I miss Steve
Tilford. The internet sucks without him.
For those who
don’t know, Steve Tilford was a legend of American bike racing and, in recent
years, also a successful, if eccentric, blogger, who was killed in a car
accident in Utah on April 5. Tilford, who was from Topeka, Kansas, won the
first US mountain biking championship in 1983, was a four-time national
cyclocross champion, and road-raced professionally in the US and Europe with
and against a who’s who of cycling greats from the 80s, from Lemond to Phinney
to Hampsten.
His palmares are impressive, but even more
remarkable was the longevity of his racing career. He continued to race his bike
regularly and successfully up to the end of his life at age 57. Every weekend,
for three seasons of the year, he’d load up his truck and drive hundreds of
miles to get to some dinky Midwestern race, ride it balls out, and then drive
home and write about it on his blog. That, somehow, was the life he loved.
