Tom Mayer wasn’t completely satisfied beating brother Jim and the locomotive on a bicycle ride from Durango to Silverton. He wanted people to come with him, but building a group was difficult in 1971.
It took the pull of downtown business owner Ed Zink to make the Iron Hose Bicycle Classic a reality. Now, 46 years later, some of the most famous names in the world of cycling have competed in a race Tom Mayer inspired.
“I loved Silverton, but I couldn’t get anybody to go with me,” Tom said. “I tried to get a club going. I would go ride 80 miles and come get the guys from the club and say, ‘OK, let’s go do a 20-mile ride,’ so they could keep up. It wasn’t like the Durango of today.”
Tom went to the Colorado State Patrol and told them he wanted to put together a race for Memorial Day weekend.
“They said, ‘No way, we’re absolutely not going to have that, especially on a holiday. It’s too dangerous,’” Tom said.
So Tom, who knew Zink only as the owner of the Outdoorsman shop that sold some bicycle parts, approached Zink with his idea.
Zink knew the Mayer brothers from Durango High School. He was younger than Jim but older than Tom.
When Zink was 20, he started running a general sporting goods store, the Outdoorsman. Zink knew of Tom’s interest in bicycles, but they didn’t interact much beyond bicycle transactions.
“He came in one day and said, ‘Gosh, I raced my brother. Rode my bike against my brother on the train. I did it last week, and you ought to do this,’” Zink said. “I didn’t take it too seriously at first. After awhile, the town wanted a bit of a kickoff celebration for the tourist season for Memorial Day. They called it ‘Narrow Gauge Days,’ and the chamber of commerce asked who had any ideas of what we ought to do. As a young Main Street businessman, I said, ‘Let’s get some bicycles and race the train.’”
So, in 1972, Zink and Mayer rallied 36 riders for the first official race, though the IHBC considers Tom’s 1971 trip the first year for the event.
The 1972 race went from Durango to the top of Coal Bank Pass. The highway wasn’t closed.
“We didn’t ask for a permit, we just did it,” Zink said. “The concept of a permit never occurred to us. It was nothing negative from the highway patrol’s point of view. They didn’t think it was a big deal and weren’t paying much attention.”
The event grew and eventually reached more than 1,000 participants.
Zink said an older trooper did not think the IHBC was safe and thought it was a mistake to allow it to continue.
“He was concerned about safety, as he should have been,” Zink said. “We had a meeting with a new young captain, and this older patrolman pulled out a rule book and said ‘here’s the rules for special events.’ One thing he cited was they were allowing the cyclists to speed on the downhills, and allowing them to cross the center line, and the rules didn’t allow for that. ‘We cannot issue this permit.’
“We were pretty nervous at that moment. But the captain, bless his heart, said if we close the road and give him a permit, then they can ride as fast as they want, so why not do that? That’s how it came to be that the road was closed.”
Zink was the race director for 43 years and still serves on the race committee’s board.
“If it hadn’t been for Ed, it wouldn’t have happened,” Tom said. “Ed put two and two together, went to the highway department and sold them on it. History was born.”
By 1977, Tom was more interested in mountain biking than the IHBC. Zink kept it alive and grew it into the multi-day cycling festival it has become. Through the years, riders such as 1984 Olympic gold medalist Alexei Grewal, former Fort Lewis College star and Discovery Cycling team member Tom Danielson and legendary mountain bike pioneer Ned Overend have been crowned champions, with Overend holding the men’s road race record of five victories.
This year, homegrown stars Howard Grotts, a 2016 mountain bike Olympian, and rising road star Sepp Kuss will line up in their hometown race.
Olympian Mara Abbott has won the women’s road race a record six times, with other stars such as Juli Furtado and Durango hero Carmen Small competing.
But Zink said perhaps none of it would have happened without the name behind the first race – and it wasn’t Tom Mayer.
“Nobody was even close to Mike Elliott that first year,” Zink said. “It wasn’t competitive.”
Elliott was a famous athlete in 1972, but it wasn’t for his exploits on a bicycle. Elliott was three-time Olympian in cross-country skiing. He was a two-time NCAA cross-country skiing champion at Fort Lewis College and was an icon in the Nordic ski world. When Zink got him on board for the first IHBC, he dominated the field.
“We were just lucky,” Zink said. “This whole deal was lucky, but it was especially lucky someone of his caliber won it because the cycling media took it much more seriously because an Olympian won it than if some kid from Durango had won it. He was certainly impressive.”
Elliott is now 75 and still lives in Durango. His family is heavily involved in Nordic skiing, and his son Tad is a U.S. national team member.
Elliott said he rode a bicycle often as a way to train for skiing. He remembers first riding in a race called the Tour de Valley that a French teacher at DHS put together. It went from the Iron Horse Inn to Hermosa. Elliott frequented Zink’s shop, and Zink told him of the idea of a race from McDonald’s up to the top of Coal Bank.
“Then you could ride the rest of the way down to Silverton to see if you could beat the train,” Elliott said. “I knew a lot of people working on the train, and I knew the brothers. I mostly knew Jim from the train. Dolph Kuss and I would go backpacking and had a climbing business, and we would ride the train up with clients to climb the peaks and fish and come out seven days later. So I knew about the brothers and the challenge.”
Elliott said he remembers putting on his leather bike helmet, which he called a brain basket, and starting the race on a beautiful day in a T-shirt and shorts. He remembers riding in a group of three until Shalona Hill, when a rider from Farmington dropped off the pack. He dropped the other rider near Electra Lake and rode solo to the summit of Coal Bank from there. He recalls his sister and her family as well as the Kuss family cheering him on when he got up Coal Bank.
“Some wore helmets, some did not, and the race really didn’t start until the Iron Horse Inn,” he said. “I stood up on the pedals a lot and used those muscle groups from skiing. I had a pretty good engine and was always fit.
“We all met at the top of Coal Bank, then rode into Silverton and rode in with a crew. I was breathing harder going downhill because I was scared going down there.”
A few of the racers got into Silverton ahead of the train, which took about 3 hours, 30 minutes. Elliott said the train got stuck just around Shalona and had to back up a bit and try to clear the tracks a second time.
“They accused us of greasing the tracks,” Elliott said.
When the racers got to town, they went around looking for some kind of bicycle-themed trophy to give Elliott for his win.
“We found some kind of craft that was a high-wheeler bicycle, and Mike Elliott got that one,” Tom Mayer said.
Elliott no longer has the trophy, but he remembers exactly what the craft was.
“It was a candle,” he said with a big laugh. “I won a candle. I don’t have it anymore. We weren’t even sure the race would take off or anything. I was in Europe ski racing the second year of it, but it really blossomed. There was a picture of us going into the valley with the train in the background. I was racing bicycles in Colorado later that summer, and everyone was asking what it was like racing the train. It ballooned from there, and now you see this incredible community event all these years later.”
jlivingston@ durangoherald.com
