Deliverance

The world's top bike couriers raced through San Francisco this summer at the fourth Cycle Messenger World Championships. Buffalo Bill came back alive.

Cycling Plus, Cover Feature, November 1996

By Buffalo Bill

"Sounds like Postman of the Year", said an unimaginative London friend. Hardly. A thousand cycle couriers, paying mostly out of their own pockets, fly, drive and cycle to San Francisco from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, North America and Europe to participate in an event that includes the world's largest ever Critical Mass (3,000 cyclists), a two-floor party with a trapeze artist and a 30-foot half-pipe, a gallery featuring art by and about messengers, a night of films about messengers and three days of messenger races, enjoyed by serious athletes and genuine slackers alike... Postman of the Year? I could just imagine little red vans from Greendale queueing up to get in.

Party time

We were all there to compete; it was an opportunity to race and find out who really is the fastest. But most people couldn't hope to take home a title. Only 20 guys were in with a chance of victory, and it was unthinkable that 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 though we were expecting a couple in the final and maybe a top 20 finish for our leading rider Andy Capp, didn't spend the week before the race drinking isotonic fluids, tapering our training schedules and going to bed early. We were out with the rest of the international messenger family, visiting the sights messenger-style, checking out the local cappuccino, hanging out 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 the size of the brewery, not the amount served), Speaking of alcohol, the Moving Target team were uniquely favoured in this respect, one of our sponsors being Bear Republic Ales of Sonoma County who gave us four kegs of their best ale.

The CMWC is primarily an excuse to get together and have a party; the racing is there to be enjoyed. Everybody got their chance to show off in front of their friends and demonstrate a bit of style. Doing well is fine but style is more important than winning prizes. Okay, we'd all like to be the World Champion, but if we can't actually win ourselves we want the guy 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 even a cappuccino. They didn't hang out, they never changed out of their team strip. What did they do in their spare time? Write postcards home to their families probably. No, it couldn't be a Dane.

The Torontonians were hoping that it would be Joey Dias, the TO Alley Cat King. The San Francisco Committee had designed the race course to set up 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 Tokyo looked very cute but no real threat for overall honours. And the Moving Target team was desperately looking for a secret weapon, or at least a decent 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% climb over 200 metres between Checkpoints 3 and 4 a monster, Looking down gave me vertigo. Riding up made me want to vomit, Halfway up there was a sharp right turn that broke any rhythm that might have been maintained in the first half, and then at Checkpoint 4 there were two sets of stairs. It broke 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 pistons for legs and a pair of bellows instead of lungs. I had been out to SF in April to recce the course and was stunned by how steep That Hill was. I went up it in 42 x 26, which is tiny, and I nearly blew my knee-caps off the 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 stand a chance of getting up it. They said they'd always known, I was a weakling so they weren’t surprised by this public announcement of my feebleness But I got the last laugh. When I marshalled Checkpoint 5 at the top of the course, I could observe their twisted and discoloured expressions close up and make cheap jokes their expense.

If the physical pain wasn't bad enough, you had to use your brain as well. 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 checkpoint stamps for delivering parcels.

On the back of the manifest was the points grid for your heat. You got more points for parcels going up or down That Hill, although the exact score varied from heat to heat, forcing everyone to think for themselves and 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 or get it stolen), the banana boxes (60 x 30 x 20cm) for double points at Checkpoint 2, and the rush parcel for Checkpoint 5, which if delivered in eight minutes scored double points. Oh yeah, and if you didn't get back to 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 equivalent of Chief Commissaire), it tested messenger skills working out the quickest way to get from A to B and make a lot of money at the same time. The reality was that it blew our minds, our legs, and our lungs too.

The action

The combination of That Hill and the fiendishly complicated format favoured only the strong of body and mind. The thick bikies who relied on their legs to do the talking were stuffed. The first guy on our team to race was Erik Zones, in the first heat, Could he be our secret weapon? Somehow Erik got up and down That Hill on his fixed gear but he didn't get enough points 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, but they both made strategy mistakes and missed qualification by some 50 points. Another of our riders, Jeff, rode up That Hill twice a grave error and missed out, too. At the end of the first day, we hadn't got a single racer in 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 correct strategy over dinner. I went to bed early but couldn't sleep. I was in the 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 humiliation I would suffer if I didn't qualify did not bear thinking about.

