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Blood, Sweat, and One Gear
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Bike Messengers Are Nuts.
Messengers Racing Each Other Is Something Else Entirely
Baltimore City Paper, July 27, 2005
By Ron Cassie
“Yo, dude, right here,” he says,
pointing out some scaffolding. “Here’s a spot.”
Nah, this guy’s gonna steal my bike, I tell myself, as I simultaneously
hop off the seat and swivel my head looking for a vacant parking meter
or light pole. Or something. This scrawny white kid thinks he’s going
to hustle me and jack my bike on some side street in Jersey City.
But shit, there is nowhere else, and I gotta fly. I’m falling way
behind already. So I hook my Kryptonite
U-lock around my rear wheel and
frame and the scaffolding and snap it closed. I give the asshole a hard
look. If my front wheel or seat is gone when I get back, I’m gonna be
pissed.
I quickly make my delivery, get my manifest stamped, and grab another
pickup—a big, triangular FedEx box—and race right back. In and out in
less than a minute.
Motherfucker!
Goddamn motherfucker stole my bike.
Some moron who saw it happen nods toward end of the block and says, “He
went up the corner.” Fuckin’ helpful. I want to punch him just for
standing there, but there is no time. I take off running as fast I can
with my huge messenger bag and the FedEx box.
There he is. Thirty yards away. My lungs have been heaving and my mouth
has been dry for the last half-hour before I got my bike ripped. I
can’t even yell at the asshole.
Goddammit. My bike has been thrown across an empty loading dock, and
now he’s jumping up to try to get away. I dive headfirst onto the
platform and trip his left leg with one outstretched arm. “Ow, Christ,
shit,” I hear in my head—or out loud, I don’t know. I pull myself up,
punch the would-be thief hard in the chest with both fists. He drops my
bike. I look at him in the eye . . . and smile, grab it, and leap off
the cement platform. Back to the street, with my ride, I growl to no
one in particular.
Cyclists are whizzing by, three, six, 10, and they’re screaming at me
to get out of the way.
Blood is everywhere. There’s blood on my T-shirt and shorts. I
instinctively lift my left hand. The top of my middle finger is
flapping open like a screen door. It’s stinging like hell. I must have
driven it directly into a nail or piece of metal when I swung my arm
across the deck to make that tackle on the loading dock. Fuck Ray Lewis.
Now what? There isn’t anything at the end of your finger. Get to the
next stop. Everybody is passing the shit out of you! something in the
back of my mind says. Pick up the pace. Jesus Christ. GET MOVING!
This is what it’s like when bike messengers get together and race for
kicks. Usually, there are some things planned that other people would
consider fun, too.
The 13th annual Cycle Messenger World Championships were held earlier
this summer in the New York City boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and
Queens, as well as Jersey City, N.J., which sits just on the other side
of the Holland Tunnel from Manhattan. The five-day rally began
Thursday, June 30, and lasted through Monday, July 4, with the main
races getting underway the same day as the Tour de France and the whole
thing winding down with an Independence Day barbecue. Organizer and New
York courier Kevin “Squid” Bolger describes the event as “20 percent
race, 20 percent family reunion, 60 percent party.”
On Saturday morning, the day before the finals, Baltimore messenger
Isaac Shay prepared for his qualifying race in the sprint event, one of
about a dozen different competitions that make up the World
Championships. “It’s 11 a.m.,” he says with no small amount of
frustration. “There has to be a liquor store open.”
Five-foot-eight and built like a lightweight boxer, 26-year-old Shay
needed a pack of Camel Lights. He definitely didn’t need anything to
drink. Hungover from the night before, he’d already guzzled so many Red
Bulls that he expected to “ be shaking like a crackhead” at the start
of his race. After bumming a smoke, he took a few “recovery rides” near
the 250-meter straightaway alongside some Jersey City train tracks.
Naturally, Shay, who works for Baltimore company VMW, claimed one of
the biggest upsets in the qualifying sprints.
His four-man heat of riders got off clean, flying in tandem to the last
100 meters, with Shay on the leader’s rear wheel. At 30-plus mph, with
hair either sweat-plastered to his face or flying off to the side, Shay
cocked his head. Knees and feet blurring, he caught the front-runner in
the last 10 meters and edged him out at the finish line.
