Breaking a Cycle of Limitations : Competition: Pair of disabled bicyclists shun the ‘geek and freak circuit’ to ride in prestigious national event.

Ray Patterson is tired of what he sees as the freak shows.

The Valley Center man has had enough of the competitions where he says the “geeks and the mutants” face off in public spectacle.

He’s talking about the the Para-Olympics, the wheelchair or special sporting events for disabled athletes.

Patterson is blind. He lost his eyes to cancer as a child. He also is an athlete, an avid bicyclist who is planning to compete next month in one of the nation’s most prestigious amateur cycling events.

Enter Jim Penseyres. In 1967, part of his left leg was blown off when he stepped on a land mine in the Vietnam jungle.

Between them, they have two good eyes and three good legs. Riding together atop a tandem bicycle, the men plan to challenge the field at the U.S. Cycling Federation’s national tandem competition in Altoona, Pa.

Competing against all those well-trained riders, the pair of friends will

try to post the fastest time in the 40-kilometer time trials under the critical gaze of a national cycling audience.

They’re doing it for pride, to drink in the exhilaration of racing against the nation’s best riders. Not the best handicapped riders. Not the best “physically challenged” riders. The best riders.

They want to prove a point to cycling officials, sponsors, participants and viewers: that athletes with disabilities need no special circumstances to compete at the highest level of their sport.

“All across this country, there are doors being slammed in people’s faces because they have something that other people describe as a handicap,” said Patterson, 44, a wiry man with an unruly shock of brown hair.

And that means blind people, he said. And those missing hands or arms or legs. It means the deaf and those with epilepsy or emotional problems. Everyone.

“There needs to be more awareness among people that we belong in the middle of regular races with athletes who are not handicapped,” he said. “It means full participation. Not shunted into the geek and freak circuit.”

Patterson, who 20 years ago qualified for the Olympic trials as a college wrestler at Kansas State University, is used to being a full participant in life.

He has hitchhiked alone across Europe, traversed the mountains of Nepal and Tibet. With his wife, Bobbi, he lived for two years in Paris, later traveling to Budapest, Beijing and Moscow, Singapore and India, lending an attentive ear to experience cultures that most people can only dream about.

Patterson said his travels were not to prove a point that he could do it.

“In a way, that would be as bad as sitting around feeling sorry for yourself,” he said. “My point is that being blind is just one aspect of a multidimensional person.”

Another aspect has been his love for competitive sports. He has snow-skied and tried his hand at archery, using the tick-tick-tick of an alarm clock as his target.

Once he bought an airplane. Sitting in the cockpit with a friend at the controls, he sat back and enjoyed the sense of motion he says can be experienced only in a small plane.

With competitive bicycling, though, Patterson found his most comfortable match. He first biked in France after joining a tandem bicycling club for blind cyclists, and rode four times as part of a tandem team in the Tour de France.

The right to race in the U.S. Cycling Federation’s most prestigious competition, he says, is the result of an eight-year struggle to win approval of the use of tandem bicycles that would enable a blind man such as himself to compete as part of a two-man team.

As recently as 1990, Patterson was barred from the national competition, which had no tandem-bicycle races.

“It was a kick in the head,” he said. “They were telling me to get lost.”

Last year, the board of the U.S. Cycling Federation added a race for tandem bicycles, setting the stage for the team of Patterson and Penseyres, a 45-year-old San Juan Capistrano resident who has competed four times in the grueling transcontinental bicycle marathon known as the Race Across America.

Still, Patterson said that the federation, which sponsors countless cycling events each year at all levels, prefers to channel handicapped athletes out of the regular competition and into special races.

Cycling federation officials deny that.

“He’s out in left field,” Stan Solin, a district representative for the federation’s Southern California region, said of Patterson. For example, Solin said, he has recently encouraged deaf riders to enter regular cycling events without telling the rest of the competition--a way to let them compete without being singled out as handicapped.

“I don’t think Ray Patterson understands,” he said. “We’re on his side.”

Although they both have handicaps, “the blind guy and the guy with one leg,” as they refer to themselves, have different reasons for wanting to compete.

The younger brother of bicycling phenomenon and long-distance rider Pete Penseyres, Jim Penseyres has finished within the top dozen riders in the annual Race Across America--a contest that requires riders to stay atop their bikes for 22 hours a day as they pedal coast to coast.

