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Inside Cycling with John Wilcockson: California's pioneers
Last week, I told the story of how Californian Audrey McElmury in 1969 became the first-ever American to win a world road race championship. Emphasizing the enormity of that rainbow victory is the fact that her feat has since been repeated by only one woman, Beth Heiden in 1980, and two pro men, Greg LeMond in 1983 and 1989, and Lance Armstrong in 1993.
McElmury’s breakthrough was a giant step for American cycling, and was confirmation that California — where McElmury often raced with the men — was producing high-quality U.S. riders. We had already seen the limited success in Europe of men like Mike Hiltner in the 1960s. But it was the ’70s that saw the lure of the Continent play a bigger and bigger role in American road racing.
It wasn’t coincidental that this was also a time when publications like Britain’s International Cycle Sport (founded in 1968), New England’s Velo News (1972) and California’s Competitive Cycling (1975) were all bringing news and photos of European racing to an American audience. This knowledge in turn enticed a few American amateur racers to go to Europe, perhaps even with the dream of competing at the Tour de France one day.
The trickle of American racers crossing the Atlantic continued through the 1970s. These U.S. pioneers were forced to completely integrate themselves into the continental lifestyle to have any hope of getting on a European team. Many returned because of homesickness — remember, this was before the days of e-mail, fax machines or cheap telephone calls.
In the early 1970s, I was working for International Cycle Sport, and one of the first U.S. racers I encountered in England was Californian Mike Neel. He was then a heavyset 20-year-old, whose main claim to fame was the U.S. national track pursuit championship he won in 1971. He came to compete for the so-called “International” team (he was the lone American) in the 1972 Tour of Britain (then known as the Milk Race). He didn’t find the ultra-steep grades of the English and Welsh hills to his liking, and once these were coupled with mechanical problems he didn’t last long in the two-week race.
Neel headed to France that summer, where he raced for an amateur club. “I had no money,” remembers Neel, “so I worked in a bike shop. It was hard working in a bike shop if you didn’t speak French.”
That initial taste of European racing showed Neel how tough it was to be successful enough to attract the interest of a pro team. Maybe a good performance at the next Olympics (in Montréal) would help him make a name. Back in the States in 1973, Neel again took the national pursuit championship, along with the 10-mile scratch-race title.
Neel also developed his road-racing talents, witnessed by his winning the 1974 Tour of the Sierras, a sort-of successor to the one-off 1971 Tour of California put on by the Velo Club Berkeley. This was enough for Neel to qualify for the 1976 Olympic trials held in Saranac Lake, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York. Neel won one of the trials’ 100-mile road races to make the U.S team.
It wasn’t Neel, but his teammate and fellow Californian George Mount who made the headlines, finishing sixth in the Olympic road race at Montréal. Mount was the first American to place top 10 in an Olympic road event. But Neel made some history of his own by immediately heading across the Atlantic to become the first homegrown American to sign for a pro team in Europe.
There wasn’t anything particularly glamorous about his new life in Prato, near Florence. He signed with a bare-bones pro team, Magniflex, whose title sponsor was a mattress maker. Neel was pretty much living at the poverty level. “I stayed in a little apartment near the [Magniflex] mattress factory with the Australian rider, Gary Clively,” Neel recalls. “I actually worked at the factory. One day, they told me to stop making so many mattresses, as I was making the others look bad.”
Despite having to work in a factory to balance his budget, Neel made his mark as a pro. On September 5, 1976, he was the lone American competing in the world pro road race championship at Ostuni in the south of Italy. At 288km it was one of the longest championship races in history. But the by-now lean Californian wasn’t deterred by the marathon distance or the stellar 71-rider field — which included such cycling greats as Eddy Merckx, Felice Gimondi, Francesco Moser, Joop Zoetemelk and Freddy Maertens.
Incredibly, Neel stuck with the lead group for the whole of the seven-hour race, and after four riders escaped on the last lap (Maertens won the rainbow jersey from Moser, Italian Tino Conti and Zoetemelk) the American was in the sprint for fifth place, which was taken by Merckx. Neel came in 10th, which was arguably a finer performance than the seventh place earned in the 1947 pro championship by the French-based American Joseph Magnani — who was actually the final finisher in a race contested by only 31 riders.
While in Italy through 1977, Neel helped his Olympic buddy Mount join an amateur team in Tuscany, at Castelfranco di Sopra. While Mount went on to race as a pro for the Italian pro squads San Giacomo (1980) and Sammontana (1981-82), Neel retired from pro racing at age 26 and took up coaching in 1978. He was the U.S. Cycling Federation road coach through 1979, and went on to become the directeur sportif of America’s first pro team, 7-Eleven, in 1985. But that’s a story for another day.
