DeliveranceDeliveranceThe world's top bike couriers raced through San Francisco this summerat the fourth Cycle Messenger World Championships. Buffalo Bill came backalive.
Cycling Plus, Cover Feature, November 1996
By Buffalo Bill
"Sounds like Postman of the Year", said an unimaginative Londonfriend. Hardly. A thousand cycle couriers, paying mostly out of their ownpockets, fly, drive and cycle to San Francisco from Japan, Australia, NewZealand, North America and Europe to participate in an event that includesthe world's largest ever Critical Mass (3,000 cyclists), a two-floor partywith a trapeze artist and a 30-foot half-pipe, a gallery featuring artby and about messengers, a night of films about messengers and three daysof messenger races, enjoyed by serious athletes and genuine slackers alike...Postman of the Year? I could just imagine little red vans from Greendalequeueing up to get in.
Party time
We were all there to compete; it was an opportunity to race and findout who really is the fastest. But most people couldn't hope to take homea title. Only 20 guys were in with a chance of victory, and it was unthinkablethat Ivonne Kraft wouldn't win the women's class for the third year running.What were the rest of us going to do?
Dear reader, I can assure you that the Moving Target team, even thoughwe were expecting a couple in the final and maybe a top 20 finish for ourleading rider Andy Capp, didn't spend the week before the race drinkingisotonic fluids, tapering our training schedules and going to bed early.We were out with the rest of the international messenger family, visitingthe sights messenger-style, checking out the local cappuccino, hangingout at The Wall (SF's cc hang-out), ripping the multi-storey car-parks,and sampling the California 'micro' beer ('micro' is a description of thesize of the brewery, not the amount served), Speaking of alcohol, the MovingTarget team were uniquely favoured in this respect, one of our sponsorsbeing Bear Republic Ales of Sonoma County who gave us four kegs of theirbest ale.
The CMWC is primarily an excuse to get together and have a party; theracing is there to be enjoyed. Everybody got their chance to show off infront of their friends and demonstrate a bit of style. Doing well is finebut style is more important than winning prizes. Okay, we'd all like tobe the World Champion, but if we can't actually win ourselves we want theguy who does to be a ‘real’ messenger. Someone we can all be proud of.Someone we could have a beer or two with.
The contenders
The Danes didn't look as though they'd had beer in their lives, or evena cappuccino. They didn't hang out, they never changed out of their teamstrip. What did they do in their spare time? Write postcards home to theirfamilies probably. No, it couldn't be a Dane.
The Torontonians were hoping that it would be Joey Dias, the TO AlleyCat King. The San Francisco Committee had designed the race course to setup a home-town win. The German and Austrian fast guys looked in good shape.The Spanish were looking for cafe con leche. The T- Serve team from Tokyolooked very cute but no real threat for overall honours. And the MovingTarget team was desperately looking for a secret weapon, or at least adecent excuse.
But before you could win you had to qualify... There was the rush parcel...the banana boxes... that hill. That Hill!
The course
The course had been designed by a sadist. That Hill was a 25% climbover 200 metres between Checkpoints 3 and 4 a monster, Looking down gaveme vertigo. Riding up made me want to vomit, Halfway up there was a sharpright turn that broke any rhythm that might have been maintained in thefirst half, and then at Checkpoint 4 there were two sets of stairs. Itbroke the legs, the lungs and the spirit.
Even defending champion Lars, who likes to crack jokes while racing,didn't find it funny which was nice because we'd thought he had pistonsfor legs and a pair of bellows instead of lungs. I had been out to SF inApril to recce the course and was stunned by how steep That Hill was. Iwent up it in 42 x 26, which is tiny, and I nearly blew my knee-caps offthe second time up. The SF guys thought this a great laugh.
When I got home I warned the Europeans they'd need a 39 x 26 to standa chance of getting up it. They said they'd always known, I was a weaklingso they weren’t surprised by this public announcement of my feeblenessBut I got the last laugh. When I marshalled Checkpoint 5 at the top ofthe course, I could observe their twisted and discoloured expressions closeup and make cheap jokes their expense.
