Bike champ is racing to save lives

Dave Zabriskie has a dream for everyone who rides a bicycle, including himself. And it's not to wear the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, like he did last year, or to repeat as the U.S. national time trial champion, like he did last month.

It would be nice if everyone could enjoy such moments, but it's just not mathematically realistic.

What is realistic, the 28-year-old Zabriskie believes, is to create an atmosphere on the local roads that treats everyone — motorists, pedestrians and cyclists — as living, breathing human beings.

"Sometimes, (drivers) don't realize it's a life attached to that bicycle," says Zabriskie, "If they could realize that, maybe there would be less accidents."

With that as his ideal, the Utah-grown cycling champion has created a foundation he has titled "Yield to Life."

"I wanted something a little dramatic, to create respect for all life on the road," he says. "'Yield to Life' is something I can be really passionate about."

Contributing mightily to that passion is a desire to never be hit again.

Zabriskie has been involved in three serious collisions with vehicles while training on his bike, all of them coming right here in his home state of Utah.

In Europe, where he lives during the cycling season — and where he's logged thousands of miles in races like the Tour de France — that hasn't happened.

"They've been riding bikes for hundreds of years there (in Europe)," he says, "for the most part they don't want to kill you. Here, they sometimes don't realize how fragile the situation is."

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To appreciate Zabriskie-style bicycle activism, first you have to meet him. This is no chest-thumping, finger-pointing bullying biker out to reform the world.

Rather, he comes across more like the 5-year-old kid who learned to ride a two-wheeler in the driveway of the house where he grew up near 3300 South and 2300 East in the Salt Lake Valley.

That bicycle, he soon learned, was his ticket out of the driveway. Long before he discovered an innate talent for riding bikes really fast he discovered the freeing feeling of pedaling around on his own power.

"I used to just ride around, checking out the neighborhood, seeing the world," he says.

When he got his driver's license at 16, he remembers feeling fearful that he wouldn't ride anymore. "I wasn't scared of getting older," he says, "but I knew the car could take the riding away. I didn't want that to happen."

Good thing it didn't. After faring unexpectedly well in some local Utah races, Zabriskie placed fourth at the junior worlds in Spain at the age of 18, about the time he was graduating from Olympus High School.