Focused on Cycling : Velodrome’s Denman Helps Call Shots on Set

Sports is full of stories about top athletes who owe a lot to their dedicated parents (face it, schlepping a junior jock to practices and games is almost a full-time job).

But this story is different--it’s about a top athlete who owes a lot to his parents for not getting involved.

“My parents weren’t the type to drive us anywhere,” says Rick Denman, a down-to-earth, 32-year-old cyclist who finished seventh in his age group in the recent U. S. National Masters cycling championships in San Diego.

At 13, Denman faced the logistic problem of getting from his east Detroit home to a Little League diamond eight miles away. The answer was inside his garage: a single-speed Stingray, an ancestor of the BMX bike. Once he began making those long bike trips, baseball was no longer his favorite sport. Soon, the Stingray was replaced by a five-speed Schwinn--and Denman began competing in races for the Wolverine Sports Club.

Although he didn’t turn into Greg LeMond, Denman has managed to do something extremely rare in cycling: make it a profitable career. He earns a steady income as the program director of the Encino Velodrome, but his biggest paydays are the result of his camera work in cycling movies and TV commercials.

Remember the Miller Beer “Tour de Lite?” Actor Woody Harrelson wins the race by managing to get lost in the Manhattan sewer system, but it’s Denman-hired cyclists who do all the spectacular road riding and Denman bike-mounted cameras that provide all the point-of-view action shots.

“I’ve found my niche,” says Denman, who calls his production company Bikes, Camera, Action.

Denman’s career evolved just as serendipitously as his introduction to cycling. In 1979, he was competing on high-banked indoor ovals in the Midwest when Universal Pictures put out a casting call for experienced cyclists to serve as extras in the remake of the 1934 Shirley Temple movie “Little Miss Marker.” Denman was hired and went on location in Northern California. That’s when he caught the bug--not for acting but for camera work.

Walter Matthau, starring in the movie, noticed Denman’s fascination with the camera “and encouraged me to stay in California and become a cameraman,” Denman says.

Denman moved to Los Angeles but couldn’t crack the camera operators’ union. In the early 1980s, he competed in Europe and worked as an assistant cycling coach under Ron Skarin and Cliff Halsey at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Skarin, a top cyclist, “was one of my heroes,” Denman says. “He took me under his wing.”

But while Denman enjoyed the European experience, he also came to realize that racing was a dead end, a grind that produced a lot of aches but no security. “I’d been racing for about 10 years and started to think, ‘I’ve done it all and this is the best I would do,’ ” Denman says.

Then, one day in ‘82, Denman found inspiration. “This kid comes along” at Dominguez Hills, Denman says. The kid was David Brinton, a young BMX racer who wanted to learn Olympic-style cycling. Just as Skarin had been for him, Denman was Brinton’s mentor. Within six months, Brinton had won national junior championships in road and track racing, and he later rode individual pursuit for the ’88 U. S. Olympic team in Seoul.

“It was extremely gratifying,” to see Brinton develop, Denman says. With renewed zest for cycling, Denman saw his role as a teacher more clearly. “When you start working with new people, their enthusiasm is contagious,” he says.

Denman’s reputation as a teacher got around. In 1985, when the Amateur Athletic Foundation was looking for someone in cycling to help spend thousands of its Olympic-surplus dollars, Denman was chosen. “We made inquiries with the U. S. Cycling Federation and Southern California Olympians,” says Keith Cruickshank, AAF program director, “and most of them pointed to Rick.”

Before he was hired to run the AAF program at the Encino Velodrome, Denman was asked to submit a step-by-step lesson plan for teaching youngsters to cycle on a banked oval. His 15-page instructional manual, covering everything from chain tension to bumping techniques, got him the job. The youth program at Encino, now in its fourth year, has taught hundreds of kids, including several junior national champions.

But there’s a downside to finding and developing talent, Denman says. “You get somebody good and all of a sudden the national-team coaches grab him, he disappears from the area and you don’t get to work with him anymore.”

By the mid-’80s, Denman was established as a teacher--he was the cycling coach in the 1987 Olympic Festival--and as the cycling expert to whom Hollywood turned. Aside from developing unique camera mounts that enabled him to ride in the pack and shoot the action, Denman tutored actors for cycling scenes in such major movie releases as “American Flyers” and “Quicksilver.”

“I never had much respect for the acting profession until I saw how much effort Kevin Bacon put into learning to ride a bike in ‘Quicksilver,’ ” Denman says.

Denman’s Hollywood connection has been sporadic--”I never know when I’ll get my next job”--but it has been lucrative. “Coaching is steady income,” he says, but camera work “is gravy, my play money.” His play money enabled him to buy a house in North Hollywood in 1986, just before the boom in real estate, and his equity quickly shot into six figures.

Cycling certainly has been good to Denman--where might he be today had he taken a bus to Little League practice?--and it paid off once again in 1988. Denman was on a long ride in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains when he saw a “for sale” sign on a desolate stretch of Lopez Canyon Road in Sylmar. He wound up buying the house, which is on five rugged, hilly acres adjacent to the Angeles National Forest.

“I never would have known about that place if I hadn’t been riding my bike,” he says.

With no neighbors within shouting distance, the place is as lonely as all of L.A. used to be 100 years ago, but it fits Denman’s life style. “I’m not into the Hollywood scene,” he says. “I don’t do clubs--I don’t like smoke and I’m not into crowds, as you can see.”

Denman has big plans for both his property--he eventually wants to use it as a training center for young cyclists--and the velodrome. At his home recently, he unfurled a detailed rendering of a multiuse velodrome that includes a roller-blade rink and track. The AAF will consider the $700,000 renovation sometime this fall.

That Denman has been able to make a solid career out of cycling doesn’t surprise his former mentor, Skarin, who now works as a building inspector for the city of Los Angeles. “I’m jealous,” Skarin says good-naturedly. “He makes as much as I do, and he has fun.”