Mike Murphy, tandem team stoker candidate for USA Para Cycling Road National Championship

[Patrick Moore]

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with a blind stoker who competes on road, track, and gravel, and is training for a Para Cycling Road National Championship — criterium, I think he said. Tandem criterium: that should be fun to watch! 

Rather striking; he works at Fat Tire Cycles Corrales; Fat Tire is a local mini-chain (just opened a 3rd store) that is thriving because they’re locally owned and serve real local customers, unlike High Desert Bicycles, another thriving and very good local mini-chain that apparently has stagnated after it was bought by Trek or Specialized some years ago. He certainly manages to get by; he checked me in and out at the digital register quickly and smoothly. He did say that he can see shades of light and shapes.

I recall about 12 or 15 years ago when word got around that I owned a Ken Rogers British racing tricycle, that an avid cyclist with a progressive neuro-muscular disease contacted me to ask if he could try it out. He had been riding a Greenfield tricycle but wanted to compete in some para-Olympics whose tricycle event allowed only “deltas,” as we tricycling cognoscenti call them (joke, dammit). I rode his Greenfield, and I have to say that I preferred the Ken Rogers. I didn’t follow up, but I wonder if he found and raced a BRT. Fun Fact: the KR had 2 brakes on the front tire, none on the rears: Weinmann cantilevers and an Altenberger early dual pivot on a metal stalk extending from the fork crown. 

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Patrick Moore

Alburquerque, Nuevo Mexico, Etats Unis d'Amerique, Orbis Terrarum

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