Back in May, I was the lucky recipient of a Marinoni, which I set about rehabilitating to the best of my meager abilities:
The end result was a bicycle I very much enjoyed riding:
But as I’m doing my best to keep the total number of bicycles I own in check I ultimately decided to auction it and give the proceeds to the Star Track Cycling program, as they were raising money to send kids to Junior Track Nationals:
It ain’t much, but I ain’t much of a human being, and selling beat-up bikes I got for free and giving away the money is about as philanthropic as I get.
“So who won the bike?,” you’re probably not wondering. Well, it was some guy from upstate who you may know from the comments as “Some Guy From Upstate,” and this past weekend he came downstate to collect his prize. Out of respect for his privacy I refrained from sticking a camera in his face to capture the moment, so instead here’s a random picture of someone receiving an award:
The plan was to do the ceremonial Passing On Of The Bicycle and then go for a ride, so we headed over to so-called “River Road,” the popular roadie route right across the George Washington Bridge:
[River Road in autumn]
After days of rain the weather was positively spectacular, but we soon learned the hard way that River Road was closed, which I would have known had I thought to check beforehand:
Usually when River Road is “closed” you just go around the barriers and keep riding, but this was bad enough they had people standing there to turn you away and everything:
Obviously we totally could have ridden that on gravel bikes, but since we were on mere road bikes we turned around and instead headed over the mighty High Bridge and into the Bronx for an impromptu tour of the city’s most chronically obstructed bike lanes:
[The High Bridge many, many years ago]
At the conclusion of the ride I then tried to convince him to take George Plimpton’s Y-Foil Instead, but being possessed of uncommon restraint he insisted on sticking with the Marinoni:
[Subtlety On Wheels]
This is probably a good thing, since there’s clearly a market for George Plimpton memorabilia:
And surely his Y-Foil will only continue to increase in value until one day I’ll do an auction with Classic Cycle and we’ll use the proceeds to build Star Track a brand new indoor velodrome which we’ll call the “Plimptonium:”
[Architectural plans for The Plimptonium, a.k.a. “The House That Wife Oil Built”]
But pending that, thanks to Some Guy From Upstate for not only helping Star Track but also freeing up a slot on my bike rack and bringing my total number of classic lugged steel road racing bicycles down to a more manageable two, those being the Faggin:
And of course the Cervino:
Of the two, the Cervino is the (mostly) period-correct one, and being slightly larger than the Faggin it affords me a somewhat more age-appropriate riding position:
Thanks to the voluminous tubular tires it floats over pretty much everything:
And while it may be lacking in the low gear department the refreshing simplicity of operating a six-speed friction drivetrain with one hand makes up for it:
Six-speeds are the new singlespeeds.
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