Photo by Elizabeth Kreutz | www.kreutzphotography.com
The 36-year-old cycling star who brought back road racing in America is now building a cultural mecca for bike lovers. He’s calling it Mellow Johnny’s, named for the English mispronunciation of the French term maillot jaune, or "yellow jersey," which stage winners wear in major races. Over his string of seven Tour de France wins, Lance Armstrong wore the mellow johnny 83 times – second only to Eddy Merckx’s record of 96 – and the nickname stuck.
Lance is adamant that the Trek-heavy bicycle shop he’s opening in his hometown on May 10 will not turn into another gear shop pushing carbon fibre, cleats, and lycra. "I always wanted to do a cool bike shop in Austin that’s not only focused on the racing side of things, but also the community side as well," he says.
Lance hasn’t turned his back on the racing world. "If you do it on a percentage basis, I would say the majority of the store is high-end racing stuff but we didn’t want to neglect the commuting side, the side that we feel the city needs."
Though he owns a second place in New York, Lance still calls Austin, where his kids Luke, 8, and twins Bella and Grace, 6, are based, home. The college town suffered for years under a low taxation base, as most of the downtown core consisted of government buildings, which meant little public money was available for road infrastructure or other amenities such as light rail. Urban redevelopment and infill projects now promise to bring 25,000 new residents downtown within ten years, making 2008 a ripe time to push for a car-light way of living.
"We have a growth of people in the downtown area that probably doesn’t have an infrastructure to accommodate thousands of new cars," Armstrong explains. "So the bike will be important for those people to get to work, to eat, go to the store, or whatever it is they want to do. It will certainly be the most convenient thing for them and also the healthiest thing."
But it’s not as if Lance thinks cycling is some uncool burden that needs to be shouldered by livability-converts or bolstered by an icon. Utility cycling, which has suffered from a lack of strong cultural history in North America, is growing organically through fashion and the rise of the culture of self-expression.
"Urban cycling and commuting, the whole fixed gear scene, is starting to see a real resurgence," Armstrong tells Momentum, between meetings for a third book deal and a biographical film project. "I’m in a cab in New York City right now and you see so many people on fixed gear bikes just cruising around town and they have with that a bike that’s unique in style … and that’s going to make its way into mainstream culture," he says.
With the opening of Mellow Johnny’s the man behind the “LiveStrong” anti-cancer rubber wristband campaign is telling the world that cycling is not just for the Tour anymore. The red brick 18,000 square foot industrial block is being transformed into a training centre, a learning centre, and a secure parking and shower-equipped commuter hub.
"It is pretty easy to come up with excuses on why people do not ride. And some like safety are valid ones for sure, but if specialty dealers can entice people to ride with things like storage and showers it could eliminate one or two of the excuses," Lance explains.
Mellow Johnny’s is also boasting a café, not only to keep the mechanics humming but also to placate the owners: "I have to have my coffee in the morning. I am usually good for a couple of cups and cannot get going until I have it," he confesses.
Lance has made room to accommodate a significant art presence, including Sam Whittingham’s award-winning bike, which Lance picked up for an undisclosed sum in February at the North American Handmade Bicycle Show in Portland. "There will be some memorabilia to salute the champions of the past. Also a big art component." Later this year, Pressure, a street-inspired mashup between 13 contemporary American artists, skate-culture clothing company RVCA, and Cinelli frames will visit the store.
To design this holistic dream venture, Lance and his business team visited and compared bike shops across the country – especially those in New York City, San Francisco, Madison, WI, and Portland. "The shops we really got excited about were these small, really urban shops that were addressing commuting and fixed gear and were on the edge of cycling," says Mellow Johnny’s general manager, Craig Staley.
Staley’s recent four years of experience co-owning and managing a women’s running gear store in Austin makes him an apparently odd choice for a bike shop manager. But when Armstrong and right-hand-man Bart Knaggs went looking for a general manager, they weren’t simply looking for someone with experience in bicycle retail. They wanted a good manager who ‘got it,’ and it didn’t hurt that Staley is their old biking buddy.
