-- Ernest Hemingway in A Moveable Feast
On a tree-lined street of a Silicon Valley suburb, in a row house filled with children's toys, lives the graying, slightly paunchy communications-equipment salesman who saved America from gloom. George Mount -- Smilin' George to bike-racing fans -- has lost some of his 1980s form, but thanks in part to him, Americans are leaving the 20th century just as they arrived: optimistic about their place in the world and crazy about bicycles.
Bicycle enthusiasm is fully developed San Francisco, where housewives start their days with "spinning" classes, pedaling in place to music. Thousands of cyclists crowd Golden Gate Park every weekend, Walter Mitty minds filled with Tour de France dreams. Bicycling dissidents vex San Francisco's mayor with the traffic-clogging protest rides known as Critical Mass. And Labor Day's Giro di San Francisco closes a Northern California bicycle racing scene that is part of a national professional circuit.
George Mount's accomplishments helped start the craze, returning the country to the bicycling dignity it enjoyed during the 1890s, 1910s, and 1920s, when bike-crazy Americans first embraced modernity, and when it seemed this country's ethos of optimism would become a driving force for all the world.
In 1976, after spending a season sharpening his sprint at the old Polo Fields velodrome in Golden Gate Park and building his stamina in the hills of the East Bay, Mount placed sixth in the Montreal Olympic Games. He went on to become one of the world's top amateur racers, then had a respectable career on an Italian professional team. A wave of U.S. cyclists, inspired by Mount and other pioneers, went to Europe. And many of them became stars.
Names like Greg LeMond, Andy Hampsten, Davis Phinney, Alexi Grewal, and Lance Armstrong began popping up in European magazines. U.S. television networks began broadcasting the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia, and Paris-Roubaix as the big-time sporting events they are across the Atlantic. Thousands of people bought bicycles, and joined bike clubs. Some took out racing licenses, others went on weekend rides. Still more massed on city streets in San Francisco, Boston, Portland, and Houston, demanding deference from cars.
America had again found its bearings, and wheels, and handlebars.
"George's contribution was getting people to say, 'Here's something an American can do,' " says Robert Leibold, a bicycle race promoter who lives in Soulsbyville.
" 'And maybe I can do it, too.' "
Two-Wheeled Golden Age
Three-quarters of a century before Greg LeMond was a spokesman for Taco Bell, before baseball and football teams held city fathers hostage for new stadiums, before the Chicago Bulls won NBA titles that caused riots, America's sport was bike racing. And America's teams were the wiry, lightning-fast, six-day racers and match sprinters who traveled from city to city to race "the boards," as pine-paneled racing tracks were then known.
In those days, these banked ovals, called velodromes, pocked the country like moon craters. Tony women and their partners learned to ride in specially built cycling salons, and racing stars earned thrice the salaries of other professional athletes.
Broadway starlets and Wall Street tycoons vied for trackside seats at Madison Square Garden's six-day races, where cyclists would compete for prize lists topping $50,000 (roughly the equivalent of $393,000 today).
In the first such races, fashioned after six-day walking races popular at the time, athletes went for six days around a one-tenth-of-a-mile board track without stopping. By race's end, riders had typically completed around 1,800 miles.
The sport quickly evolved into a team race, in which one member of a two-man squad competed while the other rested. These teams usually consisted of a "jammer" -- a rider who could maintain top speed for long periods of time, and perhaps gain a lap on his rivals -- and a "sprinter," whose swiftness was exploited during periodic "premium" sprints. Total distances often stretched to more than 2,700 miles.
Total attendance at the Madison Square Garden Six sometimes topped 150,000 fans. On the West Coast, aficionados crowded into San Francisco's Mechanics' Pavilion Velodrome, the Polo Fields Velodrome, Dreamland Auditorium, and Civic Auditorium for these six-day races. Cycling stars were featured in advertisements for popular products, and bicycle race programs hosted ads for California gubernatorial candidates, Ghirardelli chocolate and Dentyne chewing gum.
The biggest individual bicycling stars were the match sprinters. The world's fastest self-powered humans, their bulky, wool-clad frames were wrapped with miles of fast-twitch muscle. Match sprint contests -- typically a mile, with the last 200 yards or so raced at full speed -- were held on banked velodrome tracks circled by grandstands.
Sprinters typically chose one of two tactics: take shelter in the wind pocket that forms behind the lead cyclist, waiting to jump around the leader at the last minute; or sprint to the front and try to stay there the entire race. This jockeying for position resulted in high-speed kneeing, elbowing, and shoving matches that, nearly as often as not, resulted in spectacular crashes -- and skin filled with pine splinters.
