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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.
