They came. They raced. They partied. A report from the Cycle Messenger World Championships in San Francisco
Bicycling Magazine, March 1997
by Michael Finkel
I met Crossword Guy in a grungy bar in a grungy section of San Francisco. It was one o'clock in the morning. Crossword was wearing his bike messenger shoulder bag, which hung at his hip, but he wasn't wearing anything else. Eleven other people, quite a few of them women, exhibited the same state of undress. The bar is called Zeitgeist. It's a bike messenger bar, meaning the beer is cheap, the music is incomprehensible and you can bring your bicycle inside.
Bikes - many in the latter stages of decomposition were all over the place, piled against the walls, stacked haphazardly in the bee garden, swaying from various ceiling hooks. The clothed and the unclothed milled about as if nothing were amiss. If you'd been to a previous Cycle Messenger World Championships, which most of the bar patrons had, then nothing actually was out of the ordinary. You'd glance at the naked people and think, "Well, the Boston crew is back, and you'd return to your drink.
But I had never before attended a Messenger Championships The main reason for this oversight is that I am not a bicycle messenger, and don't ever plan to become one. However, I'd long been curious about the profession. What kind of bicycle-obsessed people, I wondered, would forgo health benefits, job security, sick pay, vacation time, equipment compensation, acceptable salaries and any semblance of safety in order to battle busses and cabs and carbon-monoxide poisoning for the purpose of delivering an envelope across town?
Crossword Guy is one of these people. He is 27 years old and has been a bike messenger for three years. He wears a steel bullring in his nose and a dumbbell-shaped object in his tongue that, were it to be removed, would leave a hole wide enough to slide a pencil through. He is bald, with a tattoo on his nape. He sports a goatee. His calves are as sharply toned as those of a Tour de France racer. When he's home, back in Boston, he completes The Boston Globe crossword puzzle every day.
Nudity, Crossword Guy told me, is a big part of the messenger championships. It all started back in Boston when we began hopping the fence and going skinny-dipping at night at the Metro Division public pool, then biking home naked to dry off. Let me tell you-there’s nothing better than riding naked. So a few years ago, at the Championships, me and Matty Nipplehead and Captain Jums and a bunch of others rode naked to bars. We started at midnight and went on a bar crawl. Now it’s just not the Cycle Championships without a naked ride.
Soon enough, the Boston crew finished their beers, dug their bikes out of the piles and made for the door. I followed them onto the street. They rode off, a dozen full moons in the neon San Francisco night, on their haphazard way to the next divey bar.
The following morning, at the bike messenger fair held alongside San Francisco Bay, I came across Stepha. She's 25 years old, from Vancouver, and was wearing a neon-pink fake fur bra. I made it myself, she said. Her bike was also covered with fur an orange tiger-skin pattern and in place of a horn rubber bathtub bullfrog that squeaks when you squeeze it was mounted on her handlebar. She sported Jackie O. sunglasses, black leather boots that ascended to her knees and a sticker on the back of her helmet that read helmet laws suck.
The only people who understand our jobs, said Stepha, is other messengers. Everybody has all these preconceptions about who we are, but we really don't have much in common except the job. There’s road-racer tech-heads; there’s over-educated intellectuals who can't work anywhere else; there’s hard-core drug addicts. But we all put our life on the line with every delivery. No matter where in the world we're from, we all know what it’s like feel as though everyone out there is trying to kill us. At the same time we know how free it is to have a job without walls. And of course we're all completely in love with riding our bicycles we can't understand why everyone in the world doesn't cycle. That's enough to form an intense bond.
So tight is the sense of community that more than 600 messengers from 16 countries including Austria, Finland, Japan Germany, Sweden, New Zealand and Afghanistan arrive in San Francisco, a city where bicycle messengers have operated since 1894. This was the fourth annual messenger gathering and the first in the U.S.; The others have taken place in Berlin London and Toronto. The messengers came sporting a range of hair colors and a hardware store’s worth of stuff hanging from body piercings. They came to swap stories: catapulting over doors, being pinched off by busses, riding down flights of stairs, dealing with irate customers, delivering packages in 10 below and 110 above.
They came to celebrate the amazing diversity and adaptivity of the bicycle. One messenger, who rode a heavy-duty cargo bike equipped with a tow-behind trailer large enough to accommodate a sofa, described what it was like to pedal a full keg of beer up a San Francisco hill. Another told me she often covered 50 miles a day, rushing full speed though the streets of Sydney, Australia. We're going all out five or six hours at a dip, she said. Being a messenger is like doing a stage of the Tour de France every damn day. A third, from Chicago, demonstrated his ability to swerve through traffic while writing out a delivery form in perfect handwriting. To be a good messenger, he said, you need the speed of a road racer, the guts of a downhill mountain biker, the bag of tricks of a BMXer, the lungs of a triathlete, and a bunch of other crap you don't need anywhere else.
