...in all their diversity. We celebrate fixies and singlespeeds, road bikes and touring bikes; cruisers, hybrids, choppers, and BMX; Dutch and English roadsters and their Chinese and Indian copies; pedicabs and trikes and cargo bikes; handbikes and tallbikes and kids bikes; and mountain bikes and recumbents and tandems.
We celebrate these machines because of the strength and freedom they give us, and because of the ways they link us to universal forces, to the earth and its weather and light, to our cities, towns, and countrysides, to each other, and to ourselves.
We celebrate bicycles because they are clean and efficient, requiring little in the way of material, energy, or space to do their work. We celebrate bicycles because they amplify our lives while diminishing our needs.
We celebrate bicycles because the bicycle is the most perfect amalgam of science, art, and love the human race has ever achieved.
...in all their diversity. We celebrate the tattooed messenger on his rattlecanned fixie, the hipster in square hornrims, the lady in her jogging suit on a hybrid; we celebrate the pannier-laden touring rider, the curb-jumping freerider, the club riders in their perfect Spandex; we celebrate the family wobbling along the street like a row of ducks as much as the paceline slicing its suburban shade; most of all we celebrate the pothole-dodgers riding rush hour traffic to their workstations in all weathers, wherever they may be, wherever they may work.
We celebrate the men and women who lock their rides to parking meters, poles, and fences in front of markets, offices, theaters, stores, and train stations all over the world; who ride through rain and snow and face the winds and heat and the indifference of the road hogs all around them.
We celebrate ourselves in you, and you in us. We are each other, however different we may be: we celebrate the bicyclist.