Columns: What Would Rick Sutton Do?

"I was just wondering if anyone has thought of calling Rick Sutton and inviting him to come poach our race. It seems only fair that he should be encouraged to do so, especially if he did it in a dress with a made-up number plate on a tiny bicycle."

Sitting at the laptop, reading Robert's e-mail (sent a couple of weeks before our collective group of underachieving slackers put on the Single Speed World Championships in Downieville on October 12), was possibly the only time I actually smiled in the mulcher of stress that was the month leading up to the event. For some reason, after years of the event running as a happy outlaw frenzy of unrestrained anarchy, we had decided to go legit and put the race on with insurance and permits and ambulances and all the trappings of a real race. Now, putting on a regular race with regular bike racers is a thankless pain in the ass at the best of times. But when the bulk of the entrants in said race are also professional drunks culled from a worldwide tapestry of mischief-prone freaks, trying to play the straight man and put on a legitimate race is just begging for a nightmare to unfold.

But turnabout is fair play, as someone once said. Back when most people thought singlespeeds were something to do with personal ads, before anyone was silly enough to start making components or production framesets for this micro-niche -- more precisely, back in 1993 -- there were about a half-dozen of us causing trouble at races in Northern California. The next year, there were a dozen of us. We all rode hard and drank a lot.

Fetal pig trophies. Wow.

Robert Ives, however, was the first to truly combine the art of going really fast without gears with that of drinking until he barfed. Right about the time he and his Sacramento crew began wearing orange jumpsuits to the races, a groundswell of popularity began to mount, and the lawless drunks took it upon themselves to start poaching races, with handmade number plates. The obvious target for this kind of performance art/anarchy was the Sea Otter Classic. In spite of his best intentions to bring singlespeeding into the welcome fold of his structured event by being one of the only big-time race promoters to offer a class for the gearless, Rick Sutton was at that time completely unaware of just how dark and unruly a mob he was dealing with. While Rick probably thought he was nurturing a growth segment, the one-speeders could only look at his endorsement with glowering condescension. How dare he? Forty-buck entry fees and no beer? F--k that!

From the first time there was a one-speed class at Sea Otter, probably about 1994, there was also widespread poaching of the event by drunken hairballs with black-market numbers. It probably wouldn't have been a problem if they were slow, drunken hairballs. But they weren't. What followed were several years where the scoring for the entire one-speed, expert and masters fields would get royally screwed up. Several hundred riders' worth of headache. Like clockwork. The scary thing about this was that it just sort of happened. Nobody ever said, "Hey, we're poaching Sea Otter. Meet at seven to get your fake numbers." It started with a couple of people doing it one year, and just snowballed into widespread havoc.