Cyclist's life comes full circle in Old Lyme
Aug. 10—OLD LYME — Bill Humphreys was a self-described "solo hippie" riding his bike across the country when he found his place as a spoke in the wheel of the first U.S. team to ride in an international stage race in Europe.
The 1970s-era Raleigh Century Road Club of America Team, of which Humphreys was a part, is receiving special recognition this year from the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame for its role in bringing increased legitimacy and attention to U.S. road racing.
Humphreys, 79, got his start in racing more than 50 years ago when connections forged on the long ride east from San Diego, Calif., led him to the Century Road Club of America in Princeton, N.J. He learned amid the burgeoning racing subculture how to train and how to compete. He was handpicked by bike shop proprietor Fred Kuhn for a spot on the Raleigh Boys team that included three men with five Olympic teams between them.
Humphreys couldn't believe it, then or now.
"The year before, I was a long haired hippie riding my bike across America, and there I was with them racing internationally. In one year," he said.
In a news release announcing the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame special recognition, the team and its transformative sponsorship from Raleigh Industries was credited by cycling historian Peter Joffre Nye with setting the stage for America's rise to world-class competition.
Nye said Raleigh's support encouraged the Schwinn Bicycle Company in Chicago, Peugeot and Gitane in France, and other brands to provide bicycles, clothing, and equipment to grassroots clubs around the country.
Humphreys ― whose varied career has included stints as a coach, race promoter, salesman and truck driver ― went on to mentor one of those new, world-class riders in 1978 while working with the Junior National team at the Olympic Training Center.
"I ended up coaching a kid who won the Tour de France three times, Greg LeMond," he said.
There's a picture in the guest house at his home on Rogers Lake of LeMond standing in the middle of the group of young riders Humphreys was coaching back in 2008. He spent the whole day with the kids.
"They have never forgotten that," he said.
The juniors that year on his Mystic Velo Cycling Club team included Ben Wolfe of Old Lyme, who went on to become a professional cyclist, in a Jelly Belly jersey that showed how far bike racing had come since Humphreys' team landed the first Raleigh sponsorship.
The domestique
Humphreys made his career in the European-dominated sport as a so-called domestique ― the person responsible for helping his teammates by letting them draft in his slipstream.
"I didn't win that much," said the man who made a conscious decision to ride not for glory but to carry the rest. "It's a team sport, and it's hard for Americans to understand that."
Humphreys' team included Olympians John Howard and John Allis when they flew to Ireland in 1973 to become the first U.S. cycling team competing overseas in a stage race. Nye, the hall of fame historian, said Raleigh Industries provided a station wagon carrying extra bicycles, spare wheels and a veteran team director doubling as mechanic.
When the Raleigh-Dunlop Tour of Ireland was all over, Howard had come in third overall, Allis fifth and Humphreys 47th. The domestique saw his best finish in Stage 8, where he came in third.
In the ensuing years, Humphreys helped bring Allis to victory and Howard to third place at the 175-mile Quebec-Montreal race in 1973. He supported his team to the top three best times overall in the 1974 Tour of Newfoundland.
Humphreys said he was consistently among the top 11 finishers at bike races across the U.S. that regularly drew 150 riders, but he'd only see first place once or twice a year.
"But I got as many plane tickets and had as good a career as a lot of the guys who won quite a few races," he said.
These days, Humphreys works in advertising sales for a company that markets senior center newsletters. He said he can't afford to retire because his prime earning years were consumed by bike racing.
"You're a bike racer making no money," he said of the unprofitable progression. "You decide to go into coaching and make no money. And just to make sure you're really broke, you go into race promotion."
Humphreys, with his wife and baby boy, moved in 1999 to the family home where he'd spent summers growing up. They pulled up with a UHaul trailer for what he thought would be a temporary stay as they pondered their options in the wake of a layoff from his advertising job with Pennsylvania-based Bicycling Magazine.
That's when he looked out at the lake and had the epiphany that kept him there.
"And I just said 'where in the hell are you going to go?' " he recalled. "You're here. You're actually home."
He traded two wheels for 18 when he became a tractor-trailer driver at an age when many others embark on retirement. It was full circle for the man who'd taken his first classes at New England Tractor Trailer Training School in 1967 and came back at the age of 65 for a refresher.
The Hillclimb
In another manifestation of the full circle, Humphreys is training now for the 50th Annual Mt. Washington Auto Road Bicycle Hillclimb on Aug. 19. It's the race he helped launch at a time when he'd just found his racing legs but was still an off-season ski bum waiting tables at Sugarbush Resort in Vermont.
"I sat around a table drinking some beer and somebody said 'we ought to have a race up Mount Washington," he said. It sounded like a good idea at the time, so he agreed. Then October rolled around and his phone rang.
"The Mount Washington thing we talked about, it's this Sunday," he recalled the voice on the other end of the line saying. "There's only nine, and you're one of them. So be there."
Allis came in first; Humphreys was sixth. He participated again over the next two years before bowing out for several decades. When he showed up again at the age of 60, he found a changed landscape filled with people and tents.
"This sport is no longer a subculture," he said. "It's open to the public."
The roughly 8-mile course rises steeply to the highest peak in the northeast at 6,288 feet. He's been training locally in the area of Mount Archer Road in Lyme which boasts the same 12% grade as the hillclimb course.
A reader and aspiring memoir author with a stack of books in the guest-house-turned-man-cave illustrating his varied topics of interest, Humphreys pointed to books like "Climb!" By Selene Yeager on how to train and one called "Built to Move" by Kelly and Juliet Starrett about how to incorporate stretching and conditioning into daily activities.
"At this point in life, when you're getting into your eighth decade, you're so fortunate to be physically fit and to have learned somewhere along the line how to take care of yourself," he said.
Humphreys said he'll be the only original to take on the challenge of Mount Washington, 50 years later.
