Cumhurbaskanligi Turkiye Bisiklet Turu'nun 50 Yillik Oykusu

176 pp, color and b/w figures, pb.

The story begins not with my first bicycle, whose pedals I could barely reach, but with the white line and the word “finish” in front of our house. Over the years, the location of that word written on the ground has moved 10 meters ahead, and then moved back…then it moved across the street…Somebody came and wrote “arrive” in place of “finish”; someone else preferred to write it in Turkish: “bitiş”. Basically, the end point of all bicycle races for forty-five years was in this general location.

It was at this spot that I developed the thirst for the sport of bicycle racing with all of its thrills, chills, and spills. It all took place there.

Actually, I got acquainted with bicycle racing even earlier. In 1964, the year I learned to read, I remember devouring in one sitting an article about bicycle racing on the back page of the six-page long newspaper Cumhuriyet that came to our house. When I would recount this incident later I used to wonder if this was a case of déjà vu, until the day, years later, when I was in the archives of Cumhuriyet.  I remember shouting “Here it is!” I hadn’t made it up—what my seven year old hungry, empty brain had remembered was right in front of me.