The great Sam Abt is finally done following the Tour de France. He went west this week at age 91.
I never met Sam, much less worked with him. He was an editor at The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, a real chain-smoking pro who worked on the Pentagon Papers and other top-shelf stories and covered the Tour de France — in his spare time — because he loved it. I was a editor at a series of lesser papers who read Sam at work (if the paper subscribed to the NYT wire service) and rode bicycles in my spare time because I loved it.
But my friends Charles Pelkey and Andrew Hood knew and worked with Sam, as did James Startt, who has a fond remembrance of him over at Velo.
Writes James:
Simply put, his writing was exceptional. It was at once efficient, witty, insightful and at times downright transcendent. Oh, and his fans went well beyond the press room, as at least one head of state would call him during the Tour to get his take on the race.
All of this from a chain-smoking reporter who never really rode a bike. But he knew the sport like few others did.
Sam was covering Le Tour in those dark days when an American fan had to settle for a soupçon of “Wide World of Sports” coverage, a couple grafs from The Associated Press in your local paper’s sports section (if you were lucky), and Winning: Bicycle Racing Illustrated, which would hit your mailbox about three months after the race was done and dusted.
When VeloNews moved to Boulder in the late Eighties I latched onto the back of that breakaway and hung on for dear life, doing what I’d always done for newspapers — cartooning, writing and editing. I even helped cover a few Tours, from a distance, as an editor. The magazine offered to send me abroad a time or two, but I always declined, thinking I could get more done at home.
But that meant I never got to meet one of the titans of the Tour. Not a racer — I met more than a few of those folks — but Sam, who fed the monkey for all us bike-racing junkies.
Abt was a mentor and inspiration for a generation of English-language journalists who later came to cover a once-exotic sport that’s since gone global.
Peace to Sam, his family and friends, and to his many, many devoted readers.
• Addendum: Here’s the NYT obit.
Mad Blog Media 
Did you ever regret not covering a race in person in Europe or perhaps in Australia?
Oh, for sure. It would’ve been great to catch a few stages of the Tour, or a World Cup cyclocross.
But we had people who were loads better at covering that stuff than I was. I had never been to Europe, had no languages other than Basic American, and had covered only midrange U.S. races like Cactus Cup, Sea Otter, La Vuelta de Bisbee, Casper Classic, cyclocross nationals, etc.
Plus I made most of my money as a copy editor, and was also cartooning and writing commentary for both VN and BRAIN. I needed reliable Internet, a scanner to digitize the ’toons so I could color them in the MacBook, and a few hours every day where I wasn’t in transit from the finish of one stage to the start of another, trying to find a hotel and something to eat, drunk, or asleep.
It would’ve been fun, maybe. Certainly invigorating. Watching the Coors Classic from the roadside was a whole lot different from watching a big race on TV. It was one of the things that got me wound up about cycling. That, and Greg LeMond in the Tour.
But I thought I was better suited to work the Tour from this side of the pond, and that’s how the ol’ cookie crumbled. I mean, shit, I had a dozen years of working a copy desk under my bibs. At a newspaper Back in the Day™ we were shipping the equivalent of a big, fat novel every day. Working a magazine or a website is a breeze after that noise.
You story reminds of the times when John Tesh narrated the races and wrote the music and Lemond and Fignon battled it out in Paris!
Those were the days, amirite? James Startt interviewed Sam Abt back in 2012 for Bicycling magazine and Sam recalled how practically nobody Stateside gave a rat’s ass about bicycle racing — especially the press — and how that and the Tour itself changed over the years. Good stuff.
Cycling did not even have the Olympic glow of people looking forward to it every four years. I guess each sport has its recommended daily allowance. Nobody cares about tennis, but you might catch a little Wimbledon once a year. Nobody cares about gymnastics Or figure skating, Except for once every four years. Soccer is still a niche sport in this country, But people will tune in for the World Cup.
I know this was true last time around, but I’m pretty sure for the last three Olympics, women’s ice hockey has gotten better ratings than the Stanley Cup finals. The USA – Canada match gets about a third of all eyeballs in Canada, and several million in the lower 48., but the Stanley Cup struggles to hit more than six figures.
But cycling has everything going against it. The big races are either classics that have been held on modified versions of the same course forever, or multi day races, making it hard to convince advertisers that will watch six hours a day for an extended period of time. When the Olympics come around, it’s typically on a made up course. Plus, everybody’s exhausted from a busy spring and summer. I’m guessing that if you ask most racers, if they could only win one, would you pick a grand tour, a spring, classic, a world championship, or a gold medal at the Olympics… the Olympic would come in fourth place.
For some of us oddballs and nerds, this was a feature, not a bug. In K – 8th grades, I would probably watch three or four baseball games a year, just so I knew the players on the home team. But I would read Thomas Boswell religiously. Scholastic book fair time, I was grabbed the “did you know?” Or the history of lacrosse, greatest left-handed goalies, early days or bare knuckle boxing, whatever … which is why I could tell you that the state sport of Maryland is jousting, and the state sport of Colorado is Burro racing. So for me and the three or four other total dorks out there, reading about le Tour was our preferred modality anyway.
I resemble that “oddballs and nerd” remark. As a kid (and even today, as a geezer) mostly I couldn’t have cared less about sports, unless I was doing them. And even then I rarely paid a whole lot of attention to the big stars/events.