“That was the highlight of everything for me,” he says. “That guy I
beat [in the qualifying race] took second at the North American
Championships. I’ve been to three Worlds and that was the best I’ve
ever done. But a race is a race, too. The ante is higher, that’s all.
Really, the best part of the Worlds is hanging out with couriers from
all over the place, from Japan to England and all over Europe.”
Shay was, in fact, just one among more than 700 men and women from some
30 countries in competition for the title of world’s fastest bike
messenger, including half a dozen couriers from Baltimore and a former
messenger turned reporter turned, for the weekend, messenger again.
Along with Shay, fellow Baltimoreans Chris Bishop, Aaron “Hot Sauce”
Platt, and siblings Jed and Megan Digney made the trip up to New York
to race and swap gear and stories with messengers from Tokyo, New
Orleans, Zurich, and Warsaw. There was parking-lot bike polo, skid
contests, velodrome sprints, bunny-hop competitions, 3 a.m. cruises
through the Lower East Side, group rides over the George Washington
Bridge, arm wrestling, art, live music, gambling, outdoor films in
Riverside Park, breakneck races, frightening crashes, stitches, broken
bones, and ambulances, all part of the adventure. There was also enough
beer and pot in the mix to poleax a herd of elephants.
Bishop, who works for Ramm Rapid Courier, coined the Baltimore pack’s
“20-grit” nickname after the 1999 North American Championships. “We had
done real well up in Toronto,” Jed Digney remembers. “We were driving
back, talking shit, like we were the drunkest, the best up there, had
won this and that. And Chris says, ‘Yeah, we’re real smooth. Like
20-grit [sandpaper].’”
Digney, 29, is soft-spoken and slight of stature, belying a strong
competitive streak. “When we go to races now we want be all rough-ass
and represent Baltimore and other Baltimore couriers who don’t go,” he
continues. “Everybody knows about Philadelphia and D.C. messengers, and
we want to put Baltimore on the map.”
Even though each of the 700 messengers came to New York to compete,
bike-messenger contests are quite different than the orchestrated pomp
and crisp efficiency of, say, the Olympics. A 6-foot-1 Canadian male
courier from Ireland showed up for the sprints in a pink polka-dot
dress with a lime-green boa. During the team race on Saturday morning,
the radio frequencies used by dispatchers were alive with directions
and pleas broadcast in German, English, New Yawk-ese, and Norwegian (or
maybe Danish), as riders filed in and out in of a simulated “home
office” checkpoint in side-by-side chaos:
“Bitte, bitte!”
“Where the fuck are you?”
“Ja, ja.”
“Lauf!”
“OK, go!”
The races themselves are not only physically demanding, they are
designed to mimic the nonathletic challenges messengers face on an
average day on the job. Bikes could—and did—get “stolen” and hidden by
officials. (Remember that guy on the loading dock?) In the 45- to
60-minute qualifying heats for the 2.5-hour-plus main race, competitors
had to intentionally flatten a tire, pull out their valve stem, put the
tire and tube back on the wheel, reinflate, and only then race on.
Adding to the tension, surrogate mail-room clerks and security guards,
the bane of courier existence, stood by the checkpoints spitting insults
for amusement.
“What the fuck is this, dirtball?”
“Get this filthy piece-of-shit paper off my
desk.”
“You cannot park your bike there.”
“That’s not our package, idiot.”
“You got some ID?”
“You ain’t getting nothin’ till I see some
ID.”
The racers each received different manifests, log sheets of faux
pickups and deliveries staggered in the same five-block area, each of
which required a signature or stamp. Many of the streets on the course
were one-way only, forcing racers to juggle logistics as well as
oversized packages. One wrong decision on the fly could cost valuable
minutes and eliminate a rider.
Previous Cycle Messenger World Championships have been held in
Budapest, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, San Francisco, Washington, and
Philadelphia (the 2006 event is scheduled for Sydney). And over its
13-year existence, the event has become something of a big deal.
