Friday’s foaming rant: Blood is bad for business

By Patrick O’Grady

Friday’s foaming rant: Blood is bad for business

Photo:

You’ve got to feel sympathy for Gerard Bisceglia.

I mean, think about it. Being hired as CEO of USA Cycling must have been like being handed the keys to that nifty little bike shop downtown, only to find out that the previous owner was a crackhead, deep in debt to the local motorcycle gang, and the scooter trash had been running a meth’ lab-slash-whorehouse out of the joint.

You walk nervously through the ruined door, sagging on its hinges, hear broken glass crunching under foot, see bullet holes pock-marking the walls. All the rolling stock is long gone, sold out of the back of a van for dimes on the dollar, someone has stenciled swastikas on the stars-and-stripes jerseys, and the whole place smells sour, like cheap wine, raw chemicals and urine.

Me, I’d have started looking for a reliable arsonist. Bisceglia, he starts looking for a broom and dustpan. Go figure.

And the neighbors, they’re pissed. They used to do plenty of business with the place, before management started smoking that shit and acting the fool, but they wouldn’t walk back through that door now if Bisceglia were giving bikes away, two to a customer, plus a water bottle full of hundred-dollar bills.

Hyperbole aside, this is the impression I took away from the first formal discussions between Bisceglia and representatives of the breakaway American Cycling Association last Saturday at the Park Monaco clubhouse in Denver.

ACA – formerly the Bicycle Racing Association of Colorado, which had been a district racing association under USCF – has been running its own shop in Colorado, New Mexico and Texas since 1999, shortly after USA Cycling cut loose with a spastic series of missteps better suited to a mosh pit in a madhouse. The last straw was what Bisceglia agrees was “a terrible blunder” – the sacking of USCF’s district reps, including Yvonne van Gent in Colorado and Margaret Michael in New Mexico. You know, those folks, the ones who do all the work.

Since ACA hung out its shingle, USA Cycling’s presence in its home state has melted like a cheap jersey in a hot dryer. This year, the USCF has nearly as many races scheduled on the International Space Station as it does in Colorado. A search of the USAC web site today found five: four cyclo-crosses in Salida and some indoor-training deal at Carmichael Training Systems here in Colorado Springs. I can think of only two others pending: Ed Zink’s Iron Horse in Durango, and Len Pettyjohn’s Saturn Classic from Boulder to Breckenridge.

Now, these are classy, big-time events. But ACA has more Colorado road races scheduled in May than USCF does all year. They may not all be of the same quality, but quantity has its good points, too, especially if you like to race every weekend.

And these lopsided numbers are unlikely to reverse themselves anytime soon, because if USA Cycling has historically been run like the Italian parliament, with Roberto Benigni as prime minister, ACA has been run like the Sicilian Mafia. We got the promoters, we got the officials, and we got long memories, especially where treachery is concerned.

This is why, when Bisceglia began making his pitch, the thermostat abruptly clicked and the clubhouse furnace turned on. Revenge, as the Sicilians say, is a dish best served cold, and it doesn’t get any chillier in the coroner’s icebox than it was in that clubhouse last Saturday.

Which is too bad. Because as pies go, this isn’t much of a pizza we’re squabbling over here. We don’t need bigger slices. We need a bigger pizza. Bisceglia’s proposal to kick down $10 per license to get ACA back in the family won’t get that done, because ACA’s making more than that now, on its own, and gets to decide how it’s spent. An informal proposal to send money in the other direction – from ACA to the feds, to ensure mutual recognition of licenses – probably won’t fly for the same reason, and also because Bisceglia is offering one welcome-home deal to everyone.

Stalemate. Or war, if someone else in Colorado gloms onto Bisceglia’s deal and goes into competition with ACA. The Colorado association has already moved to tighten its hold on regional racing, amending its rulebook to insist that each member club promote at least one race per year or face a $500 fine, and that clubs and promoters permit and insure their events through ACA unless granted an exception through the executive committee. Sounds like the button men are hitting the mattresses, which won’t leave them a lot of free time for expanding the family business.

Bisceglia said he’d like to see bike racing approach the popularity of tennis, or even golf, and while I can appreciate his thinking – golfers and bike racers are both mostly middle-aged white men in ugly clothing, playing with expensive carbon-and-titanium toys – we’ve got a long way to go before we challenge even less glamorous recreational activities, especially if we keep warring among ourselves.

According to executive director Beth Wrenn-Estes, ACA has 2019 members … whoops, make that 2020, ’cause I re-upped at that Denver meeting after a year AWOL in the boondocks. Bisceglia figures USA Cycling has 2800 USCF and NORBA members in Colorado. And you know there’s some cross-pollination going on among these Three Families because there ain’t anything like 4819 bike racers in these parts, even counting those of us with multiple personalities.

Now, the City of Colorado Springs Parks and Recreation Department tells me that 6746 people played in its summer softball leagues last year, and they paid more money for less action than we did – masters 35-49 paid $50 a head for a 12-game season, while the competitive class paid $420 per team plus $7.50 per player for 21 games. This is one softball program, in one city, and it makes bicycle racing look like a pimple on an elephant’s ass.

So let’s forget about fighting a war over a handful of bike racers. Remember what Virgil Sollozzo told Tom Hagen in “The Godfather?” “I’m a businessman,” Sollozzo said. “Blood is a big expense.”

We should listen to Sollozzo. We should do some business together. We – you, me, Beth and Gerard – should go where the money is.

We should go rob all those softball players.