Devoted Cyclist Was A Trailblazer On Two Wheels
The Age
Thursday February 5, 2004
Obituary - RON SHEPHERD - CYCLIST - 31-12-1934 - 13-1-2004
Ron Shepherd was the master touring cyclist. He was the driving force that brought the bicycle back to Melbourne, and an instigator of the great cycling boom that began in the early 1970s.
Ron was educated at Wesley College and graduated in science and education at Melbourne University.
He taught at University High School. From 1970 to 1973, he was at the prestigious Australian Council for Educational Research. He also spent three years teaching in Malaysia under the Colombo Plan. His colleagues have described him as a brilliant and creative teacher.
Among cyclists, he will be best remembered for his remarkable work with gears. In the 1950s cyclists were fascinated with speed. Gears, if they existed, were the type that would go into a wristwatch. In 1956, when Ron was teaching in country Victoria, he and his brother Barry put together Australia's first bicycles with wide range double chain wheels. They used them to ride all over Victoria and Tasmania.
Throughout his life, Ron rarely used a car. He became fascinated with the science of motion, effort and cadence. He and his first wife, Elizabeth, went bike touring in England, Denmark and Sweden. He performed hundreds of hill climbing experiments to determine the effects of cadence on gear size and performance. For example, he discovered it was absurd to pedal furiously down a hill so that you could easily get up the next. Less effort was expended if you used your gears and had the right cadence.
He published a small magazine called The Low Gear Bulletin, which established his reputation around the world. In 1976, he led 33 Australians on a 7700-kilometre ride across the United States to celebrate the 200th birthday of the American union. He advised those taking part to install third chain wheels and wide range gears so that they could get across the Rocky Mountains.
In 1976, the third chain wheel was extraordinary, unheard of in Australia and utterly unknown in the US.
Ron had the air of a quiet scholarly professor. He loved to pick up an old bike and restore it. He used to say: ``You can pay $2000 and more for a lightweight bicycle made of fancy metals. If you just diet for a few weeks, and take off a couple of kilos, you can save yourself $1500 with a cheaper bike."
In 1974, he was a founding member of the Bicycle Institute, later Bicycle Victoria.
After he returned from the ride in the US, he desperately wanted something similar for Victoria. It was through his enthusiasm that the Great Victorian Bike Ride was born. The first ride took place in 1984, with 2100 cyclists. It became the world's biggest all-assisted bike ride and has since been copied elsewhere in Australia and in New Zealand.
In 1975, he was at the birth of Melbourne's greatest bicycle club, the Melbourne Bicycle Touring Club.
He was always organising rides and fighting for safety for bike riders. In 1983, he started the Prahran Bicycle Committee and he persuaded Prahran Council to develop a bike plan. This led to the creation of Melbourne's first bike paths, along the Yarra.
In 1984, to celebrate his 50th birthday, Ron rode from Adelaide to Perth, 2880 kilometres across the Nullarbor, in 19 days, at an average of 151 kilometres a day. He described it as ``dead boring", not nearly as interesting as riding across the US, Europe, Malaysia or Australian Alps.
In 1987 he married again, to Anne Booth, a psychologist. After the wedding reception, they left on a tandem bicycle, decorated with flowers. Three years later he was hit by a progressive paraplegia, which eventually left him in a wheelchair.
Ron did not give up his bicycle campaigning, or his riding. He designed a U-bike with a frame that, with his failing legs, he could step through. He rode this for three years and helped to provide similar bikes for other disabled riders.
When he was unable to walk, he designed a recumbent bike with a chain wheel and pedals that he could operate with his hands. The bike, which was quite heavy, had 50 gears.
In 2000, with two of the world's other gear experts, Frank Berto in California and Raymond Henry in Entraigues, France, Ron published the definitive book on the history of bicycle gearing, The Dancing Chain.
But fate was cruel to Ron. In April 2003 he was diagnosed with a brain tumour. Even that did not stop him. He was still writing and planning almost until Christmas.
His memorial service at Holy Trinity Uniting Church in Brighton was colourful indeed. Cyclists rode from all over Melbourne to attend.
When Ron was asked why he was so passionate about bicycles, he liked to give a 1930s quote from journalist and science-fiction writer Twells Brex:
``this slender, whippet thing of steel and rubber that carries
a man far and fast, by his own glad effort, on the open road,
and takes him away from his cares as nothing else can."
Ron is survived by his wife Anne and daughter Caroline.
Keith Dunstan, an old friend of Ron Shepherd, rode with him in the US in 1976.
© 2004 The Age