we ain't going to the town we're going to the city

There's an article in today's Times about a bike race through Staten Island organized mostly for Manhattan bike messengers. A couple of interesting things from the article: one guy warms up with a cigarette; another says Manhattan is "basically as bike-friendly as you can get". I have no experience with the former, but my experience with the latter is that this guy's crazy. Staten Island traffic may be more hostile than Manhattan's, but it's also a lot faster, and it would be easy for a Manhattan messenger to mistake speed for hostility. In the same way, Manhattan traffic might seem friendly when you're moving faster than it is most of the time.

Anyway, the article brings back memories of bike messenging in Atlanta in 1996, and the rich-kid races that were always won by working men. There were two guys in particular at that time who were idolized by the rest of the courier community: Avi, who worked for three companies at once, none of which knew about the others; and Wiley, who was the first person I ever saw riding a single-speed road bike outside of a velodrome. (I'd guess these guys exist in every town that has bicycle messengers, and I wonder if anyone still on the road in Atlanta ever talks about those two.)

On weekends a lot of messengers could be found out in the suburbs, racing. Most of these races were off-road, but you could almost guarantee that if any messengers showed up, they would be the ones to win the race, and if Avi and Wiley were among them, they'd take first and second. Well, at some point the guy who always came in just behind the messengers finally had enough, and he asked Avi and Wiley what they did for a living. "Oh, we're bike messengers downtown." The stories I heard about the subsequent temper tantrum were certainly embellished, but it's still something I wish I could have seen. It started with the guy getting beet-red and screaming "That's not fair!!"

Now, I can understand his frustration; those races weren't necessarily organized for professional (in any sense) bicyclists. But they were real races with real money attached, and they weren't billed as amateur. So if a cyclist trains every day as part of his job, does that stray into illegal performance-enhancing territory? Or if your town organizes a street race for charity or something like that, and (a presumably non-doped) Floyd Landis shows up and wins handily, is he cheating?

All any messenger present at this spectacle could do was laugh at the guy, which must have just added insult to injury. But really, he was just a "weekend warrior" (the term alone makes me dry heave) who was crying because he'd been prevented from lording it over all the other weekend warriors. Put another way, he thought he was the most bad-assed guy around, and then he found out that he wasn't, and he was upset. Aw.

For the record, I never went to any of those races. I was barely in the bicycle messenger community long enough to be accepted, and hadn't been on the streets long enough that I would even come close to beating a weekend warrior. But I would have liked to watch.

Also for the record, based on my experience which only includes Atlanta, Asheville, Greensboro, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Chicago, I'd have to say that Chicago is basically as bike-friendly as you can get (and it just got friendlier).