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Inside Cycling with John Wilcockson: How track led to pro road racing in America

Published: Dec. 20, 2005

While Greg LeMond was burning up the roads of Europe in the early 1980s, becoming world professional road champion and making the podium at the Tour de France, pro road racing was still in its infancy back home. LeMond’s successes were a clear inspiration to amateur racers in North America, but there were no pro teams for them to join and no pro races in which to compete.

That situation only started to change in 1982 after an agreement was reached between the U.S. Cycling Federation (USCF) and the Professional Racing Organization of America (PRO) to sanction "open" pro-am road racing in the U.S. So, you may ask, what was PRO?

The story of PRO begins in 1948 when a 29-year-old Dutch bike racer named Chris van Gent arrived in North America to compete in this country’s still-burgeoning circuit of six-day track races. That year there were three sixes in New York (90,000 people attended the October 18-23 event in Madison Square Garden!), and one each in Buffalo, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Winnipeg, Canada. Van Gent placed second in the Washington Six with countryman Ben Remkes.

The American six-day scene — which was huge in the 1930s — had collapsed by 1950, but van Gent stayed stateside and eventually settled in Denver. He worked for AMF for a number of years before he and his wife opened a bike shop. They also organized local road races and volunteered as race officials (their niece Yvonne van Gent is today an official with the American Cycling Association). In the mid-1960s, Van Gent decided he wanted to try to revive the American six-day scene, and with this in mind he founded PRO in 1968.

Bike racing was still strictly amateur in the U.S. and was run by the Amateur Bicycle League of America (ABL). At that time, the sport’s world governing body, the UCI, was split into amateur (FIAC) and professional (FICP) branches. The ABL was affiliated with FIAC, so van Gent, with help from some friends in Europe, managed to get PRO affiliated with FICP.

America was producing some good-quality track racers, and four riders in their early 20s — Tim Mountford, Jack Simes III, John Vande Velde (father of current CSC team pro Christian Vande Velde) and Cliff Halsey — all turned pro after the 1972 Munich Olympics to compete in European six-day races. Around the same time, van Gent hooked up with Charles Ruys, a Dutch track promoter who also wrote articles for a British cycling magazine and coached track racers.

Ruys organized two American six-day races in 1973: Los Angeles in late May and Detroit in early October. Mountford came in second at Los Angeles with German partner Dieter Kemper, while Simes and Vande Velde teamed up to take third in Los Angeles and second in Detroit. The two events were professionally run, but drew little public and media interest, and they were not run again.

Simes, who lives in eastern Pennsylvania, went on to become a coach for the national track team. And when Bob Rodale, the owner of Bicycling magazine, based in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, opened the Lehigh Valley Velodrome at nearby Trexlertown in late 1975, he asked Simes to be the first track director.

To help him, Simes contacted another U.S. Olympian, Dave Chauner, who had just retired from racing. Chauner is the only American amateur to have won a stage of the Tour of Britain, then called the Milk Race. Together, Simes and Chauner managed the velodrome, set up a sports promotion company, Omni Sports, and acquired the PRO name from Chris van Gent. Simes became the president of PRO (and later a board member of the UCI’s FICP), while Chauner sat on the PRO board — even though the only pro races organized at the time were a few track races.

While Chauner and Simes were establishing Trexlertown, Omni Sports and PRO on the East Coast, amateur road racing was gaining a foothold out West. The one-off 1971 Tour of California, promoted by bike shop owner Peter Rich, was followed four years later by the inaugural Red Zinger Bicycle Classic in Colorado. As I wrote in an earlier column (see "Inside Cycling: Aisner and the Coors Classic"), founder Mo Siegel of Celestial Seasonings sold that event for a dollar to race promoter Michael Aisner, who re-launched it as the Coors Classic in 1980.

That same year, the first Coors Classic winner, Jonathan Boyer, was awarded the PRO national champion’s jersey for finishing fifth, the best placed American, at the world pro road championship in Sallanches, France. (The only other American pro in the race was George Mount, who didn’t finish the mountainous 268km race.)

It was obvious that with a handful of American pros starting to do well in Europe, that pro road racing had a chance of becoming fully established in the U.S. That was when the U.S. Cycling Federation (USCF) — the new name for the old ABL, beginning in 1975 — realized that it needed to start changing its all-amateur policy. One proposal was to gradually increase the $200 daily maximum prize money a racer could receive and still keep the amateur status needed for the Olympic Games (which wouldn’t include pro cyclists until 1996).

The USCF was concerned that its top amateurs (including Alexi Grewal, Davis Phinney, Ron Kiefel, Doug Shapiro and Roy Knickman) would turn pro before the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, and that might cost the federation hundreds of thousands of dollars to be awarded by the U.S. Olympic Committee for Americans winning medals in Los Angeles.

Members of the USCF board were furious that their predecessors had ceded authority for pro cycling to Simes and Chauner’s Professional Racing Organization of America, and they engaged in what has been called "a holy war" against PRO in 1981.

PRO filed a $299,000 lawsuit against the USCF in February that year, claiming that the federation was not honoring an agreement signed with PRO by USCF president Mike Fraysse at the 1980 world’s. That agreement relinquished all USCF claims to pro cycling and recognized PRO as the appropriate U.S. authority for that side of the sport.

The dispute was finally settled in January 1982 when PRO president Simes agreed to drop the suit in return for the federation allowing PRO-registered riders to compete in USCF-sanctioned races — such as the Coors Classic. And so pro racing in America was about to take off. I’ll write about that next time.