I can not claim that I was there at the beginning of messenger history. That would be ridiculous. One of the first notable and, in my view, heroic messengers in recorded history was Pheidippides, who delivered the happy news of the victory of Marathon and then died, thousands of years before I was born. Rudyard Kipling erroneously alluded to sex-work being ‘the oldest profession’, (it was probably tool-makers) but the rise of civilisations and empires in the fourth millennia BCE (six thousand years ago) was reliant on the development of a civil service, for the chattels of the ruling castes must be counted, and the results of the accounting would have been transmitted to the rulers via a network of state controlled messengers. According to the Wikipedia entry ‘History of Writing’, the following is an excerpt from a Sumerian poem recounting the events of the era: “because the messenger’s mouth was heavy and he couldn’t repeat (the message), the Lord of Kulaba patted some clay and put words on it, like a tablet. Until then, there had been no putting words on clay”. I’m not going to give a potted history of messengers as Rebecca Reilly provided a much more extensive and better researched version in her book, Nerves Of Steel, and also I am here concerned with messenger history of far more recent times, specifically the history of Cycle Messenger Championships (CMC hereafter).
It’s a deep dive into stuff of very little importance that happened over twenty years ago. So be warned: it’s beyond niche. Most people will have little interest in any of this.
Why am I writing this now, after so long?
Over the past few months a ridiculous but seriously unpleasant campaign of slander, abuse and misogyny has been waged by Michael ‘Ozone’ Odom against the representatives of the international messenger community, which is the International Federation Bicycle Messenger Associations (IFBMA hereafter). It has included personal abuse, lies and threats of legal action. I have hesitated to address this campaign in public because I had not wished to dignify this nonsense with a response. I have tried to engage with Ozone in private, to see if his grievances could be resolved without an almighty public slanging match, but he has made it clear that he finds my interventions entirely unwelcome. In a now deleted thread on an internet forum, he described me as: “Bafoon Bill”, which is pretty funny, and at least original, but there was a whole load of other less amusing stuff about being a white man on a white charger riding to the aid of a damsel (the principle object of his abuse is a woman).
His principle claim is that he is the founder of the IFBMA, and his part in its history was consciously erased by nefarious actors using the name of the IFBMA as a cloak for their plot to supplant Ozone as the rightfully heralded Father Of The International Messenger Community. He has thrown in some claims about this plot being possibly overtly designed to obscure the rôle of Minority Ethnic messengers in creating the IFBMA.
To me, this is a very tortured version of the old ‘not a real messenger’ thing. As in, you’re not a real messenger if you don’t ride fixie-no-brakes, if you have worked for less than 5 years, if you work in a city where it’s not necessary to lock your bike, if you haven’t worked in more than one city and so on and so forth. Some of my former colleagues would say that they weren’t messengers but were actually couriers, but that’s more of the same to me. I know that advent of food apps have blurred what it means to be a messenger / courier, and I remember most of my North American colleagues would never have considered the food delivery guys (yes, food delivery by bicycle existed before the iPhone) to be brethren (Chirping’ Chicken, anyone?) but to me a working cyclist is a working cyclist. But anyway.
As a response to Ozone’s calumnies, I am first going to set down what I remember about messenger events and the development of the IFBMA in the 90s. This stuff happened 25 – 30 years ago, so my memories are not necessarily reliable, but I am able to refer to contemporaneous accounts, some written by me, some written by others.
The First Cycle Messenger Championships
The first CMC was held in Berlin in 1993. I was working in the office, or on the road, at Security Despatch sometime in 1992 when we received a letter from The International Federation of Cycle Messengers and Companies (IFCMC hereafter), announcing that the I. CMC would be held in Berlin the following year. We said, wow, that sounds interesting, and then promptly forgot about it until the following, was it May?, can’t remember exactly, when we got a second message, and then we said, oh shit, it’s really happening, and got our act together and got out to Berlin. The event was amazing.
I am not going to write too much about the event, (my own report for a UK cycling magazine is here). To briefly summarise, we met a whole lot of people like us from other countries, slept I can’t remember where, raced, hung out and drank beer. Andy Capp and I had swapped bikes, so I was riding his fixie and he was riding my road-bike, which meant that I was made part of the very small affinity-group of fixed people at the CMC: Eric & Steve from D.C., Erik Zo from S.F. and Andi from Berlin.
