A Blind Bicyclist and His Daughter Work in Tandem

New York Times

02-05-2025

Good morning. It's Friday. We'll look at a father-daughter team that is preparing to ride in the Five Boro Bike Tour this weekend. We'll also find out what prompted a composer to write a tribute after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1968 while campaigning for president.
Thomas Panek has run more than 20 road races. His time in the New York Half Marathon last year was 2 hours 9 minutes 21 seconds.
On Sunday, he will cover some of the same ground in a different way, as a rider in the Five Boro Bike Tour. 'I'm a little nervous,' he said. 'I don't know what to expect when you're using a different group of muscles in your body.'
That sentence skipped over two things that will set him apart from most of the 32,000 other riders. One is that he will ride on a tandem bicycle.
The other is that he is blind.
He has retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disorder that left him legally blind by the time his daughter, Madeleine, was born 22 years ago. She will be the one in the front seat of the tandem, shifting the gears and calling out when turns are coming or she needs to brake. They have practiced stopping because, as he put it, 'if she were to suddenly brake, I would get thrown forward into her.'
Many sightless athletes talk about their collaboration with their guides. 'Harmony and synchrony' was how the blind runner Jerusa Geber dos Santos of Brazil described the relationship during the Olympics in Paris last year. Madeleine Panek talked about how she and her father trust each other, an idea he echoed.
'Holding my hand when she was 2 years old, helping me cross the street, it's second nature for her to guide me,' he said. 'It takes some coordination to trust the captain if you're blind and you don't know the person. We already have that relationship. That is going to be the easy part. The hard part is getting it done.'
He knows the route from running — it is similar to the course of the New York City Marathon. The two races start and end in different places, but both cover the 2.6-mile-long Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and highways like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Some of the hazards are similar, too, like potholes that can seem as large as craters on the moon.
But some of the hazards are different for cyclists: Expansion joints between sections of pavement could be trouble spots. Riders who do not spot them in time could fly over the handlebars.
Thomas Panek started a new job last month, as the president and chief executive of Lighthouse Guild, a nonprofit organization that provides services for blind people. When he heard about other cyclists from the Lighthouse Guild who would be riding, he signed up.
He waited to ask his daughter to be the pilot 'because she just finished her MCATs,' he said — the standardized test for medical school applications. 'I didn't want to add any additional pressure,' he said. She is coming to New York for the weekend as she approaches graduation from Binghamton University and is applying to medical school.
Bike New York, which runs the Five Boro Bike tour, says that 210 riders with disabilities will be in the ride on Sunday and that 101 of them will be visually impaired cyclists on tandem bicycles. Ken Podziba, the president of Bike New York, first rode in the tour in 2002 on a tandem bike with Matthew Sapolin, a friend who was blind and was the commissioner of the Mayor's Office for People With Disabilities under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Podziba, the sports commissioner under Bloomberg, loved it and ended up working for Bike New York.
Thomas Panek said their tandem is 'a long vehicle,' adding that 'you have to account for the fact that it's almost like pulling a trailer.'
'On a tandem bike,' he said, 'you're pedaling for two. If I get tired at some point, Madeleine can pick up the level of effort.' And vice versa, he said. 'But on the Verrazzano, it's going to take everything from both of us.'
There is a chance of showers throughout the day, but also sun and temperatures near 80. In the evening, there is a 30 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms, with a low around 63.
In effect until May 26 (Memorial Day).
The latest New York news
A first New York performance of a requiem from the 1960s
On a June day in 1968, a man named Frank Lewin drove his three daughters to a railroad station not far from where they lived in Princeton, N.J. He wanted to watch for a train that was going to pass by. 'I mostly remember standing there, and that it was very hot,' said one of the daughters, Naomi Lewin.
The train Frank Lewin wanted to see was carrying the body of Robert F. Kennedy, the former attorney general and senator who had been assassinated while campaigning for president in Los Angeles a couple of days earlier. The funeral had been held at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. The train was bound for Washington; Kennedy was to be buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
Frank Lewin was a composer who was perhaps best known then for scores for television shows like 'The Defenders' and 'The Nurses' on CBS. But he wrote serious music, too, including an opera based on John Steinbeck's novella 'Burning Bright,' and decided to write a requiem Mass in memory of Kennedy. It will be given its first New York performance, with Matthew Lewis and the St. George's Choral Society, on Sunday at the Rutgers Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side.
'I think my dad felt there was a need for a requiem in the English language,' Naomi Lewin said. The works by Mozart, Verdi and Fauré follow Latin texts. Lewin's setting of the Lord's Prayer in English is particularly lovely.
'Dad wanted to compose music for an entire Catholic requiem service,' Naomi Lewin said. 'So instead of having the congregation speak the Lord's Prayer, as they would normally do during a church service, he wrote music for it, and labeled it to be sung by the congregation.'
As for Kennedy, 'my dad obviously admired him,' Naomi Lewin said. The Lewins were German Jews who had come to the United States 'looking for freedom — and the sort of freedom that Robert Kennedy was fighting for,' she said. 'Robert Kennedy had a legacy of civil rights and helping poor people. This is history.'
Frank Lewin turned to the Roman Catholic chaplain at Princeton University and others from the university's Aquinas Institute who 'gave him pointers because he didn't know about the Catholic liturgy.' The piece was first performed in the Princeton University Chapel in 1969.
'Dad used the Catholic text' for the Lord's Prayer, 'ending at 'deliver us from evil,' with no 'kingdom' or 'power' or 'glory,'' said Naomi Lewis, who was a professional singer and a classical music radio personality. 'Years later, having sung in countless churches, I told Dad that he should compose a Protestant ending.' So he did.
Così fan tattoo
Dear Diary:
I have been attending operas for more than 25 years and getting tattoos for almost twice as long.
On a trip to New York in 2018, I attended a Metropolitan Opera production of Mozart's 'Così Fan Tutte' that was staged in Coney Island and featured actual sideshow performers, including a fire-eater, a sword swallower, a snake dancer and a contortionist.
Later that summer, I returned to the city for an annual tattoo show in Manhattan. Some of the same sideshow performers provided entertainment.
As one woman came off the stage, I told her I had seen her earlier that year in the opera.
She looked at the heavily tattooed and pierced crowd.
'I'm guessing you'll be the only person this weekend who tells me that,' she said.
— Jil McIntosh
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you Monday. — J.B.
P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Stefano Montali and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [e-mail].
Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.