I have been pulling on tight-fitting, funny looking cycling clothes since before they were made out of slick, synthetics—back when both our jerseys and shorts were made of wool, the pants lined with a thin strip of actual chamois, and we’d grind up hills in “easy” gears that were harder than some of the hardest gears on modern road bicycles. My old, high school friend, Greg, and I would don our kits, pull on our sleek leather shoes with their bulky “cleat” that fit over the back edge of the pedal, cinch up the leather straps of our toeclips tight, and set off, imagining ourselves in the pelotons we read about in the editions of cycling magazines we could sometimes acquire at the local bike shop in Saratoga Springs called, simply, The Bike Shop. This was the shop of now famed builder Ben Serrotta, and back then we’d go in on a weekly basis to see if new publications had arrived—hoping to find news of the great American cyclist George Mount, one of the first Americans to race in Europe. This was the era of the French phenom Bernard Hinault, who won the Tour de France twice when I was in high school, and then three more times when I was in college. The great Eddy Merckx had just retired from cycling when Greg and I took it up. Lemond would burst onto the scene a few years later.
We saved up and bought crocheted cotton/leather gloves, hats with the names of Italian brands, Colnago, Pinarello, Campagnolo…, written on them, which were all we wore on our heads when we rode, trying to look just like the thin, muscled riders on the covers of the magazines. We were quite a sight out on the road. Greg on his brown and gold Fuji with its glimmering, chromed Suntour shifter levers, me on a Ginay, (an actual French bike!) I had talked a guy on my paper route into selling for 50 bucks. It was rusted in places, the decals peeling off, so I sanded it down and spray painted it gloss black. Our big ride was to do about a 25-30 mile loop out to the Saratoga battlefield where we could cruise down the one-way, narrow, newly paved road there, imagining we were on a narrow, closed-to-traffic European race road. We raced up every hill, sprinted to any landmark or sign, practiced drafting, let gaps open up between us, then worked to close them down. We rode and rode and read about cycling (it was rarely on television, the Internet not even a twinkle in our eyes), practiced “carbo loading,” and I’m pretty certain Greg even shaved his legs (something I was too self-conscious to do). There were no nearby races we knew of, no clubs we could join, and we never saw any real cyclists on the roads of upstate New York, though I’m sure they were out there, cycling about to explode in the US.
If high school friends passed us on the road as we cycled—crouched, leaning forward in our strange garments—they would slow, roll down the windows, shout insults at us or toss small projectiles our way. One time a van of college boys headed to a heavy metal concert at SPAC (Saratoga Performing Arts Center) we guessed, rode alongside us, screaming and laughing and weaving their van onto the shoulder, inches from us. We somehow survived unscathed—but we were an odd sight. The shorts back then were much shorter and looked like something only a girl might consider wearing. The jerseys were tight with goofy-short puffy sleeves and long, bronze zippers you could unzip to your navel, which you had to do on hot days since they were made of wool. We didn’t care. We embraced it all, relished in our unique, growing knowledge of something Europeans had been cheering on and practicing forever….
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