Column: How ‘Breaking Away' helped a newbie cyclist conquer his inner critic

Chicago Tribune

19-06-2025

The right sports movie can really do a number on you. It can maneuver around cliches, resistance points and aversions to string-pulling to win the big race against your more skeptical instincts.
The right sports movie, even if it's not great, has wily ways of inspiring us to do something, try something, go somewhere we haven't yet. It can bend us, at least a little, into a new, in-progress variation of the person we were the last time we checked.
But it's usually not immediate. Movies tend to roll around in your head, half-remembered, for decades. And then it's there again, when you need it.
Last weekend, for example. Last weekend, the 1979 charmer 'Breaking Away,' nominally about cycling but about much more, glided out of the mists of time to push me up another series of hills on the second day of a three-day, two-night bike-packing trip out of Lower Manhattan, up through the Bronx, past Yonkers, into rural New York State and then into a lovely bit of Connecticut. And back again.
Movie first, personal experience later. Forty-six summers ago, 'Breaking Away' came out in theaters. It started slowly, not a hit, but it built an audience week by week and became one. Such things were possible then.
Director Peter Yates, best known as an action director ('Bullitt'), wasn't a likely choice for the material but he turned out to be good for it.
The screenplay by playwright and screenwriter Steve Tesich won the Oscar; it dealt with four recent working-class high school graduates living in Bloomington, Indiana, in the shadow of Indiana University and in a state of uncertainty regarding their own futures. Tesich basically combined two of his unfilmed scripts set in Bloomington and came up with 'Bambino,' retitled 'Breaking Away.'
Dennis Christopher, beautifully cast and, on a recent rewatch, even better than I remembered, played Dave Stohler, the cycling enthusiast besotted with all things Italian, from grand opera to scraps of handbook Italian phrases. ('Buongiorno!' he calls out to a perplexed neighbor as he rides by.) His doleful father, portrayed by Paul Dooley in a magically right match of performer and material, despairs for his blithely romantic son's future.
Barbara Barrie, nominated for an Academy Award, plays Dave's fond, supportive mother. Dave and his friends spend their summer days hanging out at the limestone quarry, ragging on each other, cliff-jumping into the water, wondering what sort of lives await them.
The big race in 'Breaking Away' happens when the Italian cyclists sponsored by Cinzano agree to come to Indianapolis to compete. This race gives Dave the setback his story requires, prior to the climactic 'Little 500' race back in Bloomington. Dave and his cohorts, the 'cutters,' aka the townies in a town built on working-class stone cutters' labor, square off on wheels against the privileged IU fraternity racers.
Is the movie a classic? Friends, that is so very much up to you. Few things in life are touchier or more prone to argument than the topic of favorite sports movies. What I liked about 'Breaking Away,' back when I was a year out of college, and again on a rewatch the other day, had everything to do with a very simple matter, described aptly by one sub-Reddit poster as 'the simple joy of riding a bike.' The poster added: 'But if that doesn't sound interesting, it isn't worth a watch.'
To which another Reddit poster countered: 'Well, I have zero interest in bike riding and I loved this movie.'
'Breaking Away' keeps its tensions between townies and university students relatively uncomplicated, but as Christopher told PBS NewsHour in 2019, 'There this lesson in it about class struggle, and you never see stories like that anymore. There's a story about how the father and mother grow closer together through this eccentric child. And there's a story about how all the male characters are examples of male doubt at this particular time in their lives.'
Last weekend I joined a dear friend on her second bike-packing trip with the terrific Brooklyn, New York outfit 718 Outdoors, run by a former architect and bike shop proprietor Joe Nocella. My friend is a lifelong jock ('and so much more!' she states, for the record) and I am not.
I learned a few things on the trip.
I learned that 'training' for even a modest 130-mile excursion, which in my case meant not training enough, will probably work better if I train without the quotation marks.
I learned that bike-packing, which means carrying a lot of stuff in pannier bags on your bike, takes some effort. Some of that is mental.
I learned that various forms of adversity on the first, 58-mile day provoked an interior debate conducted by my inner pessimist (), my inner realist () and my inner stoic optimist ().
I overpacked by 30-40%. On day one, I scraped the side of a stone pathway marker hard enough yet slowly enough to detach, in a permanent way, one of the pannier's buckles. Also, I treated the bottom hook attachment as an unnecessary backup, which was the wishful thinking of a newbie.
But I learned this, too, so very gratefully:
Our tour group of 20 or so, of all ages, from all over the globe by ancestry and all over New York City by residency, plus me, from Chicago, met every challenge in their individual ways. A typical number of flat tires; some wonky rack problems; hills too much for some of us, leading to pushing the bikes up the rest of the way on foot. These things happen, and they happened.
On day three I had some of the finest medically untrained minds in the country performing emergency surgery on my broken spoke. They got me going again, and back to New York City. And, separately, the riders who teamed up to MacGyver my busted pannier with a complex and delicate array of straps, bungee cords and inner tubes came up with a group art installation worthy of serious critical praise. 'A thing of ugly beauty'
One of my former (and best) Tribune editors, Kevin Williams, now lives in Porto, Portugal, where he allegedly takes it easier than he used to in Chicago in terms of his maniacal yet stylish devotion to high-intensity cycling. I asked him if cycling held any life lessons for him, and how riding on two wheels might have informed other parts of his life.
His reply, in part: 'The weight room, the place I used to make my cycling better, had different lessons, or more like a notion. Which essentially was, 'After you do this, nothing else you do today will be as hard.''
The bike-packing last weekend was hard, and great, and the communal cookout around the fire on night two went on for several wonderful hours, just before the frogs near the campsite in Connecticut started croaking. Stray images from 'Breaking Away' rode with me the whole time. As the miles piled up, I resembled a young Daniel Stern, a little too big and a lotta too gangly for his own bike. But at the end of it all, I felt like Dennis Christopher, hoisting his team's trophy at the end of the movie.