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.

As Hoody put it:

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.