Reporters from ESPN, The Christian Science Monitor, the Associated
Press, the Taipei Times, The Boston Globe, and German and Japanese TV
networks were among the dozens of journalists gathered and pointing
cameras at the finals July 3. And yet, to compete at the World
Championships, a courier only needed to get to town with his or her
bike, tools, messenger bag, and $50 registration fee. Any other details
could be worked out on arrival.
“It’s like going to a punk show out of town,” Shay says while waiting
with Bishop on a corner in Bolton Hill for his ride to New York after
work on Friday afternoon, unconcerned that he had no definitive lodging
for the weekend. “When it is time to sleep, you crash with whoever
you’re partying with. It will work out. Trust me, it always does.”
Aaron Platt traveled to the event in traditional bike-messenger luxury.
He grabbed the China Town bus—$20 each way, $35 round trip. Taking a
break for the summer from classes at Towson University, he brought his
messenger bag and his two-wheeler, not knowing if he was actually
allowed to bring a bicycle. “I threw it underneath in the luggage
compartment and nobody said anything,” he says. “The only thing anybody
takes on that bus is backpacks. It’s kind of sketchy.”
Platt, 28, is the kind of person it is hard to imagine someone not
liking. He’s earnest and helpful. Later in Baltimore, over a couple of
beers, he admits that while he likes the courier lifestyle, he has some
friends that have gotten too caught up in the booze and drugs that
accompany the subculture.
Bishop, 30, has a decade in as a messenger and still has the rep as the
fastest in Baltimore. He and his fiancée, Caroline Define, drove
to New York fresh from a hike through Canada and avoided any worry
about couch-surfing or reservations at a cheap motel by bedding down in
the back of their van.
Mike O’Hara, a quality-control manager at an engineering firm and a
Mount Vernon resident, is friendly with the Baltimore courier scene.
“It’s not like there are that many people riding bikes downtown
Baltimore, so you get know each other,” he says. He’sÅtrim, free
of any obvious body art (unlike most of his messenger friends), and an
amateur photographer with a web site (www.phattire.net) devoted to
bicycling. He took Amtrak out of Penn Station.
“I knew I wasn’t allowed to bring my bike on-board the train,” O’Hara
says. “But I figured if I bought my ticket at the last minute online
and showed up with it, what could they do?” Turns out, they could give
him a hard time about it. “So I took my entire bike apart, both wheels
and the stem, too, took my shoelaces off, and tied it all up in a
little package and carried it on,” he says. “What could they say? It
was smaller than some stuff other people had.”
Rather than rent a room, O’Hara spent Saturday and Sunday night on the
roof of a Howard Johnson in midtown Manhattan. “I walked in past the
front desk and got on the elevator like I was a guest. I took it all
the way up and then found the door to the top was open,” O’Hara
recounts. “Then I went back down, got a pillow and a sheet, and slept
until 8 o’clock. I saw the sun, stood up and stretched, and felt great.”
O’Hara’s story sounds a little too colorful, even in the world of
messengers, until he turns on his digital camera to show a photograph
of a white sheet and pillow resting in the middle of a pebbled roof in
the morning light against Manhattan’s familiar skyscape.
Sunday brought out clear blue skies for the championship race.
Saturday’s qualifying heats eliminated 550 riders, but Shay, Bishop,
and both Digneys did well enough to make the cut list posted outside
Brooklyn’s Rockstar Bar at 1:15 a.m. Sunday, during the conclusion of
the arm-wrestling tourney. Now 50 yards back from 150 bikes, each
costing as much as $2,000, lying in the middle of closed-off Grand
Street
in Jersey City, the finalists stand around in the mounting heat,
twitching and talking smack.
“Yeah, this is who I thought was going to be here,” one courier
bellows, adding cockily, “Good!”
“Anybody finish in the top 10 last year?” another competitor asks
defiantly. “Anybody?”
Nobody seems to pay attention.
A hand goes up: “This is mine.”
At least a thousand spectators have lined the starting area to watch.
They are sitting on the curb, sitting in trees, standing on fences, and
perched on lamp posts. The Hudson River, the New York skyline, and the
42-story Goldman-Sachs building, the tallest in New Jersey, serve as
dramatic backdrop.
BANG!
The messengers scramble to find their bikes and take off. It’s elbows
and knees and jockeying for position. It’s a miracle nobody goes down.
