Criterium Corner with Euro Freddie
Meet Shlomo Marmeladov, the inventor of the wonderfully oddball stair climbing bicycle, and sadly one of cycling's forgotten figures, curiously lost in the annals of bike history.
He was born the son of peasant serfs, on the steppes of Russia, and as a youth his mother would tell him not to ride his bike too far from the house in inhospitable Siberia. So Shlomo came to practice his own version of trials riding on the various different surfaces of their family hovel.
After several seasons of bumping up and down the front and back porches of the house, Shlomo one day had an epiphany. Both of his staircases were built compliant with Soviet building code, and therefore possessed the same standardized rise to tread ratios, which Schlomo intuited correctly as a right angle, representing 25% of a simple geometric square.
It hit him like a thunderclap, and he worked feverishly into the night that afternoon, staying up well into the wee winter hours of 3pm, where he finally collapsed into a state of spent exhaustion. The next morning he awoke to show his parents his proud new creation, for Shlomo Marmeladov had indeed invented the hitherto unknown, square wheeled stair climbing bicycle. Who says you can’t reinvent the wheel? -Euro Freddie.