Staley’s retail experience gave him a glimpse into the fitness trend that saw women’s adoption of running and jogging outstepping men’s.
"Any running store in the country is now going to be 55 to 60 per cent women’s business," Staley says, "and even that’s starting to happen now in cycling."
In the late 2000s cycling has started to go beyond ‘just sport,’ the way that coffee went beyond ‘a drink’ when Starbucks popularized their take on café culture. To rival Starbucks’ idea of a "third place" beyond home and work, Mellow Johnny’s presents the concept of the "third bike": "Most of us who have been cyclists for a long time have our road bike and our mountain bike, but what’s our third bike? Is that a fixed gear, a cruiser, or a commute bike?" asks Staley.
Mellow Johnny’s is looking to recruit new cyclists who might not have thought of moving bicycles off the toy shelf and into the modal mix. Austin is very similar in mindset to Portland (popularly regarded as America’s most cycling-friendly city) and has better weather, which makes it ripe for bike-friendly development, says Staley. The reason it has stalled until now, he says, is because "Texas is Texas."
In 2001 a bill introduced in the state’s legislature sought to restrict cyclists’ use of country roads and to require them to wear "slow moving" triangle emblems on their backs. That bill was defeated, and the senator who introduced it eventually became a strong proponent of Lance’s "Share the road y’all" collector license plates. However another bill, requiring motorists to give a three-foot berth when overtaking a bicycle, has since failed in the legislature three times in six years.
Metropolitan Austin doubled in size in the past decade, and those who loved it before it grew to encompass 1.6 million people fear it will become as off-ramp-encrusted as Dallas or, like Houston, dominated by parking lots. "Cycling is huge to the future of our city. We’re not going to have a vibrant downtown, and we’re not going to have a real livable city if cycling does not get included in there somehow," says Staley. "We’re going to be choked by traffic."
When infrastructure is poor, people don’t feel safe cycling. Because they’re not cycling, no one is lobbying for cycling improvements. Mellow Johnny’s is reaching out to break this negative cycle. Eileen Schaubert, a native of Minneapolis and certified instructor with the League of American Bicyclists, has recently been contracted to step up Mellow Johnny’s role in lobbying the city and major employers to create incentives for cyclists, and to direct street-level education to help beginner commuters.
"A lot of the curriculum has to do with teaching people how to ride safely and legally in traffic," says Schaubert.
It’s important for cyclists to learn the basics of bike handling, she says, but they also have to learn how to re-train cars not to crowd them into the gutter.
"I’m sitting at a shop and right in front of me I have a four lane road, and many of the bikes are riding on the sidewalk because they perceive the road as being very dangerous. But it’s a 35 mph (56 km/h) road and there’s not a lot of traffic," she sighs.
But even with gear, skills, showers at hand, and safe bicycle parking, it can sometimes feel like too much to get on a bike every day. And Lance gets that. This ardent promoter of healthy living has a shocking confession to make: "I’m not allowing myself to ride right now," he told MOMENTUM. Because we spoke with him just two-and-half weeks before his third marathon (Boston’s 112th), Lance was putting all his training into running.
Lance Armstrong described his ethos to Forbes magazine in 2001 as "purposeful living," and these days that means prioritizing time with his kids, fundraising, bike touring, marathoning, and lobbying for the goals of the cancer-fighting Lance Armstrong “LiveStrong” Foundation.
In a recent speech he gave in Washington, D.C. to the Intercultural Cancer Council, Lance described how in 1996, after his cancer was quelled, his oncologist inducted him into the "obligation of the cure" – the obligation to go out and speak of his battle with cancer, to use it for a greater purpose. It’s an obligation that has seemingly and understandably morphed into Lance’s philosophies on cycling: "Every time you take a car off the road - I don’t need to tell you what that does for somebody’s health, but also for the environment."
Share the road, y’all.
----------