Photo by Ken Manley
Below is one of many tales available in Steve’s eBook, “Tales From a Real Bike Shop” available in the Store:
The University of New South Wales had a cycling club at the time which was run by two customers, Jason Keane and Peter Ryan. They put a lot of time into encouraging first-year students to take up cycling as a sport and tried to develop the interested ones into good riders. They achieved a bit of success at that, and in those days there were always a number of uni riders racing in their distinctive red and yellow checked jerseys in A, B and C grades at Heffron Park on Saturday afternoons.
Jason joked to me one day that he thought he’d found a secret weapon. There was a first-year student from Brisbane whose method of traveling the 1000 kilometres from Brisbane to Sydney for his first semester, was to ride the distance with a back pack, sleeping rough by the side of the road. As a holiday during a two-week break between semesters, the same bloke thought he would see the sights of Adelaide. So he rode the 3000 kilometres roundtrip during the two-week break with back pack on, sleeping by the side of the road, and still had time to spend a few days looking around the city when he got there.
The secret weapon’s name was Barry, and he rode an old, heavy, steel bike with friction gears which was a rattletrap, literally. Every crank revolution there was a clunk, clunk, which was audible in the race and from the side of the circuit. The bike had been a quality bike, but that was 20 years before. There were a few cheap components on it as some of the quality stuff must have been worn out over time by a previous owner or by Barry himself. Barry’s first race was in C grade, and he lapped the field. His second race was in B grade and he finished half a lap ahead on his own. The jump up to A grade stymied him for a while. He could go all day but didn’t have a lot of speed. A month or two of racing A grade cured that problem, and I remember him winning his first A grade race.
I also remember him and the rattletrap getting a close second place to a little known rider in the National Universities’ Championship road race. The little known winner, Robbie McEwen by name, went on to bigger and better things, like Tour de France stage wins and green jerseys.
The thing about Barry was that he either rode 700-plus kilometers a week or he didn’t ride at all. There was no in between with him. When he was on the bike, which was most of the time, he was hard to beat. Cycling seemed to run in the family as his younger brother Klayten followed him down from Brisbane a few years later and won the National Road Championship a few years after that.
There are two kinds of bike riders; those in love with cycling and those in love with equipment. Barry always had second hand or old equipment and was the embodiment of a simple truth about cycling. To be competitive and win bike races, you don’t need the latest and greatest go fast gear. You need a work ethic, the will to win and a love for the sport.
Everything else is an accessory.
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