POWER TO THE PEOPLE
Mike Baczkowski has ridden bikes seriously, and ridden serious bikes, since his late 20s. Now 80, he recalls over the phone to Cycling Plus from his winter home in Florida of his penchant for fixing up old and abandoned bikes. Forgotten treasures, such as a 1986 Raleigh Touring 14 bike that he rescued from the garbage, restored and took over to Italy to ride the original L’Eroica vintage bike event in Tuscany. There’s also a 1980 Colnago Super that he’d put in the miles around his home in Hamburg, New York, close to Niagara Falls and the Canadian border; and the steel Bianchi that he was on in 2005 when he got wiped out by a motorist at an intersection on, ironically, Cycle to Work day, an incident that left him with a broken neck vertebrae and a long convalescence.
“I RENTED THE ALUMINIUM VERSION OF THE CREO FOR A COUPLE OF DAYS. YOU COULDN’T WIPE THE SMILE OFF MY FACE WITH A POWER SANDER!”
He later become a belated, but ultimately enthusiastic, adopter of carbon, buying a 2014 Guerciotti Eureka in the bright orange stylings of the CCC pro team at the time.
“My friends kept insisting I get a carbon bike,” he says. “They were faster up the hills on their carbon
