Background notes on my story, some personal stuff and photos
By Dave Steen
eems you're never too old to learn stuff. Or ride your bike.
As Arthur Clegg free-wheels in A Bicycle Story, he discovers
some old and new truths, about two old acquaintances and his own ill-judged ideas of love and the purpose of his life.
Because I ride every day and believe writers do better sticking to what they know, bicycles figure in every turn of my story. Its ideas and sights and sounds of real (and not-so-real) events and personalities are drawn from my first 80 years in sports. But its plot is not an after-thought. For me, in its five-years of writing and re-writing, the plausible story-line and characters grew in authenticity.
My book is proudly self-published. I didn't seek a publisher. Like Arthur in the story, I prefer any refuge from our ubiquitous consumer culture. My story is not shackled to a business or writers' school formula.
Hopefully that stance won't dampen opportunities to share the book and my passion for cycling and other things with many readers. Pedalling, for me, is more fun than peddling.
It's both embarrassing, for its appearance of immodesty, and necessary for understanding A Bicycle Story to report here about experiences that helped me to write it.
I was a 25-year staff writer/editor for the Toronto Star, have had three non-fiction sports and fitness books published, and had two feature stories appear in national magazines.
My family history is soaked in sports. My uncle Bruce was a champion cyclist in BC in the 1930s; my late brother Don was a basketball and track and field star; his son Dave medaled in the 1988 Seoul Olympics decathlon; and Dave's wife Andrea, a hurdler, and son Jordie, a wrestler, were Canadian Olympians. I won the British Commonwealth Games shot put in 1966 and 1970, and took up competitive cycling and touring (two cross-America trips, the last with my son Stefan).
In 1968 I started a small track club in Toronto. Among our first members was Lawrence Hill, who ultimately proved better at writing
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than running. His The Book of Negroes was a runaway best-seller. Larry became a lifelong friend and, in a reversal of coaching roles, offered me generous advice and encouragement for A Bicycle Story. Later he wrote to say, 'You have written a wonderful, spirited, thoughtful novel with abundant energy. Sport enthusiasts, cyclists and cycling fans and many thoughtful middle-aged and older readers will find it fascinating.'
Time trialing is the race of truth and sometimes I don't have time to stop and blow my nose.
After winning my second Commonwealth Games gold medal in shotputting, this photo from the Edinburgh Games in 1970, I took up cycling to lose unhealthy weight and discovered the joy and benefits of cycling. (Below, 1963) My coach at the University of Oregon was Bill Bowerman, famous for his training methods and co-founding Nike.
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Praise for
A Bicycle Story
from sports legend Bruce Kidd
A Bicycle Story is excellent in so many ways — with such descriptive power when it comes to people, landscapes, and physical and emotional interiors, capturing the technical requirements, lyricism, neuroses (fanaticism?), and lifelong relationships of sports. Anyone who has run or cycled in university or been a member of a club could feel at home, even affirmed, by this book.
Bruce Kidd, teenage running sensation in 1960s, Olympic Hall of Famer, twice Canadian Press athlete of the year, Officer Order of Canada, professor emeritus and University of Toronto ombudsperson.
Three 'old' teammates
The author (left) and Bruce Kidd at the statue of famous Canadian sprinter Harry Jerome in Stanley Park, Vancouver.
REVIEW: Novel 'advances the long-neglected genre of bicycle lit'
Dave Steen’s mystery novel about old crimes and old age might well have been entitled A Tale of Many Bicycles or A Tale of Many Cyclists.
All the main characters — Arthur the recluse in the backwoods of Vancouver Island, Anna the “younger woman” who befriends him in her search of truth about her mother’s suspicious death long ago, the dead mother Colleen, the recluse’s Bible-addled old riding buddy Winston, their fiercely manipulative old coach Gris — are (or were) avid cyclists.
I don’t mean avid as in, they ride around the park on Sundays. More like, they put in serious miles almost every day rain or shine (or used to), they seek out mountains to ride up, they wear gadgets that monitor their heart rate, and so on. They tend to own multiple bicycles. When we come upon the old coach late in the story, the bikes stowed in his suite are reckoned to be worth about $80,000.
All this is to say that, while I too have been an avid if not obsessive cyclist for over fifty years, I’m not a cyclist like Dave Steen’s cyclists. I ride ratty but reliable road bikes to get around. Steen’s people ride to win (or used to). Some of them more than others. And they wear those fancy togs. Steen has constructed his intriguing mystery around their kind of cycling.