At the turn of the century, a typical night out in New York City might involve dinner, a Broadway show, then a trip to the Madison Square Garden Six, where racers might have been pedaling slowly during the theater performances, resting so they could put on a speedy show for the after-theater crowd. (The first Madison Six under the new, team format was won by Frank Waller of San Francisco and his teammate Charley Miller of Chicago in 1898.)
In those days, bicycle racing stars "would go all over the world. They'd race in fairgrounds, in stadiums. It was a really big deal," says Gus Gatto, who raced in San Jose and San Francisco during 1940s and '50s.
In 1897, 50 years before Jackie Robinson became a middling pro baseball player, Marshall Taylor, a black New Jersey match sprinter, launched a professional bicycling career. His 1898 victory in the one-mile sprint is believed to be the first world championship of any kind won by a black athlete. The next year he won the U.S. national professional championship. By 1902, Taylor was earning $35,000 a year.
By comparison, baseball legend Ty Cobb had to boycott 1910 spring training to pressure the Detroit Tigers to increase his yearly pay to $9,000 a year, says Peter Nye, a historian who writes about cycling.
It wasn't just elite, highly paid athletes who took to bicycle racing. It was the everyman's sport of its day. Back then a good racing bike cost $20. Because cars were scarce and expensive, a bike was likely as not to serve as a boy's license to travel, to test himself, to dream of a world beyond what were then small Bay Area towns.
"With racing, you had freedom of movement, you had travel, and it didn't cost anything -- a little oil, but that's about it," says Hal Perry, 86, of Walnut Creek, who raced in San Jose, San Francisco, and Los Angeles during the 1920s and 1930s. "When I was racing, I used to imagine the devil was after me with a pitchfork."
In those days, boys understood that bicycling transcended ordinary sport to represent a pinnacle of human endeavor.
"There is something uncanny in the noiseless rush of the cyclist, as he comes into view, passes by, and disappears," was Popular Science's 1891 assessment.
Ernest Hemingway edited his final draft of A Farewell to Arms, the classic love story of World War I, in a box seat at the finish line of a bicycle racing track. But he never thought himself good enough to actually write about cycling. And Hemingway was considered a pretty sharp writer.
Years later, Carl Sagan compared cyclists to Greek gods: "If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles."
And Sagan was considered an astute astronomer.
In fact, one of the seminal acts of the 20th century was performed while cycling: "I thought of that while riding my bike," said Albert Einstein, commenting on his theory of relativity.
And Einstein was no Marshall Taylor.
Dark Times, Four Wheels
But in the United States, cycling's golden age wasn't to last. By the late 1940s, world wars and economic depression had blunted the country's optimism and turned people to more somber pastimes. And by midcentury, America appeared permanently stuck in a bicycle-less malaise.
By the 1950s racers of the era recall there being fewer than 1,000 bicycle racers nationwide. And they were not part of the European racing scene that had grown over preceding decades.
While bicycle racing faded in America, Europeans were turning it into an entirely new type of sport. Starting with the day-after-day heroism of six-day racing, the Europeans added their continent's dramatic landscape to the mix and gave birth to the great national tours: the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia, La Vuelta de Espana; and the single-day classics: Paris-Roubaix, Milan-San Remo, Ghent-Wevelgem.
This new style of racing was complemented by a system of commercially sponsored teams, where a squadron of lieutenants aided a superstar captain. An intricate palette of team tactics turned these races into rolling chess games, in which pre-emptory attacks, perfectly timed chases, long-shot breakaways, and precision team lead-outs could sometimes give the advantage to the smartest, rather than strongest, riders. But U.S. racing didn't follow the European route.
Instead, races here resembled sad throwbacks to American cycling's board-track heyday.
Rather than adopt technological advances such as multiple gears, quick-release wheels, and cable-pull brakes, as the Europeans had done, many U.S. riders continued pedaling brakeless, single-geared track bikes. Rather than take to continental team-style racing, contests here consisted of solo road time trials, track sprint races, and a few short, mass-start track races on the handful of velodromes that had survived.
"There were no teams, you weren't getting paid," says Gatto, who was 1951 national champion. "It was more difficult than it is now. A lot more difficult."
Aside from occasional track events in San Jose and San Francisco, races often consisted of informal contests between friends who had heard about the sport from old-timers.
During these dark ages, which lasted from about 1940 until the '76 Olympics, no U.S. cyclists shone in international competition.
Americans piled into automobiles and built unwieldy, sprawling cityscapes friendly to cars and forbidding to bikes. They drove to the corner store for milk, drove their kids to Little League baseball games, and drove to the office to make a living.
There was unhappiness in the land.
Rich Dream
Peter Rich, a rotund, soft-spoken man of generous spirit, is ready to stalk out of a newsstand a couple of blocks up the street from his Velo Sport bike shop; he's cross and impatient.
"You don't have L'Equipe? You know you could sell plenty issues if you would stock it, especially now, during the Tour," he tells the clerk, barely containing his irritation.