The night before the races there was a reception for the teams in the hall by the camp-grounds where some of us were staying. Various people were celebrated on stage, including Ozone and James ‘The General’ Moore. Achim Beier, organiser in chief of the CMC and MC of the party, made a big fuss of these two, crediting them with inspiring him to organise the CMC after meeting with them in Washington Square Park in New York City.
Achim said something like, and I heard him retell this story a few times, that he was amazed to be able to go to a completely different city and find that he had a bond with a foreign stranger because they were all bicycle messengers. This would have been a long time before bicycle messengers or anyone, really, used the internet to make friends across continents with people who had interests in common. And, even now that billions of people are able to reach like-minded persons, there is something really cool about meeting in real life people you have only interacted with via message-boards and other forms of social media.
I can not remember when this momentous (for Achim and, by extension, all the participants in I. CMC) meeting took place but it must have been before we got that fax in 1992 and, given that Achim started his company messenger Berlin (the ‘m’ was always lower case in all the logos I ever saw) in ’90 or ’91, must have been after ’90. What Achim’s mind was blown by was that Ozone, then working for messenger Berlin, had been a messenger in D.C., and James was a NYC messenger and they knew each other. Ozone says on his Instagram that he started the 1% club in D.C. with another courier called Suicide, which was an informal social gathering for DC messengers. They had a regular ride up to NYC for the NY Century, which is how the D.C. crew made contact with the NYC messengers. Or something like that.
I heard from other DC messengers, for instance, Larry Parks & Scrooge, about this ride, which sounded epic then & now, and I had a look in Rebecca’s book ‘Nerves Of Steel’ at the section on DC, which was published in 2000, and, sure enough, Ozone & Suicide are name-checked in the various oral accounts. In other words, Ozone & Suicide were legends in their own messenger community for organising cool events that connected D.C. messengers with messengers in other cities.
It was the idea of connecting messengers globally that inspired Achim to organise the CMC. Inside Germany there were already networks of courier companies, so contacting them to invite them to the event was merely a question of consulting the company rolodex. His messenger Berlin employee Stefan Klessman must have done a lot of the work of finding addresses outside of Germany.
Messengers and companies in cities all over Europe and North America were reached. Achim said that over 200 people from 20 countries participated in the event. Exactly how their contact list was compiled I am not able to tell you. I was given access to their list the following year and I can tell you it was long, but obviously with significant gaps in the global South, something that Stefan constantly emphasised.
Achim had realised his dream, and the international messenger community was born. In my view, and that of most fair-minded people, that makes Achim the father of the international messenger community, no matter where his inspiration came from. At the end of the event, I remember everybody asking, “where’s the next one? What happens next year?” There was some talk of Toronto hosting the event in 1995, but there was nothing about 1994.
The London crew didn’t even consider the possibility of organising a CMC at all, never mind in 1994.
Cycle Messenger World Championships, London, 1994
And then the fax arrived from Berlin, in the name of the IFCMC, announcing to us that the event, now called the Cycle Messenger World Championships (CMWC hereafter), was to be held in London, August 1994. This was a complete surprise to us in London and requires some explanation then and now. The CMC, although organised through a sporting club, which was financially responsible for the event, and therefore at arms length from messenger Berlin, had made a large loss.
So when Achim was approached by a London PR company with an offer to pay for the right to stage the event in London, he felt that he had no choice but to accept. Whether or not the club or the company actually retained the rights to license the event I am not absolutely sure, but that the rights were held by Berlin was the impression that we were given. Afterwards, I can’t remember any occasion where Achim mentioned that the rights were legally held by anybody except the messenger community itself. As part of the deal, Achim insisted that we, the representatives of the London messenger community, were to be fully involved as consultants in order that the event was organised in the correct messenger spirit. We met with Achim, and then we all met with the people that were supposed to organise the event and off we went.
