If one is looking for cultural testosterone and raging off-the-wall competition in the world of communications, Manhattan was – and is – home plate.

Regardless, I did rise to the editorship before embarking on a freelance career in the late ’60’s.

Don’t get me wrong, I think bikes are terrific. I own several of my own, including a trendy mountain style, and ride them for pleasure and light exercise.

The bicycle is a former child’s toy that has now been elevated to icon status because, presumably, it can move the human form from pillar to post without damage to the environment.

They still talk about the night that Augie Pabst, a fresh-faced heir to the brewing fortune, drove a rented Falcon into the swimming pool of the Mark Thomas Inn in Monterey, California. His reviews were so good that he repeated the act at a Howard Johnson’s outside Denver.

I have spent – or wasted – my life around motor racing: driving, promoting, and writing about what Ernest Hemingway once linked with mountain climbing and bull fighting as the only true sports. The rest, he sniffed, are merely games.

To Secretary Pena: Fix your busted airport and leave bikes alone and the commuting to us sociopathic drivers.

I think even as this is one of our shortest events, we'll keep all the competitors quite busy and challenged with the variety of tracks on the schedule. This year will allow for more possible hotel time but also some very long, late legs through the night. We look forward to a good, safe event.

My father, Raymond F. Yates, was a successful writer of technical nonfiction and such a life seemed a reasonable alternative to real work.

Much of our quiet time is spent boating and generally loafing at our second home in the 1,000 Islands on the St. Lawrence River.