Maynard Hershon

I've been on this Interweb malarkey for a good few years now;  long enough that I was once a number not a name in the original Compuserve "community".  In fact,  it was while taking part in a very lo-tech Fantasy Tour De France on a Compuserve forum in the early nineties that I first realised there were people in this world even sadder than me.

But it wasn't until this week that I realised that the great Maynard Hershon had a blog.  Maynard's books "Half-Wheel Hell" and "Tales from the Bike Shop" are now out of print, although I suspect an E-Bay or Amazon search could turn up a copy,  but much of his excellent writing has been revised and reprinted in digital form.

I first came across Maynard in the mid-Eighties, when he wrote a column for the US cycle racing magazine Winning.  

This was long before Procycling and Cycle Sport, so UK bikies were stuck with the dull and parochial Comic and not much else.  During the Giro, Paolo Garbini would let us sniff his Gazetta at his shop in Great Pulteney Street, and I would buy L'Equipe during the Tour to look at the pictures and brush up my schoolboy French.

So Winning came as a breath of fresh air.   True, you had to wade through pages of unnecessary guff about obscure mid-Western crits, and its Grand Tour coverage was inevitably tilted towards LeMond or the 7-Eleven squad - but at least it had good colour pictures and intelligent writing.

And Maynard Hershon -- and his folksy, quirky monthly column.  Tales of old-school mechanics, mid-week races and life viewed through the uniquely twisted prism of a cycling obsessive.  Imagine Prairie Home Companion set in a dusty bike shop, with Garrison Keillor in a faded, celeste Bianchi jersey.  

Sometimes the stories were just too folksy, too Waltons for UK taste -- but most of the time he set a standard for thoughtful writing the rest of us can only aspire to.  Maynard was by all accounts a useful racer in his time as well, and an official motorbike rider at several US events, including a spell piloting one of the yellow Service Des Courses Mavic motos.

Bizarrely, a short-lived UK edition of Winning was published -- with a few time trial results stuck in among the stories of the Coors Classic and, unforgivably, Maynard's column was clumsily rewritten in a hopeless attempt to make it sound British ("Last weekend, I came across a dead coyote by the side of the old fire-road in the hills above Milton Keynes").

Not long after, Winning itself folded and was absorbed into VeloNews, to which Maynard still occasionally contributes.

Anyway, stop reading this and go and read his blog instead.