At least four messengers were taken to the hospital during the races in
New York, all from separate accidents, most from smashing into other
couriers during the qualifying heats. More should have gone. The night
the World Championships concluded, Los Angeles messenger Ozzy Lopez was
struck by a car and suffered several broken bones. Tragically, Spencer
Morris, a New York courier and a housing coordinator for the race, was
hit by a car in a non-work-related accident the day after the World
Championships ended and was rehabilitating at a Portland, Ore.,
hospital as of press time.
“You are going to get hit,” Jed Digney says, expressing a truism of
messengers, whether they race or not. “The odds catch you. I’ve been in
five or six bad accidents and hospitalized three times. The worst time
my femur was snapped in half. Always on St. Paul Street.”
The dangers of riding a bike as fast as possible in city traffic are
serious, and that may be the strongest thread tying this diverse group
together. Couriers know the risks, and drivers’ failure to share the
road gets under their skin. But so do the low pay, the absence of
health benefits, their clients’ and the public’s lack of appreciation
for their dedication and professionalism. And they get little respect
from commuters who bully the road, foul the air with gas guzzlers, and
leave the city at 5 p.m., often to pay taxes elsewhere.
Embracing a low-paying and dangerous line of work is just one of the
paradoxes bike messengers embody. They’re tattooed like Hells Angels,
but they don’t have the beer guts. They own expensive bikes, but the
machines are usually covered in spray paint and anarchist stickers.
They are fit, but they are not diet and stopwatch-obsessed triathletes.
Riding down Fifth Street in Manhattan’s East Village, heading to the
Ace Bar on Saturday after a full day of racing, a pack of Baltimore
cyclists pedal by an 8-by-5-foot brick-wall graffiti portrait of the
recently deceased Clash frontman Joe Strummer. Give Strummer a track
bike and he could’ve joined the party. The iconoclastic “don’t fuck
with me” mind-set shines through punk musicians and bike messengers
alike.
“Track bikes,” with a single gear, are the Baltimore messengers’
choice. The bikes were designed for high-speed indoor velodrome racing,
without brakes to prevent sudden stops and subsequent pileups. They
require tremendous strength and skill to ride on city streets. To stop,
a rider must lock his or her legs to slow down and prevent the pedals
from continuing forward progress; lock your legs hard enough, you skid.
The unofficial world’s record for a skid, 509 feet, was set on a track
bike this year in New York.
These bikes have become the messenger vehicle of choice for several
reasons, some practical, some poetic. “First, they look great, because
they’re so spare. They have less parts that can break or get grimed
up,” Jed Digney says. “Thieves don’t want them because they can’t ride
them or sell them to pawn shops. I’ve seen two get jacked and then
returned.
“But how do I say it?” he continues, searching for the perfect metaphor
to illuminate the finer points of the difference between a track bike
and a regular multigeared street machine. “It’s like t’ai chi vs.
karate. One is fluid and one is constantly having to start and stop. A
track bike maneuvers better in traffic, too. You have to slow down much
earlier, before you come to a light, but you want to be moving all the
time.”
“You do become like one with the road on a [track] bike,” says Bishop,
who builds his own. “You hear more and sense more. You feel the road
more, your feet are always moving with the pedals, so you react better.
You react before you even know you are reacting.”
One quirky competition at messenger events was born from the courier
practice of balancing on a virtually stationary track bike when caught
at a busy intersection. A “track stand” contest determines who can stay
on his or her motionless bike the longest without putting a foot on the
ground.
At the World Championships participants had to remove one hand from the
handle bars after five minutes of balancing upright to increase the
degree of difficulty. Five minutes after that, with 20 or so
competitors left, the other hand had to go.
After 10 more minutes with no hands, only their feet on the pedals,
just over 10 messengers remained. So organizers asked them to lift one
foot, leaving cyclists teetering with just the ball of a single foot
slightly juggling one pedal. Remarkably, both Digneys were alive at
this point. With a two-day beard, short curly hair, and an unbuttoned
short-sleeve shirt, Jed Digney looked like a French high-wire artist,
seemingly in a some sort of trance as he balanced. “The key,” he says,
“is to focus on a spot just in front of the bike.”
