Childhood Bicycle Racing Memory Thread (Feel free to post yours)

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Kevin B

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Lately I have been thinking about my earliest bicycling days. After I outgrew my kick scooter my parents got me a JC Penney's Swinger like this.

Kid 1.JPG

This one isn't mine (I found it online) But it is like mine. Between 1967 and probably 1970 a bunch of the local boys would race our bikes (muscle bikes of course). We were all into real racing so we found parking lots in the neighborhood (Tampa, FL - Sulphur Springs neighborhood). Back then this part of Tampa was a lower middle class to middle class urban neighborhood. I pulled up Google Earth and found three of the locations. Usually they were church parking lots because they were big and often vacant through the week. We marked out ovals and named the tracks after real tracks we were familiar with. The local paved sprint car/stock car track was Golden Gate Speedway several of us attended races there on Friday and Saturday nights. My dad was a Sheriff's deputy and moonlighted there working security for extra money. He earned more per hour from the moonlighting than he did from his actual law enforcement job. I went most weekends and was granted free admission. To represent Golden Gate we used the church most of us attended. I can remember rubbing into a another bike there in a turn and having his pedal take out some of my front spokes. Our legs and elbows were often a bloody and scabbed mess. We had no helmets or pads and often no shirts on. Another church had a paved banked area in front of it that we could ride up on at one end of a track. We called that one Daytona. I can't remember where it was but we had a dirt oval too. That was because the IMCA Winter National sprint car races were held at the state fairgrounds in Tampa every year.

One of the best ideas a kid came up with was to use the Greyhound dog racing track parking lot when the track was closed. It was right on Nebraska Ave. It was our drag strip. We could line up in the dog track parking lot and use the light at Juneau and Nebraska for our Christmas tree (starting light).

What a different day. Often we would get on bikes after breakfast and ride from house to house engaged in all kinds of adventures until it was time for supper. Just thought I would share these memories as I have a suspicion there are others here with similar experiences. Confession, to this day when I get on one of my bikes that old feeling of adventure still surfaces. Not doing any racing though. To put this in perspective I was 10 in 1968.

I wouldn't trade those times of coming of age in the late 60s early 70s for anything. The bike was a huge part of it.

Here is a present day Google earth capture that shows where some of this stuff happened. Thanks for tolerating my memories.

Sulphur Springs Tracks.JPG
 
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I used to race at the now defunct Janesville WI BMX track back in my youth. My sister lived just around the corner and my nephew and I would take our huffy's and go thrash around just about every day during summer vacation. Finally convinced my parents to pony up for a decent bike and got a Schwinn Predator in 86' and it started my passion for all kinds of competition and speed

Sadly they tore it down years ago and turned it into a botanical garden, but the memory lives on

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Craig was my cycling pal in highschool. He was a roadie, but I never held that against him, he was the one who taught me the magic word chromoly. He hooked me up with Phil, who sold me the RockRat. Craig also had a Fiori Monza with a CatEye speedometer. It was like a razor compared to what I was riding. We would take it to the Pitt St overpass and take turns doing speed runs. If you were lucky, the light at Emma would be green, and you'd gave a downhill all the way to First Street. We'd take turns on the Fiori, comparing top speed and times. It was so perfect when you could time the lights correctly, and pass traffic all the way downtown. Fifteen or twenty blocks never felt so fast
 
We had a vacant lot on our block that was the World back in the 80’s. We built several tracks with jumps, turns and cross-overs. The older cool guys, Vincent and Sonny, dug the pit on the backside of the big jump hill. This meant that the rest of us couldn’t make the jump. I worked up the courage and promptly stacked it. Over the bars, seat hit me in the back, the whole deal but I tried it again til I made it. Spent hours there with bikes and shovels. Never raced at an official track cuz it was too far away in the big city.
We covered the whole town on our bikes. Found a great jump that would launch you straight up and land on soft grass. Funny enough, it was behind the hospital. As long as we were home before the street lights came on, it was all good.
 
The BMX bikes in the above posts are very cool. My son in-law still has his BMX racer too. I read that BMX was born after the documentary with Steve McQueen, "On Any Sunday." We were more drawn to cars than motor bikes as far as what we aspired to, not having the documentary for inspiration yet. However, we were aware of Evil Knievel and made jump ramps and so on.

My bike like the one above went through a few configurations. Eventually I got a tall sissy bar. Later we moved out into the country and it went back to stock with a knobby in the place of the cheater slick. My friends and I used them on trails in pine woods and orange groves then.
 
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I signed up for a road race in 1970. I was the only entrant so I got my money back. This was the closest I ever got to first place. Oh, wait, I wasn’t a child, I was 25, but most would argue about my adulthood. Its a good thing that bicycle races are seldom canceled now due to not enough enteries.
 
He might have inspired the kids even before that...
View attachment 158908
Made us think we could jump anything!
That jump was made by Bud Ekins, though Steve did most of his own stunt riding in that film. Bud also drove the Mustang for some stunts in the Bullitt chase, chasing Bill Hickman in the Dodge Charger.
 
That jump was made by Bud Ekins, though Steve did most of his own stunt riding in that film. Bud also drove the Mustang for some stunts in the Bullitt chase, chasing Bill Hickman in the Dodge Charger.
Lol was going to post the Bud picture, didn't want to ruin the McQueen mystique we had going
0_Steve-McQueen-In-The-Great-Escape.jpg

Also wasn't sure if anyone would realize I was making a joke by putting Bud's picture but giving Steve credit
 
The apartments at 5252 Bishop Street in Cypress, CA were not always there. In late 1972 it was part of a former dairy farm that had been cleared off and piles of dirt/rock had been placed there to compact the soil for future development. In the year or so before the dirt/rock piles were cleared off to make way for the apartments, we neighborhood kids built a BMX track and held races there. It was a glorious year.

CypressBMX.jpg
 
My first bike:
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Друг means Friend in Russian. I was 5 when my dad taught me to ride it in the park. I've picked it up pretty quickly, but back in my hometown Tula at that age i didn't really ride a lot.

My second bike was some noname chinese mtb, but since no one of us had any clue about non-soviet bikes, we called it Shimano, becuase that was written all over the frame :D My dad wanted a nice bike for me to be different from what other kids had, but i totally hated it. Cheap parts, constantly failing derailleur when no one in the entire district knew how to fix it. Simple Аист (Cane) bike like every other cool kid had was my dream, simple and reliable. I hate derailleurs since that time and never ever had it on any of my bikes since then :D

AistWiki.jpg


My third bike was K2 Strip, my first consciously chosen bike. I rode it at the dirt track near my house in Moscow. That was really fun and that was a bike i finally loved as it was. Until it was stolen i rode everything i could out of it. Cracked bones were not a problem :D
I couldn't find a stock photo online, originally it had no red plastic seat, pedals and grips, but here is more or less how it looked like.
strip-25_blowup.jpg
 

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