Cycling

"Women in pro cycling have long fought for better pay, race opportunities, and safety. So far, its been a difficult battle: 50 percent of women in the sport still earn only $11,800 or less per year, 17 percent get no salary at all, and a little more than half work second jobs to make ends meet."

"I want to die at a hundred years old with an American flag on my back and the star of Texas on my helmet, after screaming down an Alpine descent on a bicycle at 75 miles per hour. I want to cross one last finish line as my stud wife and my ten children applaud, and then I want to lie down in a field of those famous French sunflowers and gracefully expire, the perfect contradiction to my once anticipated poignant early demise."

"It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and can coast down them.... Thus you remember them as they actually are, while in a motorcar only a high hill impresses you, and you have no such accurate remembrance of country you have driven through as you gain by riding a bicycle."

"Despite the grim statistics, the survey found that more women are racing today than in years past. Yet only 11 percent make more than $35,500 a year, roughly equivalent to the UCI’s minimum wage for male Pro Tour riders. There is no minimum salary for women."

"The findings, which the Alliance presented to the UCI earlier, also outlines some demands that pro women have—primarily, access to health insurance. Second to that was post-career job placement or education. (Forty-eight percent of women pros have at least a four-year university degree, 19 percent have at least a masters degree, and 35 percent are currently enrolled as students.)"

"Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. Theres something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym."

"With an efficiency of 97 percent, bicycle technology is nearly perfect, so why do we use it only for transportation?"

"I began to feel that myself plus the bicycle equaled myself plus the world, upon whose spinning wheel we must all earn to ride, or fall into the sluiceways of oblivion and despair. That which made me succeed with the bicycle was precisely what had gained me a measure of success in life -- it was the hardihood of spirit that led me to begin, the persistence of will that held me to my task, and the patience that was willing to begin again when the last stroke had failed. And so I found high moral uses in the bicycle and can commend it as a teacher without pulpit or creed. She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life."

"To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I can take them. Voltaire himself might have invented the bicycle, since it contributes so much to man’s welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm?"

"Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat she knows she cant get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood."

"The steps of ones progress are distinctly marked. At the end of each lesson he knows he has acquired something, and he also knows what that something is, and likewise that it will stay with him. It is not like studying German, where you mull along, in a groping, uncertain way, for thirty years; and at last, just as you think youve got it, they spring the subjunctive on you, and there you are. No -- and I see now, plainly enough, that the great pity about the German language is, that you cant fall off it and hurt yourself. There is nothing like that feature to make you attend strictly to business. But I also see, by what I have learned of bicycling, that the right and only sure way to learn German is by the bicycling method. That is to say, take a grip on one villainy of it at a time, and learn it -- not ease up and shirk to the next, leaving that one half learned."