Except they didn’t. We heard nothing for some weeks from the ‘organisers’, and began to get a little anxious what might or might not happen. By this time, we had gone from scepticism to enthusiam, and were concerned about the lack of activity or even communication from the ‘organisers’. Achim got in touch, and came over to London. My recollection is of hanging out with him in Burgess Park on a summer’s day, so maybe, June? The CMWC was scheduled for the middle of August. Time was short. Achim told us that he had cancelled the agreement with the ‘organisers’ and gave us the go ahead to organise it ourselves.
Again, so much was written at the time about the event that I am not going to write about here, at distance of nearly 30 years. I have included some press stuff and the cover of MT from way back then. Suffice to say that the event was life-changing for me and others, and we managed the organisation side of it by the seat of our pants. That is to say, we hadn’t a clue what we were doing most of the time, but we just about held it together and the event was more or less successful, despite some moments of complete chaos. We were overwhelmed mentally, emotionally and physically by the demands of the event.
And now the question of who controlled the event, in the sense of who decided where the next events would be held, was beginning to become salient. The Toronto messengers had come in force to London, and had been crucial to the organisation of the event. Of course, London messengers, friends and, in my case, family, provided essential support but undoubtedly the willingness of the TO crew to muck in & help out provided moral and physical encouragement to us when we, inevitably, suffered moments of doubt and weakness, was inspirational to us. Other people and city crews were also incredibly helpful and inspirational, but I mention the TO crew in particular because of what was to happen the following year.
They appeared to have every intention of successfully organising the event in TO in 1995. People outside of London & Berlin were aware that there had been a change of organisers in between the announcement of the venue and the actual event in London. This led to the question of, well, who actually is in charge of the CMC / CMWC? Achim said that it was the IFCMC, which meant him and Stefan, and they realised that the IFCMC needed to have a broader leadership group than just the two of them, so they convened a council consisting Boris, the London Race Captain & organiser, and myself from London, Eric the Commander from D.C., Erik Zo from S.F., Stefan Klessman and himself. The arrangement was not at all inclusive or representative, but it was presented as a fait accompli. In another fait accompli, the IFCMC Council awarded the 95 Champs to TO. ‘Red’ Nic, as organiser, received written confirmation that his company had the authority to organise CMWC 1995 in TO.
My recollection is that iteration of the IFCMC Council did not meet again after that thunderous night (literally: an electric storm broke as we were having the meeting in one of the still standing dock warehouses) in London. The IFCMC seemed an irrelevance, as we had no mandate, other than that we had awarded ourselves. Boris & I resigned from the council, saying in conclusion, “in all honesty, we would rather follow the SF model and have the IFCMC form as the IFBMA. No leaders & anyone can be a member at any time. Thus the IFBMA would be a front that anyone could use when necessary.”
CMWC 1995 Toronto
And so to Toronto. Toronto was significant because it was the first Mess Champs that was conceived and organised by local messengers. I’m not saying that Achim wasn’t a real messenger, but, by the time he had decide to organise the CMC, he was the boss of a large messenger company and had resources to draw on, e.g. office-space, photo-copier, dedicated phone line for the fax-machine, access to business networks. The situation of the TO crew was very different.
Sarah Hood provided PR support free of charge, bless her, but they lacked everything else. We in London had some help from the original so-called organisers because they had booked the venue, (the Royal Docks), and we are able to steal photo-copying and faxes from one of our employers, but the TO crew had to do everything from scratch, apart from having access to the now expanded contact list and considerable word-of-mouth awareness amongst the international messsenger community of the event. Despite ‘Red’ Nic’s attempts to turn the CMWC into a proper commercial sports events, with a budget to support a ‘professional’ organisation, it was the same as ’94 – a grass-roots event run on the thinnest of shoe-strings, albeit with an international dimension.
CMWC 95 was also significant because it was the first Mess Champs in North America, which meant that the North American messenger community was in a majority for the first time. Those who had never been to such an event duly had their minds blown. We all hung out, drank beer, and did stupid things on bikes. (Once again, I wrote extensively at the time, so see here, here, here, and here, as I’m not going to recap.) There was a large contingent from San Francisco, many more than had come to Berlin & London, and one of their leaders, Markus Cook, publicly announced their intention to organise CMWC ’96 in SF on the Sunday night, to the loud approbation of the large crowd.
