Brushes with Greatness Return to Main Page
If you pay attention, you'll notice many people who can be loosely or objectively classified as Great in one way or another, because of the combined effect of their accomplishments, media exposure, public adulation, and other more fundamentally human of factors.
To me, places and landmarks hold even more importance, but I'll start with the people, in case there are any autograph-hunter-types reading this. Growing up in SoCal led numerous of their paths to cross mine (and others outside cycling....see my People magazine column for more on that), and working in a really good bike shop and traveling/living in Europe adds not inconsiderably to the heap.
This is the list of Cycling Greats that (or Greats that Cycling) Fortune has led into (and right back out of) my radius of existence. This is just a curiosity (oh, I already said that). None have changed my life in the meeting, and none would remember me (well, maybe one), but I admit to feeling the slight tugging tingle of pre-eminence and distinction, inching me upward the slope to Olympus, in these moments.
Read on of if you haven't received this month's subscription of Paris Match magazine to read instead.
A Chronology........DETAILS TO BE ADDED.
If you pay attention, you'll notice many people who can be loosely or objectively classified as Great in one way or another, because of the combined effect of their accomplishments, media exposure, public adulation, and other more fundamentally human of factors.
To me, places and landmarks hold even more importance, but I'll start with the people, in case there are any autograph-hunter-types reading this. Growing up in SoCal led numerous of their paths to cross mine (and others outside cycling....see my People magazine column for more on that), and working in a really good bike shop and traveling/living in Europe adds not inconsiderably to the heap.
This is the list of Cycling Greats that (or Greats that Cycling) Fortune has led into (and right back out of) my radius of existence. This is just a curiosity (oh, I already said that). None have changed my life in the meeting, and none would remember me (well, maybe one), but I admit to feeling the slight tugging tingle of pre-eminence and distinction, inching me upward the slope to Olympus, in these moments.
Read on of if you haven't received this month's subscription of Paris Match magazine to read instead.
A Chronology........DETAILS TO BE ADDED.
- Joan Baez, Thanksgiving 1972. I was riding my bike when I saw her ring the doorbell and enter her brother's house. (He was our neighbor.) I might have wobbled a bit, that's it. I should have offered her a ride on my handlebars, but I was only 6.
- Peloton....saw one in France, 1974. Whizzed by, didn't return. But I was taken.
- Jonathan Boyer
- Lon Haldeman: "Marathon Lon," two time winner of RAAM, the Race Across America ultra-endurance event.
- Greg Lemond and Vincent Barteau, fresh off their Renault-Elf team's victory with Laurent Fignon in the 1984 Tour de France. So this must have been autumn of 1984.
- Bernard Hinault, freshly retired, promoting cycling and his latest biography across the USA. He was ready to head back to Brittany. Our shop was his last stop. I played interpreter, but he kept saying he just wanted to go home.
- Alexi Grewal, Dag Otto Lauriten and Co....at the Colorado races in August, 1986
- Eddy Merckx and Axel Merckx at the World Championships in Colorado Springs, 1986
- Worlds 1986 Peloton
- Moreno Argentina and Guiseppe Sarroni....how Sue and I got invited to the reception and party for the gold and bronze winners of the '86 Worlds is a fairy tale. But it's true. (We stayed longer than they did, of course.)
- Laurent Fignon....twice!.....Tour 88 outside Grenoble and Loire Valley 1995, just riding
- 1988 TdF Peloton
- Nelson Vails, silver medal winning track racer in the 1984 Olympics, borrowing wrenches at Two Wheel Transit Authority. He was really muscular and friendly.
- Sting....during our bike tour in England, we camped nearby a town with a really big swing outside the tall wall of a really big house. It was like a fairy tale. A passerby informed us we were resting on "Sting's Swing." Only connection is that we were bike touring at the time.
- Miguel Indurain in Seville 1995. (Anquetil is the only TdF 5 time champion I have not seen...but I met his noble challenger, Poulidor.)
- Tyler Hamilton, Lance Armstrong, and Jan Ullrich on the hot day that Ullrich crushed everyone in the Carmaux time trial on Stage XX?
- 2003 TdF Peloton
- Richard Virenque and Axel Merckx, a flood called the Peloton, and much later lone Swede Magnus Backstedt struggling over Montsalvy hill in the 2004 stage 10 from Limoges to St Flour, winding an awful long way across the Aveyron and Cantal.
- 2004 TdF Peloton
- Ag2r rider on Puy de Dome...he passed us three times on our way up; he was going up and down for training.
- Dave Stoller's mechanic....via eBay.
- Marcel Tinazzi....French bike rider with bike shop outside Marseille.
- Thierry Bourguignon...French bike racer who now represents Look bikes.
- Thomas Voeckler....Fleche Brabanconne in Belgium.
- Philippe Gilbert...in Nivelles, Belgium.
- George Hincapie and Christian Vandevelde, Armstrong's USPostal teammates....Tour of Flanders, next table at the cafe in Waregem...touring NY tourists. Not much fun. More likely, they were potential investors. Hincapie leaned his bike against mine and scratched it! The pros have a different feeling about their bikes than we mere mortals.
- Bernard Thevenet.....missed opportunity
- Raymond Poulidor
- Bernard Thevenet.....next day, saw him again, and did not miss the opportunity to ask him some questions.
- Richard Virenque, now retired and a little less lanky
- John Ke (a cycling fan and francophile)
- Philippe Brunel and Claude Droussant (French cycling journalists whose articles I have been reading for many years), 2017 TdF
- 2017 TdF Peloton
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