Yellow Was Never My Color

It's a lot different from when we were growing up and used them as essential transportation to get to and from the field (the baseball field, of course, what else was there for a kid growing up in the late Fifties and early Sixties?) or from friends' houses.

You might start out with just you and Neil, and then go a couple of blocks and pick up Bobby, and then all you headed across the development, to the new Levitt houses, where Tommy lived.

I'm talking about bicycles and as kids there was Schwinn and there was Royce Union, and not much else. These were big, clunky solid yoke metal frame bikes, with balloon tires and white sidewalls. You had a mousetrap in the back, and that's where you kept your glove, baseball inside of it, so that the pocket formed just right.

Maybe your dad, or somebody else's dad would remember to get the little can of Neet's foot oil at the hardware store and you'd work that stuff into the glove before putting it into the mousetrap.

Twenty-six-inch tires on those bikes and if you had a fancy one, it had front and rear handbrakes, but ours mostly didn't-you just stood on the pedals hard and the rear wheel broke away and wound up sliding to one side or the other. You stopped all right. 

We all knew somebody whose folks had gotten them a bike with three gears, think of it! but we didn't have bikes like that. Going uphill, you pedaled hard-if it got steeper, you pedaled harder. Screw up, you fell off and walked uphill holding the bike by the handlebars, feeling (and looking) like a dork.

I was thinking about all of that last weekend as the bikers raced across parts of France whose towns can only correctly be pronounced by removing your adenoids. And again this year, one or more people were badly injured along the route, and I keep thinking 'Nobody ever got hurt when we rode to Resko's house' and that was over an hour back in the day (it'd be like three days in 'now' time).

It was not until the LA Olympics in '84, sitting in Germany and watching highlights of the games the Warsaw Pact boycotted, that I first saw Americans go ga-ga for the most European of sports, in my opinion (unless they make sulking an Olympic event.)

The oval track with the impossible angles of banking, the skinny tires that seemed to be made of solid rubber, the 'Disco in Frisco' skin-tight speedo outfits, and most especially those 'Revenge of the Alien' head-shaped helmets, all of it so aerodynamic I thought these guys could fly. 

I was aware of a Frankfurt am Main-based Tour de France cyclist, Didi Thoreau, I think his name was and I couldn't understand how you could make a living as a professional bike rider. I had a movie in my head, where Didi is in Munich, perhaps visiting his fan club (I'm sure he had one) and checking into the Munich Hilton what exactly does he put under "occupation"? 'Professional Bicycle Rider' And if the concierge snickers across the desk while reading it, upside down, in the ledger, does he offer to prove it with a bike strapped to his back?

Then in the late Eighties, Greg Lemond, an American from I have no idea where, won the Tour de France Actually he won it three times, twice AFTER accidentally shooting himself. He recovered, but after those two victories his career seemed to go away (I always wondered where he'd been shot since we're talking a LOT of hours on a bike seat if you follow my drift.)

We'll skip over Lance Armstrong and just point out that "Cheaters never prosper" needed to have one or more asterisks when applied to him, amirite?  And now the 2023 version is history and what does the winner get? A permanent press yellow jersey? The opportunity to write 'winner of the Tour de France' on the hotel check-in registry? I'm wondering if Duna could do that.
-bill kenny