used Mavic-branded Retrofrictions).  These shifters I found in the shop, provenance unknown, were just sitting in the box doing nothing.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I held them out to the shop owner and said, “Do you know what these are?!”  He said oh yes, he was well aware of what he had there.  I looked him right in the eye and said, “I’m taking these.”  I had no plan for them, other than to own them.  My boss didn’t object;  perhaps he knew, as I did, that you can’t stand in the way of destiny.

I didn’t have a bike to put them on and considered acquiring one just for that purpose.  (It’s a testament to the glory of these shifters that I can’t even remember which friend of mine had expressed the same idea.  I think it was John Pelster, my old UCSB and current EBVC teammate.)  Alas, I had no money, and as a starving student could no longer afford to buy another bike just because I felt like it.  But I ended up using those shifters before I expected to.

Simplex saved me!

That year—it was 1990—my Team Miyata vas the victim of a car rack accident (follow that link and look closely at the first photo and you’ll see the broken-off fork tip and caved-in top tube).   So I bought a new frame from a buddy; he’d been given it years before from his team, and hadn’t ever built it up.  It was a Guerciotti, with old-school Campy dropouts, and I think the derailleur hanger was longer than what had been on the Miyata.  What’s worse, my rear derailleur was slightly bent, which—combined with the longer derailleur hanger on the Guerciotti—meant my indexed shifting wouldn’t work right.  I had just moved to the Bay Area, had  run out of money, and was trying to earn a spot on the UC Berkeley cycling “A” team, all with a bike that wouldn’t shift right, and I was so overwhelmed and frustrated I almost quit the sport.  I mean, if a seasoned mechanic, who’s down to just a single racing bike, can’t even get it working right, what hope does he have in life?  But the Retrofrictions saved me!  I slapped those babies on the Guerc and everything was fine.  After five years of racing with indexed shifters, it was actually fun going back to friction.  I ended up using those shifters for the next eight years, until a freak bike tune-up accident ruined the right lever.

Here’s the sad tale.  I don’t know if this is a French thing or what, but the little socket where the gear cable’s head sits is a bit small on these shifters.  In other words, the cable head has a snugger fit to begin with, and—unknowingly compounding this—I had, somewhere along the line, installed a Campy cable.  Campy cables had a slightly oversized head, and it must have worked its way into the shifter over time.  So when the cable wore out, I absolutely could not get that cable head out of the shifter.  I finally clipped the cable off at the head and tried to drill it out, but I aimed poorly and did terrible cosmetic damage to the shifter without accomplishing anything.  I was so bummed out at the loss of the shifter, and the inability to replace it (this was before eBay), that to cheer myself up I bought a whole new gruppo, 9-speed Dura-Ace with STI shift levers (i.e., shifters built into the brake levers).  See?  There is some benefit to finishing college and becoming a working stiff!

Back on Retrofriction

Recently a friend, who is restoring an old Campy-equipped road bike, asked if I had any Campy shifters I could sell him.  Well, I couldn’t lie:  I had a pair on Full Slab, my beloved commuter bike. 

Actually, my friend offered to trade a crankset for the shifters, which is a pretty sweet deal.  The only problem, of course, is that I use Full Slab regularly and would need something to replace the Campy shifters with.

I knew my ruined Retrofriction shifters would be waiting for me, buried in The Box where I’ve been accumulating cast-off parts for decades.  It’s always a little scary cobbling together something from The Box, and I wasn’t looking forward to reliving the torment of the Retrofriction shifter I so stupidly ruined.  Sure enough, I found it right away.  I also found Pete’s (i.e., Dave’s) old Retrofrictions, and wondered if I could possibly move the (good) guts from my badly-drilled shifter to the handle of Pete’s worn-out one, and thereby cobble together a perfect shifter.

But I’m an adult now, with a career and a wife and two kids, and my hands have gone soft from decades of office work, and when it comes right down to it I’m just not a good enough mechanic to tear into anything that’s both a) French-engineered, and b) bound up with a spring.  So I charged up my drill and had another go at the old cable head.  This time I started from the flip side of the shifter, and though I missed the original hole completely, I ultimately (re-)created a good hole to feed a cable through.  Note that in the process I came up with a valid use for a phone book, of which I’d been previously convinced there was none.  The yellow pages provided an expendable surface to catch the drill after it finally burst through the back of the shifter.

The result?  Life is good!  Full Slab has never been so smartly attired.  The left shifter is perfect.  The right shifter ends up being pretty worn out after eight years and some 50,000 miles, but it still works.  Best of all, just riding that bike to the train station and reaching for one of those levers is a trip down memory lane, a sped-up review of everything you just read here along with about a hundred more things I couldn’t manage to fit in to this story.  Ah, the splendid nexus between bikes and memory!

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