By Dave Schweidenback
Fall 2020 Newsletter

Back in the 1990s Pedals for Progress had a relationship with Bell Sports, at the time the largest distributor of bikes and bike parts in the United States and Canada. Bell Sports donated millions of dollars of new bicycle parts, including the bicycle that David Loveland rode from South Cape, South Africa, to North Cape, Norway.

Take a moment and think of yourself as the executive running a massive parts distribution company. How do you know you sold every single part you could have sold? The answer is there must be one left over. If you sell every one of an individual part, how do you know you couldn’t have sold more? Therefore it behooves these distributors to have a small amount of excess to prove their efficiency. The problem is that the excess needs to disappear.

Before the Bell–P4P relationship, that excess product would be ground up and put in a landfill at great expense. By donating all of that product to Pedals for Progress, Bell got a tax deduction for the value of the product they gave us. The trick was that the product had to be destroyed.

In this case, destruction means permanent removal from their market. The Bell Sports corporate footprint was the United States and Canada. If the donated products were removed from the United States and Canada, they were theoretically “destroyed”.

Over an eight year period, Pedals for Progress received over $10 million of new parts from Bell Sports.

In 1993 I received an email from David Loveland. He was approaching his close of service as a Peace Corps volunteer serving in Malawi, East Africa. He had a dream of bicycling from South Cape, South Africa, to North Cape, Norway. He was going to fund the trip himself. He just needed a bike. On one hand, this is not what Pedals for Progress does, but on the other hand there was a man with a dream and maybe I could help. I contacted my contact at Bell Sports, Jim Keller, and told him about this young man who wanted to bicycle halfway across the world, south to north. After some mild negotiating, Bell Sports gave us a brand-new Trek bicycle and some accessories, which we got to Malawi. Dave did the rest.

I remember conspiring with his mother to try to convince him to stay safe in the routes he took.

I also remember the story of the danger of frogs on the road in Slovakia. These great big frogs sit out on the road and if you hit one you just slide off the road into the bushes.

I recently heard from David. He still has the bicycle. I had a Cape-to-Cape T-shirt in a frame at the office and I sent it to him. He wrote a great trip report for this newsletter.