Steve Tilford

Steve Tilford

The streets were wet this morning, and for a minute I debated whether I should to out in the dark to meet up with the WeMoRi. I took the old Orbea, thinking I'd probably get wet and dirty and maybe puncture a tire. Halfway to the lakefront the streets were dry and I merged into the group as it came flying down Marconi, turning onto Robert E. Lee maybe third or fourth wheel. The pace picked up, I accelerated, hanging on to the wheel in front, then, Wham, I slammed the front wheel in to that damned little pothole that I never see till the last second and blew the front tire. I coasted to a stop hoping it wouldn't snag or come off the rim before I could get my feet down. The first spare tube blew out. It was still dark and hard to tell if there was a cut in the casing somewhere, so I put about 40 psi into the second spare and headed home.

I thought it was a bad morning - until it got worse.

First thing I saw when I fired up the computer to upload Strava data was that Steve Tilford had died in a car accident. The details are on his blog, posted by his friend Vincent Davis who was with him.

I didn't know Steve personally - never met him, probably never raced with him - but on the other hand I felt like I knew him very well. He started racing just a few years after I did, but while I was always down here in the small local races, he was way up there in the big international races. He was one of the real pioneers of U.S. cycling, moving seamlessly from road to mountain bike to cyclocross and winning championships in all of them. He never really capitalized on any of it. If he had enough to get to the next race, he was happy. In a lot of ways, I identified with him. I added a link from my blog to his a few years ago. He was one of the few who consistently updated his blog, and was never shy about calling out the dopers or the cheaters or any of the other things that threatened to drag bike racing down. If you don't know who he was, well, you're probably relatively young. Steve made 57 earlier this year and was just about ready to resume racing following the skull fracture and TBI he suffered, and documented on his blog, last fall, a few months after being inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame.  I will really miss his blog posts and I will especially miss reading about his come-back from his skull fracture. I have no doubt he would have been dropping guys half his age by June. So his unexpected death feels like a real personal loss to me and a huge loss to the U.S. cycling community. It kind of sucks being at this age where life stops giving you things and starts taking them away instead.

http://www.sltrib.com/news/5141593-155/two-dead-in-crash-of-semis

 "A chain reaction accident involving two semi-trailer rigs and a van killed two men — including internationally known cyclist Stephen Tilford — early Wednesday morning on Interstate 70 near the Utah-Colorado border. Utah Highway Patrol Sgt. Todd Royce said the tragic events began with the first semi drifting off the road and then overcorrecting. It overturned, coming to rest on its side and blocking all eastbound lanes of the highway at mile marker 214. Moments later, a Mercedes-Benz van plowed into and through the big rig's trailer. Tilford, 57, of Topeka, Kansas, got out and was standing next his vehicle when a second semi crashed into the wreckage, striking and killing him. 
The driver of the second semi, 70-year-old Stanley Williams of Grand Junction, Colo., also died of his injuries at the scene. A passenger in the van was hospitalized with non-life threatening injuries; the driver of the first semi was not reported hurt. The highway was closed down for nearly four hours as wreckage was cleared and the scene investigated by troopers. Tilford, inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 2000, had five Union Cycliste Internationale masters' class championships, four U.S. National Cyclo-Cross titles and two world championships in Masters Cyclocross competitions, in addition to a U.S. National Mountain Bike championship."