And via all that I learned so much more than I ever could have imagined and met so many great bike people all over the planet, and it’s sort of cliché to say that it changed my whole life, except that it did. Then Outside Magazine named RKP the #1 Bike Blog on the internet. We worked together and visited each other, and met up at industry events and out on the road. I wanted to get into the bike business, and Padraig and Freddy helped me find a job at one of the best bike companies in the world (another story).įreddy and I became friends. I had been in educational publishing, managing big textbook development projects, and I was burned out. I had spent years writing about soccer as a freelancer, and I missed the rhythm of regular sports writing. And then, quite curiously, but also thrillingly, he let me send him some more stuff. I had been leaving comments on RKP posts for months, long, tortured rants, so he was aware of who I was, but I was surprised when he encouraged me to send him the piece. That’s when I wrote to Padraig to see if he was interested in a sort of homage to Abt piece. Even writing this, just now, I can see how odd my frame of mind was then. Reading Abt’s pieces about races whose outcome I already knew was something special, because he brought the events and the characters to life in extraordinary ways. I was devouring every bit of cycling history I could and had developed a particular love for the journalism of Samuel Abt, who covered the Tour de France for more than 30 years, writing for the New York Times and International Herald Tribune. The Red Kite Prayer, incidentally, is the prayer the breakaway rider in the lead of a race says at the 1km to go banner, the red kite, in hopes of staying away to the finish and winning the race.Īround that time I was, as I said, obsessed.

He needed RKP as an outlet for the riot of ideas bursting out of his fingertips. He had too much for it all to find its way into print or onto BKW. Later I would learn that Padraig started RKP because he was bursting with words. Here’s a classic excerpt from Freddy’s work: Belgium Knee Warmers is a term for embrocation, the grease the toughest riders slather on their legs for cold weather training, in lieu of tights or actual knee warmers.

It was the deep dive on cycling culture I craved, and it didn’t take itself too seriously. He could reminisce about races decades past and describe what it felt like to turn yourself inside out on a long climb. He knew how tall your socks were supposed to be, and also didn’t care. Freddy was in tune with the zeitgeist in a serious way.

That’s when I discovered Belgium Knee Warmers, written by a guy who called himself Radio Freddy. I was obsessed with cycling, and I wanted to read things that expressed what I felt about riding a bike. Speaking of weird moments, the moment Shimano North America said they wanted to underwrite a significant portion of our expenses was a weird and magical one I never saw coming. I really don’t know what I was thinking, writing to a guy I didn’t know who had just started a new blog, wondering if he’d run a piece I was working on, but as it turned out that was the tipping of a domino that cascaded through my life, changed everything, and brought me here, to this weird moment. Maybe if I’m grateful then I become, somehow, worthy. I’m probably not in control of my own life really, right? Somewhere between strict determinism and inertia there are forces beyond my control and beyond my ken that have delivered me to a place that I never expected and certainly don’t deserve to be. For everyone else, the occasional references to RKP might be confusing, so here is something I wrote about RKP very near the transition from that site to this one, and maybe it puts more of what we do here in context. A lot of you reading these words came to The Cycling Independent after a decade and a bit more of reading Red Kite Prayer.

Red kite bicycles