NELSON VAILS OLYMPIC SILVER MEDALIST COMES TO BUFFALO
On Monday September 26th a national hero, 1984 Olympic Silver Medalist, Nelson Vails, will be coming to Buffalo to ride in the weekly Slow Roll. To fully comprehend how important someone like Nelson Vails is, one needs to understand the context surrounding his life.
The thing known as “bike culture” is something that is very new to Buffalo. Before the advent of the modern day bike messengers in the major metropolitan cities of the U.S., “bike culture” did not exist. There was a time, before ubiquitous bike lanes, Slow Roll, Mayors proclaiming that that bikes humanize cities when people rode their bikes in the summer for fun and then put them away as soon as the weather got chilly.
Nelson Vails was an “Original Dime” or “OD” messenger, in street parlance. Working in the 1970’s NYC, his world was the bike messenger world, a counter-culture apart from the regular work-a-day life. It was a profession both lauded and vilified. Above all, it was considered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1998 to be the fourth most dangerous profession in the United States. Largely working alone, bike messengers developed a unique culture born of necessity and camaraderie.
As a 10 year, 10 city messenger, in my travels around the U.S. interviewing messengers for my book (Nerves of Steel: Bike Messengers in the United States), I learned about bike messenger history, culture, and the evolution of the profession. There are many things that started in the bike messengers that took decades to assimilate into mainstream culture: Alleycat races, clipless pedals, bullhorn handlebars, Critical Mass etc. Messengers invented them all.
Nelson Vails has a special place in bike culture history. He is in the Pantheon of Messenger Gods like Mercury and Hermes. Nelson, by virtue of being a complete outsider to the cycling world first coming to it as a bike messenger, and then by being Black, shattered not only racing records but outsiders and messengers’ perceptions alike.
Messengers, lowest on pecking order of the traffic ecosystem, had long struggled to find a voice in their defense against the “Might makes right” attitude of motorists. Countless articles over the decades depict those who did the profession as scofflaws, outlaws, drug addicts and worse. In actuality, messengers are simply earning a living doing a job. It happens to be a fun job if you can handle the stress of knowing that every day of work could be your last.
Nelson dared to be himself and follow his bliss. He loved bikes and loved to ride fast. He dared to do that in spite of an exclusively white bike racing world that is still very insular and elitist, not to mention borderline sexist and racist. I know this from personal experience. He won often and he won with grace. But perhaps the thing that messengers appreciate about him most, was how much credit he gave the job for his racing skills. Nelson inspired huge numbers of messengers after him to go pro and race in every type of bike racing available. What is more important, is that he made us feel that we all had something we could contribute, that if we worked hard enough, we also could gain the sort of respect Nelson did. He proved if in Los Angeles in 1984.
In 1987, Mayor Ed Koch, of NYC, announced that forthwith, mid-town Manhattan would be prohibited to bikes. The generation of messengers right after Nelson’s rose up, mobilized the mass of NYC’s 2,000 bike messengers and bike riding public in what they call the “Revolution of 1987.” It got national coverage and a messenger in San Francisco, inspired by their example created the now infamous “Critical Mass” as a protest to the first Gulf War in 1994. Bike advocacy got loud as bike messengers saw friends mowed down in the street from road raging and careless drivers. We defied outsiders’ characterization of our culture because we knew we had people like Nelson to point to with pride.
We encouraged the early bike commuters when they asked us questions and when groups formed to advocate for bike lanes, we helped them publicize their causes, often times, messengers tired of riding the city, went inside and worked for these organizations. In 1992, inspired by my messenger community forefathers, among them Mr. Vails, I set off to catalog the verbal history of my beloved new community and connect the dots of messenger communities in a pre-internet age.
When Nelson Vails exploded on the international stage of the Olympics proudly proclaiming that he was a NYC messenger, we were all given a voice. It’s because of his example, of toughness through diversity, which has actually reordered the urban conversation. From the 1950’s until the 2000’s, the car has been king even in cramped, traffic congested cities. Bike messengers fought for some space on those roads for 40 years. Nelson gave us credibility when he won that Silver Medal at the Olympics. Even now, as cities become more and more bike-friendly, his visit should serve as a reminder that the larger biking public has benefitted from the messengers bike community in the form of bike lanes, driver awareness, bike rental systems and even stupid little stuff like wearing a skirt over lycra shorts. But we always remember and remind each other that we benefitted from one extremely dedicated, totally ordinary Black dude from Harlem.
Nelson will be in Rochester on September 25th and 27th and here in Buffalo on the 26th at Slow Roll. His love affair with the bike is as strong as ever as he speaks frequently to bike advocacy groups like the NY Bicycle Advocacy and Conkey Cruisers of Rochester. Nelson is still a messenger, encouraging would be bike riders to take a chance and join us in the bike community which is a diverse and wonderful place of self-expression. Who knows what the next generation has in store for us!
Come meet the man and the legend at the Colored Musicians’ Club 145 Broadway Avenue at 5:30 -6:00 p.m.