Perhaps because he can ride a regular bicycle with his prosthesis, which connects to his left leg about 4 inches below the kneecap, Penseyres said he has felt less discrimination from race officials and sponsors because he regularly competes at all levels.

And, although he has ridden tandem twice before with Patterson--himself the lead driver and Ray pedaling behind him--he said the national scope of the Olympic trials will give the most publicity to the achievements of the disabled, even though there will be no hope of achieving an Olympic berth because there will be no tandem events in Barcelona this summer.

“What’s most rewarding to me is having people come up to me with small children with disabilities, and to have these kids tell me that it rekindles their flame,” he said. “I want to drive home the point that you don’t have to be cosmetically beautiful or fit into the mold of ideal human beings to achieve things.”

Along with that dream goes a dose of realism.

“I mean, we’re not going to win this thing, are you kidding me? A lot of people will ask, ‘Then, why go?’ We’re doing it for the handicapped people who might follow us and who might be 10 times more talented who might say, ‘Hey, they did this race in one hour and five minutes. We can beat that.’ ”

The pair also have fans in the athletic community.

“What they’re doing, two handicapped guys riding together, that’s a first,” said three-time Olympic cyclist John Howard of Encinitas. “I applaud their efforts not only to break through their own limitations, but the barriers that exist for handicapped people.”

People such as Patterson look beyond their handicaps, Howard notes.

“Once, as I was riding with Ray in a tandem race along the ocean, I turned to him during the race and, without thinking, said ‘Hey Ray, look at the surf,’ ” Howard recalled. “Without missing a beat, he responded, ‘I see it.’ ”

“And it occurred to me that he really did see it. He could hear it and smell it and feel it. In a way, maybe he saw it more clearly than I did.”

For Patterson, the federation’s national competitions--to be held in mid-June--will be a proving ground for his long-developed theory that everyone has handicaps.

“This is not an athletic issue,” he said. “When something is thrown right at you, you have to decide to fight it or not fight it. I fought.”

Patterson continued to wage his battles for equality on several fronts. In 1988, he filed suit against the U.S. State Department, alleging that he was refused an overseas position because of his blindness. The case has not yet gone to court. A spokeswoman for the State Department declined to comment.

As a traveler, Patterson said, he has faced other roadblocks because of his blindness.

He has been kept off planes in some countries and forced to ride in a wheelchair at airports. Once, in China, an attendant using broken English told him that there was no discount for “retarded people.”

Things are better now, but discrimination persists.

“Some people still look at Ray and they stare, amazed at the fact that he doesn’t have eyeballs,” explained wife Bobbi, who married Patterson in 1981 after they met at a friend’s moving party.

“And you know they’re thinking ‘Look at that guy! Geez, that could be me!’ Some people never get past that enough to talk with Ray. Because he’s blind, they don’t think he can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Patterson said there’s definitely too much tip-toeing going on around the issue of physical handicaps--including the words people use.

“There’s no good word, so just use what’s least offensive,” he said. “Just call a spade a spade. This business of the ‘physically challenged.’ Physically challenged, hell.”

Penseyres, who at age 45 cycles 50 miles round-trip each day to and from his job as a machinist at the San Onofre nuclear power plant, still senses doubts about his abilities--even from other riders.

“During races, I’ve had people ride up to me and ask what bicycle club would even have me as a member,” he said.

The pair came face to face with narrow attitudes as they rode together in a tandem race in San Diego.

As Penseyres recalled, they were nearing the finish line when they spotted just ahead a bicycle being ridden by Vince and Raphael Gomez, two brothers from the Los Angeles area known for their competitive spirit.

“You could hear their bike grinding, so you knew they were having problems,” Penseyres said. “So I turned back and said to Ray, ‘Hey, man. That’s the Gomez brothers up there. We might be able to overtake them. Keep pedaling!’ ”

As they raced ahead, the Gomez brothers suddenly pulled across, forcing Patterson and Penseyres to the side.

Vince Gomez recalls the moment, too.

“We cut them off,” he said, matter-of-factly.

“My brother is really competitive. He looked back and his eyes got wide. I’m sure they heard us. He kept yelling ‘Pedal! Pedal! We can’t let these guys beat us, not a blind guy and a guy with a peg leg!’ ”