*** Cycle-Pedia It’s A Race For This Bike Mechanic ***

Wenatchee, Washington -- 05/16/2006
A lanky, lycra-covered man is standing over his road bike,
shrugging his shoulders in disbelief. He peers behind him to
the east, where the rest of the 70 amateur riders in Sunday’s
Malaga Road Race are disappearing in a silent stampede
over a shallow horizon line.

The man’s shrug of disbelief
morphs into a scowl of frustration.

He made it less than a half-mile.

At that moment, Jeremy Bader, a 34-year-old former
Seattle bike courier and mechanic, eases his 1991 Subaru
wagon onto the gravel shoulder, his bumper a few feet
from the rider.

He leaps out, snatches one of a half-dozen tires sitting
in his back seat and runs toward the racer’s bike.

“Better now than later, huh,” Bader says to him.

“No kidding,” the racer says.
“I don’t know how that happened.”

Bader remains silent, never bothering with that polite
statement of commiseration or conciliation that would
follow these kinds of conversations. He is focused on
his hands, which are hurriedly twisting and untwisting
in a race to replace the flat tire with the fresh one.

Within seconds, the racer is again in the saddle of his bike,
powering his way to the back of the peloton. And Bader,
who is still slightly out of breath from pushing the racer
back into cruising speed, is reaching into the dashboard
for one of the seven pieces of duct tape that clings to it.

On it, he’ll write the racer’s number and stick it to his tire.

Bader doesn’t know this man’s name. And he doesn’t
really care if he finishes first or 50th. He just hopes he
returns the tire to Bader — and finishes the race.

That is his job.

As the sole Neutral Support Vehicle in this last stage
of the Washington State Omnium Stage Race Championships,
Bader has a few responsibilities. And the duct tape dangling
from his belt loop is a clue into one of them.

“Sometimes if a rider breaks his cleat,
I have to tape their feet to their pedals,” he says.

If the racers tangle and crash, he’ll stay near.
If it’s bad, he’ll call 911.

“They usually come in bunches,” he says.
“But a lot of times, they just need to be
pampered and pushed. Replacing wheels,
straightening handlebars.”

His primary task, of course, is to do what he just did;
that is replace punctured tires with healthy ones.

He has about 18 of them with him — six in his backseat
and a dozen or so strapped to his roof. Full Speed Ahead,
one of Bader’s sponsors, donated these and 32 other
wheels to Northwest Technical Support, Bader’s two
-man company. Each pair retails for about $250, Bader
says. And before Bader earned the support of FSA, he
and his partner Joe Sandschulte, 50, paid for and built
them themselves.

“A lot of times,” Bader says, “you are putting more into it
than you’re getting out of it. But I love it. It’s a way that I
can still be involved in the sport without all the pain.”

By the end of the day, Bader will have driven at least 111
miles, most of them no faster than 30 mph. He’ll remove
and install at least 10 tires, put chains back on a half-dozen
bikes and push restart almost 20 riders. And he’ll be sitting
in his Subaru, which already has 190,000 miles on it, for
anywhere between six to eight hours.

For this, he’s feels lucky if he earns $100.

“Usually it’s about $75,” he says. “It’s a full day.”

On weekends, he drives all over the state doing this for
20 to 40 races a year. During the week, he studies
machining at Bellingham Technical College.

Within an hour of the start line, Bader is weaving through
forests of Ponderosa pine and Balsam Root. He’s following
a cluster of five riders, who are nearing the end to one of the
course’s most grueling climbs, that up Joe Miller Road.

The rider in the back sticks out for two reasons: He’s standing
up on his pedals in a sprint — as he has for the last 20 minutes
of this climb — and he’s small, no more than 90 pounds one
would guess.

Eighty pounds, actually.

His name is Shannon Maris. He’s a shy 12-year-old from
Bonner Springs, who prefers to have his dad Jerry speak
for him.

Last year, he won the junior category of this race and the
junior’s overall omnium championships. This year, he started
competing with the adults, those who outweigh him by at least
100 pounds, because “it’s more fun” than competing against
other sixth-graders.

He can’t hardly compete with the adults on the downhills
or the flats, where the wind whips up the Columbia and
grabs a hold of his small body like a sail.

“But he excels at the big hills,” his dad says.

A few weeks ago, he placed in the top 10 of this men’s
category in Walla Walla. And today, he’ll finish 11th.

“This kid is good,” Bader says admiringly, his Subaru
coasting behind him. “He has good technique. He must.
Because he doesn’t have any muscle.”

For four years, Bader, too, was a racer. He had, in that pre-
Lance Armstrong-era (defined as those years from 1996 to
2000, before Armstrong came back from testicular cancer to
win the Tour de France seven times) worked himself from the
amateurs’ Category 4-5, to Category 3 and finally into the pro
1-2 division.

Now, he’s almost always among the last to cross the finish
line, an indicator of speedy tedium, in which he takes pride.

“Jeremy is one of the best mechanics in the state,” says Andrew
Rosette, a top-10 finisher in the Category 4-5 event and recipient
of a Bader assist in the Joe Miller hills section. “You could try
changing a tire 100 times and he’s still infinitely faster. He’s
meticulous and careful. Pro speed, really.”

“Pro speed” is a complement to which Bader might squint.
He knows he’s fast. He knows he has pro speed. He’s worked
head-to-head against the corporate teams of Shimano and others
and he’s always been faster, better. That’s partly how he was, for
one race in 2003, the Israeli women’s team mechanic at the world
championships in Hamilton, Ontario.

And that is what annoys him.

“I would really love to go to Europe,” he says. “At my age, it’s
getting further and further away though. Honestly, the Northwest
isn’t a major cycling area like Colorado, California or the East
Coast. Plus you’ve got to know somebody.”

Latent dreams, he calls them.

ACC - PHOTOS - Wa Omnium Stage Race Championships 05-13-2006
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