I wondered a few times as I read, rapt and engaged, how non-cyclists might find this book. You don’t have to be a bicycle racer to relate to the well-crafted story. But the book’s narrator, that aging Vancouver Island recluse, does often wax lyrical about the exquisite joy of cycling.
I get this too, when I ride, and I don’t even have to suffer the pain and damage endured by bicycle racers. There is nothing quite like this low altitude, human-powered flight, and the movement required to achieve lift-off feels good, in moderation. But, can readers who aren’t cyclists relate? Does it matter?
Similar questions came to mind about younger readers. Anna, whose search for truth about her cyclist mother’s demise is at the heart of the mystery, is a ripe 65 years old during most of the story. And she’s the “younger woman” love interest for the reclusive Arthur, who’s ten years older.
Old coach Gris is 96 years old, for goodness sake, though still cycling up a storm.
The only indelibly young person is Anna’s mother, because she died young almost sixty years earlier (while cycling, of course). But we spend much of our time delving into the pasts of the still living characters, when they were young cyclists.
So, this might be a good read for those younger readers who seek insights into what old people were like, before they got old, and what happens to young people when they live to be old. In any case, Steen does a masterful job of weaving the stories of their past lives into the puzzle that is eventually solved.
We — the old — don’t all live in cat-filled shacks like Arthur, though admittedly this persuasion is well represented on our islands. And we don’t all put in miles on our bicycles the way Arthur still does, even at 75, when he’s not being distracted by Anna.
And I, like many old cyclists, don’t feel kinship with these riders who insist on wearing embarrassing, tight-fitting costumes and winning races on preposterously expensive machines. Why can’t they just dress like everyone else and use their bikes for transportation? But, while I can’t relate to cycling as one-up-man-ship, self-abuse, and/or or exhibitionism, I can totally relate to riding as addiction or obsession, the kind that brings together the cast of A Bicycle Story.
Older readers might relate to and younger readers might be enlightened by Steen’s astute glimpses of the daily challenges and traumas of getting old, of the shock of watching one’s body break down while one’s friends and family bite the dust one after the other: things that remind you of that scene in The Wizard of Oz where the Wicked Witch of the West is fast disappearing, after Dorothy throws water on her. “I’m melting. Melting!”
I suspect that many will enjoy the cycling lore that envelops the mystery. There is a lot of it, though not too much (for me, anyway). We learn much about the practice of doping
This unedited, unsolicited review is by Howard Macdonald Stewart, historical geographer, world traveller (sometimes on his bike, award-winning author, and frequent contributor to the British Columbia Review. His Bumbling Down the Danube, about a bicycle adventure he once took with the late Canadian war hero Cornelius Burke, was published in 2016, followed in 2020 by The Year of the Bicycle: 1973. Stewart lives on Denman Island, B.C.
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bicycle racers that was entering its golden age when Arthur and Winston were young racers. Amphetamines were ubiquitous by the 1950s, but thereafter drugs and drugging strategies became ever more elaborate, killed more riders, and undermined any residual faith in the purity of the sport. In fact, we are told, the sport of bicycle racing has always had a brutal, ruthless side; with many heroes who are less than exemplary role models for our children.
This rough side to cycling’s personality, and the growing role of doping after mid-century, fits well with the personality of Gris, then a much younger coach. Gris creeps towards centre stage as the novel unfolds and the mystery deepens around the demise of Anna’s mother. But it wasn’t performance-enhancing drugs that killed her.
Revealing more of the story would risk spoiling a compelling good read, one that I recommend to all readers, notwithstanding the questions raised above.
I do have a minor quibble, though, about some of Steen’s dialogues. His characters sometimes say things that would work well as narrative but sound unnatural as dialogue. An issue that an editor ought to have caught, and not one that detracted measurably from my enjoyment of the story. As one of our local oldies would say, “I’m not sayin’, I’m just sayin.’”
Steen’s book carries the reader along with a first-rate story while offering a good primer about one side of the complex community of cyclists. A Bicycle Story will advance the long-neglected genre of bicycle lit and help bring it in from the wilderness to the mainstream where it belongs — but still with its own dedicated lane.
As formidable coach Gris points out, bicycling could make us and our climate far healthier if more of us around the world embraced it (or returned to it). And forget about the spandex and carbon fibre and clattering shoes. Cycling is even more transcendental without these.
The death at the heart of this story confirms that cycling is not without risks. But what is?
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By Howard Stewart
The British Columbia Review