Peter Rich, Berkeley bike shop owner who launched Tour of California, dies at 83

Sam Whiting
Aug. 17, 2023

Peter Rich racing in Italy in 1961. A decade later when he was back in the Bay Area, he founded the Tour of California, a 685-mile road race.

Peter Rich was a Berkeley bike shop owner and former police officer when he came up with an idea big enough to pedal him into the wider world of endurance bicycle racing.

Operating out of his small storefront called Velo Sport, he organized, promoted and paid for a 685-mile, 10-stage race he named the Tour of California. Staged in 1971, it is credited with being the first international stage race in the United States.

The eight-day race, which brought in 80 riders on teams from Mexico to Germany, lasted just one year (though the concept was revived as the Amgen Tour of California in 2006). But Velo Sport lasted for 50 years and was central to the evolution of Bay Area cycling, as the home of Velo Club Berkeley and a newsletter that became Bicycling Magazine.

Rich, whose enthusiasm for distance riding overflowed into the equally brutal sport of endurance trail racing on horseback, had used a wheelchair since suffering a stroke 10 years ago. In June, he fell and broke his femur, which led to pneumonia. He died Aug. 3, at Kaiser Permanente Walnut Creek, said his daughter, Julie Peterson. He was 83 and just three months shy of his induction into the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame, to be held at a ceremony in Pennsylvania.

“Peter spread the culture of cycling to a receptive audience at the beginning of what today is known as ‘the bike boom,’ ’’ said Joe Breeze, who rode that boom by creating the modern mountain bike, the Breezer, in Mill Valley. “At the inception of Velo Sport, the bicycle in America was pretty much a kid’s sidewalk toy. Peter’s passion brought European cycling culture to the Bay Area and beyond.”

More than a bike shop owner and race promoter, Rich had been a successful track racer himself, competing in Italy. He came just shy of making the U.S. team for the 1960 Summer Olympic Games in Rome.

He opened Velo Sport in 1962 and became a coach for Olympic aspirants in both track racing and road racing. Among his innovations was cross training, which included chopping wood, lifting weights and doing lap work on the velodrome around the Polo Field in Golden Gate Park.

Rich bought a van and painted it in the livery of Velo Sport, and transported his riders to the park. At the end of the session, he would tell his riders he’d meet them back at the shop and drive off, leaving them to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge and up to San Rafael, then hitchhike across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, and ride back to Berkeley.

When they reached the store after this harrowing journey, Rich would say, “Oh, you’re back.” Or in George Mount’s case it was, “Oh, you’re home,” since Rich let riders live above the shop.

“Peter contributed in a way that moved the sport of bicycle road racing forward,” said Mount, a cyclist from Walnut Creek, who was coached by Rich to a sixth-place finish in the 112-mile road race event at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. He was the first American to crack the top 50 in modern times.

“Without Peter, I wouldn’t have even made the team,” said Mount. “He could take raw talent and create world-class athletes.”

But his influence in the world of bicycling went beyond road racing. His shop first opened on university Avenue but soon moved to Grove Street where it became a hangout the way Tower Records was for musicians and record collectors. Velo Sport was so cool that graphic artist David Lance Goines depicted it in one of his limited edition posters that are now collectible.

“The word on the street was that Peter Rich and his Velo Sport was the place to go,” said Breeze, who saw the poster and went to the shop in 1970. Breeze later opened the Marin Museum of Bicycling and Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in Fairfax. An orange road bike with the blue Velo Sport logo on the down tube is in the window display, with a descriptive placard.

“Peter Rich helped bring cycling back to America for the first time since its 1890s Golden Age,” said Breeze. “Peter was on the next wave, and all other cycling followed, mountain biking included.”

 

Peter Rich at his bike shop Velo Sport in Berkeley in 2002. The shop, opened in 1962, remained in business for 50 years.

Peter Starke Rich was born July 25, 1940, at Children’s Hospital in San Francisco. His father, Charles Rich, was an educator who left the family when Peter was 8. He and an older sister, Robin, were raised by their mother, Thelma, a preschool teacher. They lived in a square saltbox on Russell Street in South Berkeley. Rich attended Le Conte Elementary School, Willard Middle School, and began his long affair with bicycling by delivering both the morning and afternoon newspapers on a Schwinn Black Phantom.

At a 40th anniversary celebration at Velo Sport in March 2002, Rich recounted that he was one of three students among 2,700 at Berkeley High School who were uncool enough to ride a bike to school. He graduated in 1958 and enrolled at San Francisco State. Because people could not ride across the Bay Bridge, he moved to Half Moon Bay, a quick 30-mile commute by bicycle.

His riding to class outlasted class itself, as he dropped out to become a road racer in Italy. Upon his return, in 1962 he opened Velo Sport and soon met JoAnne Parchen, a student in comparative literature at UC Berkeley. She needed a quiet place to study, and Rich gallantly offered up his shop, which at that point was mostly empty of customers. They were married in 1963, and their daughter, Julie, was born six months later.

They lived in the unincorporated Contra Costa town of Canyon until the marriage ended on Christmas Eve 1965, said Peterson.

Rich’s marriage to the shop was a main factor, and Rich decided to switch careers by becoming a Berkeley police officer, leaving the shop in the care of a manager. But his three years on the force, 1966-69, were tumultuous years in Berkeley, and he eventually returned to the shop.

In the mid-1970s, Rich became interested in horses, thinking it would give him something in common with his daughter and bring them closer together, Peterson said. It didn’t really work, but it did bring him to his second wife, Rose Marie Hoffman, a Berkeley trail rider out of Grizzly Peak Stables.

They started riding together, then moved in together and were eventually married. Ever competitive, Rich rode in the Tevis Cup, a grueling 100-mile horseback race through rugged Sierra Nevada backcountry trails. He finished that race five times, while raising Arabian horses at an 8-acre ranch he and Hoffman established in the Orinda hills bordering Tilden Park.

 

Peter Rich, competing in the Tevis Cup in 1986, completed the 100-mile endurance trail-riding race five times.

In 2004, Riche moved the shop back to University Avenue where he had started. He closed it in 2011 to turn his full attention to the stables. His stroke, in 2014, left him paralyzed on his left side, and he never walked again.

“Peter was always a very positive, looking-forward kind of person,’’ said Hoffman. “He loved helping people, and even following his stroke he maintained his love of sport and community.”

Rich’s induction into the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame, in Pennsylvania, will be followed by a memorial Oct. 21 at the museum’s showroom in Davis (Yolo County). Mount, who serves on the museum’s board, will lead a memorial bike ride for his old coach and a tribute at the museum downtown. He expects hundreds of riders, including a cohort who will ride from Berkeley, 80 miles away, some wearing their old Velo Club jerseys, a gesture Rich would appreciate — though he would not appreciate their plan to take the train back.

“Peter would make them ride home,’’ said Mount, who now lives in Grants Pass, Ore. “But he’d probably find some Italian mother to throw them a spaghetti feed at the halfway point.”