"She's got them. I know she does. But she saves them for two of her favorite customers," he confides as he walks down the block. "She just didn't want to sell them to me."
Aside from following major races in the European sports dailies and running his bike shop, Rich hasn't been involved in cycling for years now.
But two decades ago, he was the godfather of Bay Area bike racing, a man who helped pull America out of cycling's dark ages, who helped turn it into a respectable sport again. By infecting dozens of riders with his passion for racing, he helped inspire a generation of Bay Area cyclists to dedicate their lives to the sport, and to mix it up with the European stars. Their success helped drag cycling from its former status as an indulgence of eccentrics into a mainstream pastime.
Rich nearly went bankrupt sponsoring, coaching, and chaperoning a coterie of young racers he cultivated. As a race promoter during the 1950s and '60s, he established the oldest continuously operating road race in the United States, America's first weeklong stage race, and numerous other events.
Perhaps most important, he took in the hardscrabble youngsters Mike Neel and George Mount, and turned them into cycling heroes.
When Rich met him in 1973, Mount had just been kicked out of the house. His father had bounced the teen-ager for refusing to register for the draft. When Rich met Neel in 1968, the teen-ager had been living the life of a youthful roustabout as a groom at the local racetrack.
Rich gave first Neel and later Mount rooms to live in over his shop. He gave them jobs fixing bicycles, and he taught them how to race.
Years earlier, during the 1950s, Rich had become intrigued with the idea of racing in Europe after a couple of his bike-racing friends returned from a sojourn on the Continent infatuated with everything Italian.
At that time, Rich says, there was no literature in the English language on the sport of cycling. So this news from the European racing circuit was revered by flat-earth Bay Area bike racers.
After trying his own legs in Europe for a season, Rich returned and founded a bike club sponsored by his shop, Velo Sport. He gave riders uniforms, equipment, help with travel, and coaching in the style of the European teams he had competed against: uniformity, cooperation, and discipline were to become the hallmarks of the Velo Sport team.
But Rich's authoritarian ethic also included a soft spot for wayward boys.
When Rich first met Mike Neel, he found the skinny kid gazing at a Raleigh brand racing bike, right at closing time.
"I was given credit by Peter right off the street," says Neel, now the manager of the Saeco-Timex women's bicycle racing team. After winning some bike races in California, Neel left to compete in France in 1972, then moved to Chicago to ride for a team there in 1973.
"I had a different upbringing than some of the other kids. My parents were divorced, and I was working at an early age. I had been working at warehouses. I thought, 'Hey, this racing is an easy way to make money.' I had a tougher attitude than some of the other kids," Neel says.
A couple of years later, Rich started seeing a sassy kid from Walnut Creek hanging around his store.
"In 1973, I first started noticing George Mount, a cocky pop-off, a pleasant smart aleck. But he obviously had great potential, great pedaling form. He was not quite so elegant as Mike Neel, but he had a powerful smoothness about him. He would pedal without wasting energy," Rich says.
He put his new protege, along with the rest of his team, through pace-line drills on the Polo Fields track at Golden Gate Park.
"Peter formed this team, he took me under his wing and took on the task of teaching me to really race bikes," says Mount, relaxing after a plate of pasta at an Italian cafe in San Mateo. "My first year of racing I only won a lot of hard, hilly races. So I had the strength, I had the stamina, but I didn't know how to ride a bike race."
"There's an old velodrome at Golden Gate Park at the Polo Fields, built in 1906; it's not usable now, but it used to be. We used to go there as a club and do great workouts."
So great, in fact, they turned Mount into a titan of West Coast bicycle racing. He became unbeatable in local races. And though he had yet to show the rest of the world, he had brought himself to the level of top European amateurs.
"As a result of that, I started winning a lot of bike races the next year," says Mount. "I won a whole lot of races in a row -- for a couple of months in 1975, nobody beat me in a bike race, whether it was a criterium, a road race, a time trial. I mean, I won a whole lot of races."
Mount Olympics
Navigating among the couches and highchairs, potted plants and baby toys that clutter his Redwood City tract house, George Mount doesn't strike one at first as the champion of an epoch. His severe visage has softened over the years; he's lost a bike racer's gauntness. The delight he takes in talking about his 10-month-old daughter, Eleanor, or his wife, Caryne, doesn't much resemble the delight a racer takes in making an opponent suffer climbing up a hill.
Still, when he reminisces about his racing days, his tone takes on a champion's intensity.
"I had people throughout my career telling me I couldn't do things. People who told me I couldn't go race in Europe, to me they just revealed their ignorance," he says.
After a year of training with Rich, then a year of winning local bike races, Mount went on to do a wonderful, amazing thing.