Would I have enough time to take two boxes, one parcel from Checkpoint 1, drop at Checkpoint 4 and make the rush? Should I try to second guess everyone 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? Should I 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 ride up that damn hill again the next day.

The Final

In the final, 100 couriers who had qualified from 15 heats of up to 50 riders each had to race around eight checkpoints on a single loop. At the start of each round you picked up a brand new funky Timbuk2 bag inside which was a bundle of parcels that had to be delivered to some, but not all, of the checkpoints. At the end of each round a number of lagging riders were eliminated until only 10 were left. The guy first over the line with a correctly completed manifest was the winner, the undisputed World Champion...

There had been dirty tricks in the heats tacks left on the road, parcels stolen from checkpoints and in the final there was even more controversy. Bribes offered to riders; MTBer Jackie Phelan naked; the defending champ nobbled by his own manager; a rider clearly in a winning position misdirected by a policeman... It was just like a pro bike race.

And then there was Thomas Sauerwein's disqualification. Thomas had finished second in London '94 and Toronto '95, and finally in San Francisco, at the fourth Cycle Messenger World Championships, he had crossed the line first. Here in the United States of America, land of dreams, it seemed that 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 final correctly. Aghast, the chief race official wept as he told Thomas the bad news. 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 him a CCCP jersey, the one he'd worn when he won first the German and then the World Championships in '95, with the hope it would bring Thomas the luck necessary to win the ‘97 CMWC in Barcelona.

Thomas pulled it on and his face began to crumple. He could only choke out, 'Thank you... thank you...' Then he turned away, having lost an unequal battle against emotion.

The crowd roared its appreciation, its commiseration, its respect. Swiss rider Sven Baumann might have been declared the winner, officially the world’s fastest messenger, but the assembled throng knew who the real hero of the day was.

Ivonne won the female messengers' race, as expected, but in a spirit of camaraderie second and third were awarded to 10 riders equally. Roll on Barcelona.

The World of Bikes

The Europeans

The average European messenger makes a lot more money than their North American counterpart and this was reflected in their bikes. With the exception of the guys who felt they were in with a shout of victory the Europeans rode expensive slicked-up MTB's - flash frames and nice components.

Your average Berliner's dream bike would be an oversized alloy off-road frame, oil-damped front suspension, TIG-welded stem, hydraulic brakes, cartridge hubs laced radially to T7000 hoops, Ti- railed saddle and any other anodised trinket that could be justifiably be bolted on. More money than sense, you might say.

The hard-core Euro racer-types (like Lars Urban, riding a Schroeder road frame, and Thomas Sauerwein) were on 700C wheels, with double chainrings and a wide ratio sprocket. A few used exotic handlebar set-ups, low-pros with aero bars, but most of the fast guts were using the standard road set-up - drops with STI or Ergo.

The Brits

The British contingent was rather and the bikes we rode weren't that representative of couriers in this country. We Londoners divide pretty evenly into the fixed gear crew (see C+56 for a review of a typical London fixed gear) and the Giro-Moto-goatee-Eye Jackets and Suspender crowd. However none 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 took our own TJQ and Condom road bikes.

Except for Stringer, who had eleventh hour surgery on his Sonic fixed gear, which Helmut at Sonic Cycles metamorphosed into a road bike. The rest of us laid odds on whether it would all come apart on the way up or the way down That Hill.

The Americans

The North Americans divide up the same way as the Londoners. The East Coasters have an interesting variant on the standard London fixed gear single brake set-up. Influenced by guys like Joey Love and underground messenger 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 gear set-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 won it, riding a Jan Vandertieun built, conventional Long-John, but the second place man was riding a pedicab that converted into a flat-bed pedal pick-up trike. Jan was showing off his latest wheel-mule, a recumbent box trike steered 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. Second place went to a bearded guy called Junior, who looked like a trapper. He has been a messenger since 1968. In those days the messenger companies in SF issued their employees with a company shirt and a single speed beach cruiser with a kick back brake and a basket. This is the classic SF messenger bike.

Megan Redington, President of the CMWC '96 Committee, insisted this race be included in the programme as a tribute to the traditions of SF messengering and as a reminder that all that's needed to be a good messenger are pedals, wheels and a desire to get the job done.

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