Along with the stories, the messengers shared tricks of the trade: how to repair potato-chipped rims without any tools, where to find theft-resistant parking spots, foolproof methods of escaping from hospitals without paying the bill. They debated the best method of hauling a 50-pound parcel (bike basket or shoulder bag?) and the most painless way to ride with broken fingers. They bought T-shirts that said Cars Suck. They traded photocopied bike-messenger zines by the armload. They drank too much beer. They swarmed the streets. They got naked.
The host-city messengers opened up their futons and couches to out-of-town brethren. For the event, the San Franciscans compiled a CD of bike-messenger thrash bands, of which there are many. (messengering is one of the few jobs that allow people with purple hair to earn a living.) The album, called Pothole, featured songs such as Drag Racer by Bimbo Toolshed and Too Stoned by Three Stoned Men. And everyone was given the Messenger’s Guidebook to San Francisco, a publication that came with a Saxon Gold condom taped inside, a description of 20 must-visit bars, and a dictionary of bike-messenger lingo including gravy (high-paying deliveries), gristle (low-paying deliveries), copsicle (a policeman on a bicycle), urban food log (burrito), and a dozen or so words for marijuana ( huffbo, fluffbo, indo, proj, salad ).
And yes, champions were actually crowned at this championships, though with the exception of a handful of serious (e.g. German) competitors, the contest was merely a sidelight to the three-day bacchanal. Heats were held Saturday; the finals were Sunday. The race was designed to mimic a messenger’s typically frenetic day entrants had 30 minutes to complete as many laps as possible on a course laid out on the roller-coaster downtown streets, stopping at various checkpoints and picking up and dropping off as many packages as they could in the allotted time.
Each race began with competitors sprinting on foot from the starting line and, in a mad melee, unlocking their bicycles and pedalling off. Racers banked around corners; accelerated through cobblestones; and flew into checkpoints dismounting at foll speed, running to a stop and slamming down their bikes. The packages given out at the checkpoints ranged from small envelopes to television-sized cardboard boxes. Each time a racer dropped off a package the further he or she had cycled it, the more points scored the transaction had to be recorded on a sheet of paper called a manifest. Some messengers kept their manifests neatly folded in their shoulder bag; others clenched them in their teeth; still others stuffed them in their bra or shoved them into their shorts.
The course ran through the historic Telegraph Hill district, in the shadow of the TransAmerica Pyramid (known in San Francisco bike-messenger lingo as the Dunce Cap). It included the famous Vallejo Street hill, a half-mile-long incline with the approximate steepness of a ski jump. Biking up Vallejo is like sprinting up a 30-story staircase. The racers, exhorted by the crowd, charged up it wildly, leaving a trail of sweat and more often than not spitting out expletives with every pedal rotation. Then, after making a delivery at the top of the precipice, they'd barrel back down, screaming at the top of their lungs. Some racers climbed Vallejo a dozen times. As the finish time neared, the pace became even more frenzied the manifest had to be dropped off at the finish-line checkpoint before time was called or a racer would be given a score of zero. It was an exhausting, confusing, hilarious competition.
Messengers raced on their everyday bikes, many of which were rusty one-speeds that predated the Nixon Administration. Bike messengers, I learned, tend to be overtly low-tech. To be a bike courier, said one racer, is to be able to ride city streets through rain, snow and mud it’s not about having the hottest stuff and strutting it around. According to the Guidebook, gear-heads who insist on the latest equipment are called Glow in the Darks.
The Germans were Glow in the Darks. They had water bottles and clipless pedals and those little band-aid thingies saddling their noses. Their hair was neatly cut. They wore Lycra. They had a coach. And they dominated. Thomas Sauerwein won the men’s race [note - not true the winner was Sven Bauman from Switzerland] and teammate Ivonne Kraft took the women’s division. Both work for the same company, Per Rad, in Karlsruhe, Germany. Said Thomas: I'm in good shape because I don't have a car. Said Ivonne: You really can't go that fast in the U.S. too many traffic lights.
The matter of a champion duly settled, the final party began right in the finish area. Here, amidst the youthful revelry, I was introduced to a middle-aged man named Junior. Junior owns a one- speed basket bike and a beard that looks like a convention of Brillo pads. He’s been a San Francisco bike messenger for 28 years. Before I joined this crew," he said, signalling with open arms that he meant the whole world of messengerdom, I'd spent time in jail. I was on food stamps. And then I became a messenger and in the craziness of the job I found stability. I found a group of people with a spirit that fit my style. And all of a sudden I found I was part of a family. It’s a strange one, sure. But when you think of it, what family isn't?
Contributing editor Michael Finkel wrote about ice riding in Vermont in our February issue and is at work on a novel.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at messvilleto@yahoo.com