Both eventually lost their balance after several more minutes, with Jed
Digney taking third place overall; Megan Digney took third in the
women’s category. Mike Cobb from Berkeley, Calif., won. “I practice at
every red light,” Cobb says. “You definitely have to get ‘centered.’ I
do yoga once a week and I think that helps.”
For the Digney siblings, this trip was somewhat bittersweet. They’ve
ridden together all over the United States and France and Italy,
including the Alps, but Megan, 25, is moving back to Los Angeles, away
from her brother and parents here. She’s messengered in L.A. in the
past and delivered subpoenas on her bike there as well. She learned to
snowboard in California, too. Last year she worked at youth hostel in
Chile, she says, spending part of her time guiding snowboarding
tourists down a still-active volcano in Pucon.
“Megan’s going to do good [at the World Championships], she’s tough,”
Jed predicts via cell phone while climbing North Charles Street in
rush-hour traffic the Friday before the World Championships. “This is
going to be one of our last trips together for a while. I’m going to
miss her.” She eventually took third overall in the women’s fixed-gear
Omnium category, which combines the results from the sprints, track
stand, backward circles, and main event race.
Bishop was the top Baltimore finisher in the main race, placing just
inside the top 40 finishers, several minutes ahead of Shay. Winners
were awarded silver rear-sprocket medals on red, white, and blue
ribbons. Even seasoned couriers don’t know what to expect exactly when
they get to a big race like the Worlds. The events are often unique
from year to year and tend to have a flying-by-the seat-of-your-pants
vibe. For most messengers the joy isn’t winning or losing—it’s in
letting it all hang out.
The Jersey City cops even got caught up in the fun. As three couriers
in the finals, two guys and one woman, tore their last two laps around
the course sans jersey, shorts, helmets, or underwear, one gregarious
local police officer, unable to hide an ear-to-ear grin, bent down to
explain what had happened to an incredulous 5-year-old spectator
watching with his mom. “They were going so fast,” the officer told the
confused youth, “that their clothes just blew off!”
Shay was in New York to race, maybe even win, and have a good time, but
he also had a side mission: promoting an unofficial “alley cat” race in
Baltimore the following weekend. Maybe you caught a glimpse of the 70
or so wheeled demons barreling around Baltimore on Saturday, July 9.
Launched from the Sidebar Tavern on East Lexington Street downtown, the
late-afternoon, 27-mile, three-person-team race and afterbash proved to
be a scaled-down version of New York. Shay, who organized the race with
fellow Baltimore messenger Damian Keller, is responsible for the
periodic event’s politically incorrect moniker: the GangBang.
“We were just trying to think of something different, something that
sounded, like the L.A. gangs, the Bloods and Crips,” he says.
“Gangbangers, drive-bys, and all that.”
Shay and Keller shaped the course, copied maps, recruited volunteers to
work the checkpoints, and advertised with posters, handouts, and a web
site. They got T-shirts made, lined up sponsors, contacted companies to
donate giveaways, found a local artist to create bike-inspired
sculptures as prizes, got the cooperation of the Sidebar, and hired the
DJ. There were burgers on the grill and a hip-hop show.
Former Baltimore messenger Matthew Schwar, who now customizes bikes in
Portland, Ore., made the race, as did Portland’s Reverend Phil and his
bike video cam. Dreadlocked Mike D. drove down from New York, and
Switzerland’s Freddie Thern and Jo Jo Reader, the women’s world champ
in New York, stayed in the United States an extra week to compete.
Yoshi Tlatakeana, a messenger for Cyclex in Tokyo, arrived with
couriers from Philly and won the track stand.
And a former bike messenger-turned-reporter-turned-bike messenger
again, finger bandaged, is back in the saddle again for the second
weekend running.
As in New York, the main race isn’t just a test of speed and endurance.
At an early stop, near Hollins Market in Sowebo, racers rolls up to a
checkpoint to do whiskey shots and beer chasers. The only alternative
is even less appealing.
“I can’t tell some straight edge guy who’s winning halfway through that
he’s disqualified because he doesn’t drink,” Shay says. “So there’s
warm grape soda, which tastes like shit and will cramp you up later.”
