Our First Year of Racing
My brother and I each rode our first year of racing wearing a HUGE Japanese Keirin helmet. What a joke! I can’t believe we did that. We must’ve looked so funny. Much bigger than a big Bell Biker. We also wore Keirin superpro thigh-pad shorts and fullyfingered gloves. (He married into a keirin family.)
He did the first year, then I started and used the same gear, since he was off in Japan. We each won almost all our Cit races, certainly contended in all, whatever we lost was on insane breaks that almost worked. We weren’t on any teams and didn’t know what training was. I’m not sure that people laughed for long at our get-up! I’m sure the big helmet meant trouble to anyone who saw it in those years!
All those hotshots must’ve been squirming! This was in the big racing years when Greg was winning Tours. I think that everyone, even in the Cits, had better ‘cool new’ stuff than we did.
I recall all those nice old Gios bikes. Not us! We were nuts!
We shared bikes, borrowed bikes, bent them doing jumps.
They told me my 25″ Raleigh SuperCourse (20 yrs old) was way too big, but I broke their course record anyway.
(We used to chase down the racers on our 3-speeds and I did good in a big training race once on a big grocery bike with basket.)
BIG HELMETS RULE! 🙂