With Mike Neel as his wizened teammate, he took sixth in the road race at the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. Chasing after every attack with lightning speed, Mount joined the final, successful breakaway, at Neel's urging.
"I would say I had a really good rapport with George," Neel recalls. "We were on the same page."
Though he placed sixth, Mount was by many accounts the strongest man in a highly tactical Olympic road race. His exploits were featured in a 17-minute national television spot that was part of Olympic network coverage. This showed millions of Americans for the first time that bike racing, long seen as an oddity suffered only by Europeans, had been mastered by the New World.
In 1978, two years after Montreal, Mount accompanied the U.S. National team to Europe, with Mike Neel as coach. As if from nowhere, the United States had one of the best amateur teams in the world.
"George won a lot of races, big races," Neel recalls.
By 1980, French cycling magazines ranked Mount among the top half-dozen amateurs in the world. After the U.S. decided to boycott the '80 Olympic Games over Russia's invasion of Afghanistan, Mount signed a professional contract with the Sammontana-Benotto team, one of Italy's top squads. The thrill of racing week after week with his childhood bike-racing heroes was intoxicating, at first.
"It was like, you want to be a rock star, you finally make it, and you're at Woodstock every weekend," Mount says.
It was a dream come true, but it was also grueling, depressing work. As a domestique or team helper for superstars such as Roberto Visentini and Moreno Argentin, Mount was actually prohibited from attempting to win races if his captain had even the remotest chance. Winning a race over his captain could have gotten him fired.
The wear and tear of European racing -- a normal season includes 160 races at a typical distance of 150 miles each -- and the regimented obscurity of working for his captain began to sap Mount's morale. After three years, he decided to pack it in.
"I was too burnt out, and I wanted to go home," Mount says. "I also was 28 years old. I thought, 'Could race another five years, and I could be a mid-30s burnt-out bike racer working in a bike shop. Or I could go back into the United States and get something going; either work or get back into school.' When I was 15 years old, my goal was the gran esperienza -- the big experience. To be able to be a pro bike racer in Europe was the goal. And I did it. I did it the hard way. And I did it before anybody else in this country did it.
"But most importantly I did it. I actually got to be in bike races with guys who were my big heroes. Sometimes I beat them, sometimes they beat me. But I did it."
He came back and scraped his way into the American middle-class dream. He got a job selling computers, when that industry was in its infancy. Later, he moved to a high-tech communications company that developed fax-modems. The company went public and Mount cashed in his employee equity to put a down payment on a house. Now he's a product manager at Octel Communications, which sells network equipment.
"This steady paycheck thing is much nicer than racing bikes," he says. "I still wake up in a cold sweat thinking I have to race or train today."
This is nonsense, of course.
No one is ever cured of bicycling. Mount is no exception.
Five years ago Mount staged a comeback, of sorts, competing in the "veterans" class of older riders in Northern California. He helped put on track-racing events at the Hellyer Park velodrome in San Jose, wrote training articles for the bicycle-racing journal Velo News, and now coaches recreational riders as part of a program sponsored by the Leukemia Society. He met his wife through a local racing club, and his wedding nearly three years ago was populated by a who's who of 1970s-80s California bike racing.
"The wedding itself was short," Mount says. "Followed by a lot of barbecuing.
"And a lot of bike riding."
Two-Wheeled Millennium
After the 1976 Olympics, Mike Neel entered the world championship road race and placed 10th. In 1977, Jonathan Boyer of Carmel, Calif., turned professional to race for the French team LeJeune-BP. In 1979, Greg LeMond won the junior world road racing championships in Buenos Aires. In 1980, Boyer finished fifth in the world professional road championships. In 1981, LeMond signed a pro contract with the Gitane team of France, winning the world road championship the following year.
LeMond went on to win three Tours, two world championships, and dozens of top European races, becoming one of the greatest riders in the history of the sport.
In the 1984 Olympics, U.S. riders won the road race, the pursuit, and the match sprint: a virtual sweep.
In 1986, with Mike Neel as coach, a team sponsored by the convenience store chain 7-Eleven went to Europe, winning a stage of the Tour de France. In 1988, Neel coached 7-Eleven team leader Andy Hampsten to win the Giro d'Italia. In 1989, having just won his second Tour de France and his second world championship, Greg LeMond was invited to the White House for a visit with George Bush. In 1994, Marty Nothstein was the first American since Frank Kramer to become world sprint champion.
And in 1997, some 32,000 cyclists took out racing licenses. Organized century rides -- 100-mile pleasure jaunts where participants pay a fee to receive food and mechanical support along the way -- attracted hundreds of thousands of participants.
Thousands more amassed regularly at San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza and rode through the streets of the city to challenge automobiles' hegemony.
Americans were cycling again, into a new and prosperous century, an optimistic and unsullied and two-wheeled millennium.