From Southwest Baltimore it was on to a brutal uphill climb toward
Gwynns Falls Park. Then to the William Wallace statue in Druid Hill
Park. “I could taste my stomach acids at that point,” Chris Bishop
says. “I thought I was going to throw up.” You think you’re going can
catch your breath at some point, but you’re wrong.
“A head butt or 20 push-ups,” three shirtless blokes stationed at the
base of the marbled martyr to Scottish freedom sternly inform you. Fuck.
I can’t do five push-ups right now, I say to myself, winded and unable
to speak.
“I haven’t done a push-up since I got out of the Army,” Aaron Platt
gasps nearby.
But staring at these bastards, each gleeful at the thought of cracking
open your noggin, you convince yourself you’ve got 20 “good ones” to
give. About seven of the 70 participants take the head-butt option, but
they are among the minority of competitors wearing bike helmets.
Then to Wyman Park and an off-road trail. The purple carbonated sugar
water—and drool—is now caked around the corners of your mouth as you
swerve across 33rd Street to Waverly. Then Harford Road.
The only thing keeping the dirt, gravel, smog, and dust from completely
blinding you at this point is the sweat pouring down your forehead.
Fingers and forearms seize from your ever-ready grip, repetitive
breaking, and dehydration. Pristine gyms don’t rob your lungs like
ozone-depletion and bus fumes. Traffic is getting worse and no one is
looking where the hell they’re going. Eventually a downhill brings
riders past the city jail around dinnertime, and you can hear the
inmates chattering and grabbing trays. “I should’ve made everyone eat a
bologna sandwich at the checkpoint there,” Shay says later, with a tone
of regret.
Each of the three team members was given a map with the checkpoints
charted in a different order. At the last checkpoint in Locust Point,
each team has to wait until all three members arrive, whereupon they
sprint to the finish at the Sidebar in unison.
All this after a week of riding Baltimore’s torturous hills, punching
across town to Johns Hopkins Hospital, darting between cabbies who
would run over their own mother to get to a fare, squeezing between
bakery trucks, dodging tourists, and enduring sweltering humidity.
“I probably shouldn’t say this,” Bishop admits after he and
teammates/co-workers, Dante High and Chris “Sinister” Cummings, capture
first place in Baltimore. “But there is no way I ride this hard during
the week.”
Platt, who came in third with his teammates, David Chapman and Jamie
“Chewy” Chwirut, chooses a different way to express the same idea. “I
don’t know whether to puke or pee first,” he says right after finishing
the main race. “I think I’d feel better if I puked.”
The team of Brian Bartch, Eddie Prince, and Ron Lurz comes in second.
“I know all these guys, I work with them,” Shay says, chiding his
fellow VMW messengers before he announces the runners-up. “And you all
ought to be ashamed of yourselves for letting them beat you.”
Physically, the GangBang was more intense than anything in New York,
because of traffic, terrain, heat, and distance—and the lug to the top
of Federal Hill. Megan Digney took a bad spill, suffering a concussion
and a head wound requiring several stitches. She was released from the
hospital the same day, but her memory of the previous few days was
scrambled briefly. “I was looking at the map and trying to figure out
where I had to go next and wasn’t paying attention like I should’ve
been,” she says, more embarrassed than defensive.
At 10 p.m., only 90 minutes after the strength-sapping 2.5-hour marquee
race (three hours for slowpokes) and rehydration courtesy some Natty
Bohs, some of the messengers jump into one-on-one sprints on stationary
bikes in the back of a pickup truck. For these so-called gold sprints,
the rear wheel of each bike is hooked up to a computer that measures
the power generated by each rider. What looks like an enormous clock
with two giant second hands is projected on a 16-by-12-foot wall behind
the cyclists. One hand is green, matching a green bike, and the other
red, matching a red bike. Fans, hooting and hollering, track the
simulated 500-meter race as it is displayed by the clock’s second
hands. The racers follow on monitors in front of them as they pump
away. It’s a little like competing in a killer Tour de France stage and
then challenging everybody to a footrace in the parking lot afterward.
