Today the announcement was made public. Pope Francis has a custom commemorative bike from Breezer Bikes, and in honor of the presentation another 100 bicycles have been given to the city of Philadelphia for use in a public bicycle program.
My lifelong friend Joe Breeze is a world renowned bicycle designer. He got his start in 1977 when I asked him if he could build me a bike for this new "sport" we had come up with, racing fat-tire bikes off-road down a steep hill. The first of the ten bikes that he designed and built for this purpose is now in the collection of the Smithsonian. The second, which belongs to me, is in the collection of the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. These bikes represent the first of what became a worldwide wave of mountain biking, and represent the beginning of the most important cycling development of the 20th Century. Only 20 years after a few of my friends and I gathered at the top of a steep hill for the first competition on these bikes, mountain biking became an Olympic sport. World mountain bike champions are entitled to wear the rainbow jersey signifying that title.
Joe and I just spent a week together at the Interbike international bicycle trade show in Las Vegas. While we were there he let it slip that his company was going to present Pope Francis with a special bike. Although he is most famous for his mountain bike designs, Joe's primary interest is in bicycles for transportation. The "people's bike" is exactly that, a practical bike for local transportation. Perhaps Pope Francis will use his new bicycle to sneak out of the Vatican at night and do good works in secret.
Sometimes I wonder what I did in a former life that entitled me to a friend like Joe. Joe was instrumental in helping me compile the definitive account of the birth of the new cycling sport, and he wrote the foreword.
Joe's passion for bicycling inspired him to spend two years planning, designing and building the Marin Museum of Bicycling, which includes the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame. Here he is with a sculpture called "Ibis Maximums."