If the physical pain wasn't bad enough, you had to use your brain aswell. You had to plot your own route a sort of urban Polaris. At the start,you were handed a manifest (parcel list) on which to collect the checkpointstamps for delivering parcels.
On the back of the manifest was the points grid for your heat. You gotmore points for parcels going up or down That Hill, although the exactscore varied from heat to heat, forcing everyone to think for themselvesand work out their own way to score enough points to qualify for the final.
Added complications were a lock up at Checkpoint 3 (lock your bike orget it stolen), the banana boxes (60 x 30 x 20cm) for double points atCheckpoint 2, and the rush parcel for Checkpoint 5, which if deliveredin eight minutes scored double points. Oh yeah, and if you didn't get backto the finish and hand in your manifest inside the 30 minutes you 'sacked’and scored zero.
Confused? So were we. According to Waldo, the Race Captain (CMWC’s equivalentof Chief Commissaire), it tested messenger skills working out the quickestway to get from A to B and make a lot of money at the same time. The realitywas that it blew our minds, our legs, and our lungs too.
The action
The combination of That Hill and the fiendishly complicated format favouredonly the strong of body and mind. The thick bikies who relied on theirlegs to do the talking were stuffed. The first guy on our team to racewas Erik Zones, in the first heat, Could he be our secret weapon? SomehowErik got up and down That Hill on his fixed gear but he didn't get enoughpoints to qualify. He decided the Race Captain had made a mistake, appealed...and got a place in the final for his trouble.
Moving Target's Peter Lord and Andy Capp raced in the same heat, butthey both made strategy mistakes and missed qualification by some 50 points.Another of our riders, Jeff, rode up That Hill twice a grave error andmissed out, too. At the end of the first day, we hadn't got a single racerin the final.
My heat was in the afternoon of the second day. It was all down to me.I was carrying the honour of the team. Me and Andy talked about the correctstrategy over dinner. I went to bed early but couldn't sleep. I was inthe veteran heat for guys who'd been messenger for 10 years or more. Basically,I was racing against a load of old men and alcoholics. The humiliationI would suffer if I didn't qualify did not bear thinking about.
Would I have enough time to take two boxes, one parcel from Checkpoint1, drop at Checkpoint 4 and make the rush? Should I try to second guesseveryone else by heading straight for the rush, missing out the boxes,and try to pick up as many points at the top of the hill as possible? ShouldI run away with one of the Bear Republic kegs and get drunk instead?
To cut a long story short, I qualified. Which meant that I had to rideup that damn hill again the next day.
The Final
In the final, 100 couriers who had qualified from 15 heats of up to50 riders each had to race around eight checkpoints on a single loop. Atthe start of each round you picked up a brand new funky Timbuk2 bag insidewhich was a bundle of parcels that had to be delivered to some, but notall, of the checkpoints. At the end of each round a number of lagging riderswere eliminated until only 10 were left. The guy first over the line witha correctly completed manifest was the winner, the undisputed World Champion...
There had been dirty tricks in the heats tacks left on the road, parcelsstolen from checkpoints and in the final there was even more controversy.Bribes offered to riders; MTBer Jackie Phelan naked; the defending champnobbled by his own manager; a rider clearly in a winning position misdirectedby a policeman... It was just like a pro bike race.
And then there was Thomas Sauerwein's disqualification. Thomas had finishedsecond in London '94 and Toronto '95, and finally in San Francisco, atthe fourth Cycle Messenger World Championships, he had crossed the linefirst. Here in the United States of America, land of dreams, it seemedthat Thomas's dream had come true. He was the Cycle Messenger World Champion.
But it wasn't to be. He hadn't completed the last round of the finalcorrectly. Aghast, the chief race official wept as he told Thomas the badnews. Thomas turned away, inconsolable.