Who decides?
My recollection isn’t clear enough to be sure, but I think that Achim pulled Markus and I aside immediately after. My memory is that we had an impromptu meeting under a trailer. I can’t remember who else was there, if anyone, and Achim announced that he was organising a bid to host in New York City in 1996. Earlier in the year, Trèvol, a messenger coop based in Barçelona, had proposed that they would organise CMWC 1997 in Barça.
The question: “who controls CMWC? Who decides?” had become pressing. Also, the question of what should a CMWC be?, was also being raised. Everyone agreed future events needed to be better organised. But some saw a pathway to inclusion in the Olympics or the X-Games, with promises of serious rewards & recognition to the racers, rather than a home-made trophy, a hang-over and a pocketful of love and memories.
Achim’s proposal was very much in the former, promising big ticket sponsors (free plane trips for competitors!) and a race-course on closed roads in Manhattan. SF had nothing down on paper. On the other hand, their (SF) proposal had been made publicly and had been approved vocally and loudly.
Nothing was resolved by the ‘meeting’ under the trailer. There was another meeting the following day and it was agreed that nothing had been agreed about where CMWC ’96 was going to be. The SF crew were really upset by what was an ambush by Achim, even if it was not intended as such.
A process was agreed, which I can hardly bring myself to describe, because it was so unnecessary and such a total waste of everyone’s time. Essentially, Achim foisted a committee of ‘grown-ups’ on us (according to his narrative, the ‘children’ had tried and failed to organise a successful CMWC in TO, and this could not be allowed to happen again) to decide where CMWC ’96 would be. The committee consisted of: Achim; Howard Williams (an actual messenger but also then US head of the charity Afghan Amputee Bicyclists for Rehabilitation and Recreation) of SF; Lisa Byrne (boss of Creative Couriers, who I then worked for) of London; Oriol Salas (an actual messenger) of Trèvol, Barçelona; James Moore (an actual working messenger) of New York. The two cities, NYC & SF, would submit bids to the committee and then the committee would decide.
The recriminations started immediately after everyone had got home. I still have in my IFCMC box file (see, I always knew that keeping all this stuff for decades was worth it!) a hand-written note from Howard setting out his objections to the process. The killer line was from Omara Khan, one of AABRAR’s employees, who had been in TO: “the people supported San Francisco on Sunday night. There was no objection. Why is there now a problem?”
At this point, most of the communication between the various messenger city communities took place by letter, fax and, very occasionally, if it was international, phone calls – not by mobile phone – none of us had one! Very few people had access to email and people did not browse the Web. This made coordinating anything internationally in real time pretty much impossible for the average messenger – even international faxes cost money.
But some of us did have email, and after CMWC 1995 the messenger email list began to become the most important means of communication within the international messenger community, which it remained well into this century. All of the various lists that existed on the various servers have been archived on the website of the late, great, Bega. Yet again, I find myself grateful to Bega’s selflessness. Miss you lots, man.
There then followed weeks of toing-and-froing about ’96. I met with Achim, Stefan & Grey (a SF messenger then working in Berlin) and we talked and talked (meetings: take minutes, last hours). In the end, Achim went out to SF, literally banged his head on the Golden Gate Bridge and eventually bowed to the inevitable: he withdrew the NYC bid and, finally, SF got to host CMWC ’96.
CMWC ’96 & The Open Forum
After all that nonsense, the SFBMA had to get their shit together and actually organise the event. In January, Marcus Cook died. This was unbelievable, shocking, but meant that the SFBMA crew redoubled their efforts.
As well as organising for the CMWC, people were also thinking about who should control the CMWC, and how should this control be validated. As Barçelona had already been selected to host 1997, there was no need to spend time on selecting the host for the following year. No-one wanted a repeat of what had happened in ’95.
The feeling was that the event belonged to the participants, whether volunteer organisers or competitors. The event was about more than who was the fastest on the day. Messenger culture’s growing celebration of DFL (Dead F*cking Last), which I think was originally an SF thing, showed that. There were still some that wanted the event to become some sort of pro sport, but most participants came because it was a fun event to be part of. You could not have a Messenger Championships without racing, but the racing was less important than the hanging out and drinking beer.