So, being a swimmer, I knew about Mark Spitz, and I would watch swimming on TV if I could find any (hello again, “Wide World of Sports”).
The strange thing is, I was years away from being able to drive but was fascinated by auto racing. Not stock cars, but races like 24 Hours of Le Mans, Sebring, Grand Prix, Can-Am … anything with ups and downs plus left and right turns. Jim Hall and his winged Chaparral. I had a slot-car track and everything.
But bike racing really grabbed me. Once I finally discovered it, I did it, read about it, watched it on TV and in person, the whole ball of wax. Different strokes, hey?
Different spokes for different folks.
We got the NYT delivered to our rooms for *free* back in college. So that was my first exposure to Samuel, for the handful of summers that I had training on post. Those were the Fignon, Hinault, and LeMond years, three French guys, yeah? (I’m assuming Greg was pronounced “greh,” short for Grégoire?)
* free. = we didn’t have to physically pay for the newspaper, it just came out of your cadet account, don’t even think we got an annual subscription discount. Each roommate was charged 50% of the cost of the daily paper, even if you had a three person room. They say that in the army, the pay is mighty fine.. they give you a hundred dollars, and take back 99 … oh Lord, I wanna go, but they won’t let me go, please Lord I want to go home.
Sam could do the bizniz. John Wilcockson was another good read come Tour time. He’s covered something like 45 Tours (I’ve lost track). He was one of the original Trio at Inside Communications, which brought Velo-news to Boulder from Vermont in 1988, renamed it VeloNews, and declined to hire me as managing editor, all praise to Cthulhu, may Its tentacles grow ever longer. He’s forgotten more about big-time bicycle racing than I will ever know.
He’s also the guy who got me riding my age on my birthday. He’s been doing that forever.
Marco Pantani: The Legend of a Tragic Champion was a good one. Maybe even Shakespearean.
Are we halfway through le Tour? Haven’t watched a minute of it. Until LUG and/or Joe Lindsey get the band back together, probably will stay that way. (But just in case, I had better dust off my NRRBBB and my Monty Python and Fletch quote database!)
Stage nine today. I’m not paying attention either, though I do peek at The Guardian‘s coverage now and then in case anything interesting leaps out at me.
I think 30 years of working in cycling journalism was sort of like being an employee at the candy factory. “Go ahead, pal, eat all you want, you’ll get sick of it eventually.” That’s kinda what happened to me. I’d rather ride my own bike than watch someone else do it.
“I’d rather ride my own bike than watch someone else do it.”
Kinda where I am at. I’m curious enough about the eventual Pogacar v Vingegaard (or whoever) outcome, but otherwise, would prefer to just ride my bike. Plenty of hills up this way to ride while fantasizing over Le Beeg Sheew or worrying about whether I go into cardiac arrest pushing it to over 150 BPM. I think the Lance Armstrong fiasco cured me of gluing myself to pro bike racing.
Sorry to hear this. I tried to read his stuff when I could find it. That wasn’t easy.
I still have the shortwave radio I bought way, way, way back in the day, so I could catch a 5 minute summary the BBC.
And folks, including me still gripe about today’s coverage.
Shortwave! That’s what I call going the extra mile. Chapeau!
I miss hearing Carlton Kirby and Sean Kelly rocking the Eurosport.
Jeeze. I have no idea what happened to my last shortwave radio. I used to tune in to Radio Hanoi, Radio Peking, and Radio Moscow during the Vietnam War. Does shortwave still even exist in the age of the Internet?
Hey Khal – It’s still alive. If you like podcasts, check out On The Media’s – The Divided Dial on the subject.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/divided-dial
Thanks! That looks like an interesting site.
My shortwave radio, a big nasty boom-box size thing that was mostly used in the FM band, was stolen from the infield at the Ed Rudolph Velodrome in Northbrook, Illinois, as I was warming up. They also grabbed my spare wheels. That was back in the early 1970’s. If anyone reading this knows where it is, I would like to have it back, even if the 10 D-cell batteries that powered it are probably dead by now. They can keep the wheels, as they were old and beat up.
Ah… LeMond and Hinault and Fignon. Epic battles that dwarf the bullshit they sling now on Netflix recaps. Mostly cause of the $$$ that UAE pours into their super group which I guess is worth watching just to root against? I’ve been watching the NBC YouTube shorties each night. Sadly old Phil is slipping and half the time kinda babbling. Yet I do realize how hard it must be to make sense out of video feeds and then place a coherent comment . But Bobke seems to be able to.
Ok….I’ll come clean… I totally hate the look of the carbon bikes they all ride. I get kinda worked up since they are so inelegant with their blocky tubes and no “neck” front fork/stem visual. Also, can’t prove this, but it seems there are more crashes then ever? In slo-mo it looks like these light bikes make it easy for the rear wheel to break loose of the pavement. Of course the speeds are higher than ever but that is due in part to the whiz-bang tech of latest and greatest bike stuff. I don’t think the actual motor (rider) is the factor but what do I know. I’m a guy that struggles to hold 16 mph. With a tailwind.
Carbon fiber is for guitars; steel is for bike frames, unless you can afford titanium.
Carbon fiber might make them go a little faster. Are we sure they are still not racing Modified Production rather than Stock?
Go faster: the guitars?
A friend of mine refers to it as “Carpet Fiber”. That said, he recently bought a Carpert Fiber Bianchi
His stories were magical. RIP.
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