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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.