It was decided that there would be an Open Forum on Tuesday 3rd September, after the event had finished. The first Monday in September is Labor Day in the US, and is a public holiday, so the SFBMA held the event over 3 days. The Open Forum would be open to all who wanted to come together to discuss the future of the CMWC.
The event itself was amazing. There were some glitches and some bitching by people who should have known better, but as far as most people were concerned, it was the best Champs yet. Once again, I wrote up the event for a magazine, so if you want to read it, you can find it here, here and here. And on the Tuesday those of us that wanted to, and were still in town, went to the Open Forum.
The minutes of the Forum are in the archive, for those that can be bothered to read them, here. You need to scroll down to find them. As far as I know, the accuracy of the notes have never been disputed. It’s only a shame that there isn’t a list of attendees. There probably is somewhere, but I can’t find it. [Edit: of course, Joel Metz had the list. Thanks Joel!] I can tell you that Achim wasn’t there, as he wasn’t able to come to CMWC ’96.
The key paragraphs are as follows:
We no longer consider the IFCMC as “founded” in London by Achim et al to be any kind of overseeing, mandating kind of mother/father body. We consider the group of people at the forum to comprise the decision making body of the CMWC at this time. We assumed this position because we all chose to come to the meeting and make decisions. This is not a set body, but will vary from year to year depending on who shows up at similar forums. We dont have a name for this body [sic].
As this blog post has gone for so long, I am going to skip on to the Barçelona Open Forum, 1997, where it was decided that the name for the organisation that controls the CMWC host city selection would be the International Federation of Bicycle Messenger Associations. Here’s the key paragraph:
DECISIONS: The IFBMA (International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations) now exists.
Helpfully, there IS a list of attendees. One name stands out by its absence, at least in the context of what Ozone has been screaming the house down about: yeah, Michael ‘Ozone’ Odom. In fact, after 1994, I don’t remember seeing Ozone at ANY CMWC at all, and I went to all of them between 1993 and 2002. Maybe he was there and I missed him but I doubt it.
Based on what I have written above, Ozone’s central claim, which he is the OG founder of the IFBMA, is totally false. He may have a point about under-representation of Minority Ethnic messengers. I can only see Scrooge (DC) & Hodari Depalm (NYC) on the list. It is an overwhelmingly white and male list. Ok, we probably should have done more to change that. But it’s a bit of stretch to claim that, based on what was a bit of irresponsible editing by a thoughtless CPH messenger, ME messenger history was deliberately erased. Absolute f***ing bullshit, in fact.
As to his claim that the 1% club was the first messenger crew to think of reaching out beyond their own city, this is also nonsense. Zero, who pre-dated me as a London messenger (he would called himself a courier) writer, was in contact with Bob McGlynn from New York, who was an organiser of the Independent Courier Association, which successfully fought Ed Koch’s mid-town bike ban. (BTW, in his obit that I linked to above, it says that Bob McGlynn proudly called himself the “King of All Bicycle Messengers.” Oh, the irony.) In my files, I have an original ICA newsletter dated Dec ’89. Click here, if you don’t believe me. My old messenger ‘zine Moving Target and its SF equivalent, Mercury Rising, were swapping articles in 1992. When I met Markus in Berlin ’93, it was pretty cool, as we had only exchanged paper correspondence up until that point.
Finally, if all this messenger stuff was oh, so important to you, where the hell have you been? Your narrative is all about what happened in the early 90s and seems to stop at Berlin 1993, as if that event was the beginning and end of messenger culture. You may have been a central figure in ’93, but so much has happened since within the international messenger community, that what happened then is barely relevant now. And I say that as someone who is likewise barely relevant to the messenger community now. That is not false modesty, that’s the truth.
By all means, please do go along to the next IFBMA meeting and pitch in and help. But do so in the spirit of community, not because you want to assure your place in messenger history as the OG whatever-it-is. No-one should care that much about their own place in ‘history’. You’re making yourself look stupid, petty and egotistical and some of the stuff you have written is vile.
Updated: Rebecca Reilly has interviewed Ozone for her podcast. The transcript and podcast is here.
I edited this post after I posted it for grammar, spelling and clarity.