On the podium Lars Urban, the deposed champion, stepped up to the mike,and told Thomas's story then called him up to the mike and offered hima CCCP jersey, the one he'd worn when he won first the German and thenthe World Championships in '95, with the hope it would bring Thomas theluck necessary to win the ‘97 CMWC in Barcelona.
Thomas pulled it on and his face began to crumple. He could only chokeout, 'Thank you... thank you...' Then he turned away, having lost an unequalbattle against emotion.
The crowd roared its appreciation, its commiseration, its respect. Swissrider Sven Baumann might have been declared the winner, officially theworld’s fastest messenger, but the assembled throng knew who the real heroof the day was.
Ivonne won the female messengers' race, as expected, but in a spiritof camaraderie second and third were awarded to 10 riders equally. Rollon Barcelona.
The World of Bikes
The Europeans
The average European messenger makes a lot more money than their NorthAmerican counterpart and this was reflected in their bikes. With the exceptionof the guys who felt they were in with a shout of victory the Europeansrode expensive slicked-up MTB's - flash frames and nice components.
Your average Berliner's dream bike would be an oversized alloy off-roadframe, oil-damped front suspension, TIG-welded stem, hydraulic brakes,cartridge hubs laced radially to T7000 hoops, Ti- railed saddle and anyother anodised trinket that could be justifiably be bolted on. More moneythan sense, you might say.
The hard-core Euro racer-types (like Lars Urban, riding a Schroederroad frame, and Thomas Sauerwein) were on 700C wheels, with double chainringsand a wide ratio sprocket. A few used exotic handlebar set-ups, low-proswith aero bars, but most of the fast guts were using the standard roadset-up - drops with STI or Ergo.
The Brits
The British contingent was rather and the bikes we rode weren't thatrepresentative of couriers in this country. We Londoners divide prettyevenly into the fixed gear crew (see C+56 for a review of a typical Londonfixed gear) and the Giro-Moto-goatee-Eye Jackets and Suspender crowd. Howevernone of the fat-tyre tyros made it across the pond (better things to do,like finishing second last in the Bestway Series), and us fixies all tookour own TJQ and Condom road bikes.
Except for Stringer, who had eleventh hour surgery on his Sonic fixedgear, which Helmut at Sonic Cycles metamorphosed into a road bike. Therest of us laid odds on whether it would all come apart on the way up orthe way down That Hill.
The Americans
The North Americans divide up the same way as the Londoners. The EastCoasters have an interesting variant on the standard London fixed gearsingle brake set-up. Influenced by guys like Joey Love and undergroundmessenger hero, Eric the Commander, a lot of East Coasters ride fixed-gear-no-brakes.Though it looks crazy (and is crazy) it's bike riding in its purest form.
The West Coasters live in cities with big hills, making a single gearset-up a very serious undertaking. In the main, gears are used, but die-hard,gung-ho individuals like Rebecca Riley from SF, who rides fixed-gear-no-brakes,can be found. I should add that Rebecca's lower front teeth are missing...
Only Dinosaurs Use Fossil Fuels
Perhaps the wackiest race of all was the Cargo bike race. Erik Zo wonit, riding a Jan Vandertieun built, conventional Long-John, but the secondplace man was riding a pedicab that converted into a flat-bed pedal pick-uptrike. Jan was showing off his latest wheel-mule, a recumbent box trikesteered with the legs. Very weird, but more laughs than a Volvo Estate.
Full Metal Basket
One of the "special" races was the single speed race. Secondplace went to a bearded guy called Junior, who looked like a trapper. Hehas been a messenger since 1968. In those days the messenger companiesin SF issued their employees with a company shirt and a single speed beachcruiser with a kick back brake and a basket. This is the classic SF messengerbike.
Megan Redington, President of the CMWC '96 Committee, insisted thisrace be included in the programme as a tribute to the traditions of SFmessengering and as a reminder that all that's needed to be a good messengerare pedals, wheels and a desire to get the job done.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at messvilleto@yahoo.com