Hard-core messengers, those who stick with it for years, are talented
athletes by any measure. Former New York messenger Nelson Vails, who
appeared with Kevin Bacon in the bike-messenger movie QuickSilver,
during bike messengers’ first taste of pop-culture fame in 1986, also
won an Olympic silver medal for velo, or track racing, in 1984. Former
German bike courier and 1998 Cycle Messenger World Champion Yvonne
Kraft took seventh at the 2004 Athens Olympics mountain-biking event.
Jeremiah Bishop, originally from Pikesville and briefly a courier with
local firm Magic Messenger, won a gold medal in the 2003 Pan American
Games in mountain biking, and currently races professionally with
Trek/VW. Brooks Rapley of Toronto, who won the sprint competition at
the Cycle Messenger World Championships this year, has won a silver
medal at the Canadian track-racing championships.
ESPN filmed part of a documentary at the New York races. A film crew
tagged along with New York courier Alfred Bobe Jr. Bobe is a member of
Puma’s
sponsored messenger team, the first of its kind. The sneaker
company has been providing bikes, gear, travel and hotel expenses,
health insurance, and per diem to its New York-based team for the past
year. It’s sending them to courier events around the globe. (Shay says
that he’s sent letters out inquiring about sponsorship, but has
received little response; Pabst sprung for some GangBang T-shirts and
such.)
Bobe was one of the favorites to win the big race in New York, but only
finished in the top third. Regardless, he won an important velodrome
race in Los Angeles, placing him in the elite group of U.S. cyclists.
There is talk of him training for the Olympic team for 2008 in Beijing.
“I never knew I had that kind of talent,” Bobe says. “I’ve tried to do
other things, but I always come back to this. It is the pull of the
bike. But I’m 31 years old, and I have two kids. We’ll see.”
One thing to watch for at the Cycle Messenger World Championships was
the differing styles presented by the top couriers from
Europe—Scandinavia, in particular—alongside the U.S. messengers. The
teams from Holland, Finland, Denmark, and Belgium looked elegant,
sporting matching spandex suits, helmets, road bikes, and cleats. In
comparison, the Americans were typically bearded, pierced, and
disheveled. Four of the top five male riders were from Scandinavia.
Overall winner Karl Stransky was from Switzerland.
In Europe, being a bike messenger “is seen as more of a professional
job,” says Achim Vogt, from the German team Per Rad. “We have health
benefits, vacation, yes. I think, from what I can tell, it is much
different than it is in the United States.”
“In Europe, cycling is much more respected than it is
here,” Bishop says. “Which is strange now, because
we have Lance [Armstrong].”
Lots of U.S. couriers have raced on sponsored teams and clubs in lower
pro-level and top amateur events, but racing glory is not on the minds
of most. Many of the guys and gals spend years developing their love of
riding into a lifestyle that allows them to travel and be a part of the
brotherhood.
“For all times that I curse the decisions I have made in my life,”
Bishop continues, “I wouldn’t do it any differently if I had the
chance. I started and sold my own business [local messenger firm
Marathon Express]. And I’ve traveled all over the world and paid for it
myself. People sometimes look down on you like you’re a lowly
messenger, but they don’t know the whole story. They don’t know we put
on stuff like the World Championships and this race in Baltimore.”
When hurtling through traffic unprotected on top of a few pounds of
gracile metal becomes harder and harder to reconcile, many messengers
transition off the bike to other aspects of the subculture. They become
bike builders, T-shirt silk-screeners, apparel designers, and bike
painters. Many become mechanics, some start courier services of their
own, some manufacture messenger bags. Others use the courier and
underground cycling world as inspiration for their photographic or
literary pursuits. One even retired to become a reporter.
But while it lasts, messengering—whether on the clock or racing in
alley cats—is its own reward. “I like seeing everybody the best,
hearing the different languages and seeing all the faces,” Megan Digney
says of her time at this year’s World Championships. “It’s not like I
know everybody, but I like the feeling of belonging to a tight-knit
community. At times I feel like I don’t who I am, you know? I used to
feel like a lone wolf, a lonely person, but at the races I feel like
I’m part of something larger, and that’s cool.
“I also like to race, too,” she adds. “When you’re racing, you don’t
ride like you do when you’re working. You ride until you’re ready to
throw up. You push yourself to the limit. Afterward, though, you feel
stronger.”
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