When I began riding – not counting the time as a child but starting from when I discovered a life’s passion,

in 1981 in my first year of high school – I was desperate and eager and nuts to inhale the lore of cycling so I could immediately align my life with the sacred tenets that had always been true and always would be. Like: 19mm tyres were the fastest. And: cycling greatness looked like Bernard Hinault, powerful and intense. If this greatness was of such a supreme degree that no one could possibly question its existence, it could go way beyond any bounds and look like bespectacled Laurent Fignon or wide-grinning Greg Lemond.

In 1984, at the Los Angeles Olympics, one of the biggest stars – not just in cycling but of the whole games – was the charismatic track racer Nelson Vails, who was black and had been a bike messenger in New York City. Alexi Grewal, whose father had emigrated from India, became the first American to win a gold medal in a men’s road race. And Connie Carpenter-phinney won the absolute first-ever women’s Olympic road race by half a wheel with one of the most thrilling bike throws in history.

It would be ludicrous to even suggest that this moment woke either the world of cycling or me to the challenges and rewards inherent in taking on the issue of diversity and equity. But I can say that for what began as a very selfish reason, my own naïve and ignorant

view of greatness at least began to splinter. I was a white kid from the Midwest; but because of (among other things) some horrific abuses that had been inflicted on me starting when I was about four years old, for almost my entire life I’d felt different to everyone else, like an outcast from the whole of the human race, or – at best – an outsider. The only thing I ever really had going for me, I would sometimes tell myself, was that I was resilient. I had thought so little back then about what it might be like to be black, or the first-generation child of nonwhite immigrants, or a woman, that I could believe I had more in common with Nelson Vails than I did with Greg Lemond. I know it doesn’t make much sense, but the existence of cycling greatness in Vails gave me something like a kind of hope for myself.

And wanting to know more about Nellie got me to Major Taylor, the black American sprinter who became a world champion in 1899 and was for years one of the world’s highest-paid and most famous athletes. The mercurial and volatile and too-often fragile Grewal led me to the even more troubled dark angel of the mountains, Federico Bahamontes. Somehow from Carpenter-phinney I found my way to Alfonsina Strada, the woman who got into the men’s Giro d’italia in 1924. I was drawn to these cyclists, and over the years, to others who – because of race or gender or temperament or economic background or style or sometimes just because of something we’ll have to call pure fate – were not what I had imagined cycling was supposed to be, any more than I really was what I appeared to be.

Because of my job, on top of all the stuff I read about him in the ’80s I’ve also ended up talking to Vails quite a few times, and riding with him once at some event or other. I bought a cap from him. He hugged me goodbye at the Handmade Bike Show a few years ago.

I wanted to thank him, that last time I saw him. And I kind of did, but not really – I told him he’d been an inspiration. I didn’t get into why. His life was his, and mine was mine, and however they intersected in any important way was mostly in my head.

The last road bike I built up, I mounted 28mm tyres. They’re the fastest.