A Blind Bicyclist and His Daughter Work in Tandem

Posted by New York Times, by James Barron

Thomas Panek has run more than 20 road races. His time in the New York Half Marathon last year was 2 hours 9 minutes 21 seconds.

On Sunday, he will cover some of the same ground in a different way, as a rider in the Five Boro Bike Tour. “I’m a little nervous,” he said. “I don’t know what to expect when you’re using a different group of muscles in your body.”

That sentence skipped over two things that will set him apart from most of the 32,000 other riders. One is that he will ride on a tandem bicycle.

The other is that he is blind.

He has retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative disorder that left him legally blind by the time his daughter, Madeleine, was born 22 years ago. She will be the one in the front seat of the tandem, shifting the gears and calling out when turns are coming or she needs to brake. They have practiced stopping because, as he put it, “if she were to suddenly brake, I would get thrown forward into her.”

Many sightless athletes talk about their collaboration with their guides. “Harmony and synchrony” was how the blind runner Jerusa Geber dos Santos of Brazil described the relationship during the Olympics in Paris last year. Madeleine Panek talked about how she and her father trust each other, an idea he echoed.

“Holding my hand when she was 2 years old, helping me cross the street, it’s second nature for her to guide me,” he said. “It takes some coordination to trust the captain if you’re blind and you don’t know the person. We already have that relationship. That is going to be the easy part. The hard part is getting it done.”

He knows the route from running — it is similar to the course of the New York City Marathon. The two races start and end in different places, but both cover the 2.6-mile-long Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge and highways like the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Some of the hazards are similar, too, like potholes that can seem as large as craters on the moon.

But some of the hazards are different for cyclists: Expansion joints between sections of pavement could be trouble spots. Riders who do not spot them in time could fly over the handlebars.

Thomas Panek started a new job last month, as the president and chief executive of Lighthouse Guild, a nonprofit organization that provides services for blind people. When he heard about other cyclists from the Lighthouse Guild who would be riding, he signed up.

He waited to ask his daughter to be the pilot “because she just finished her MCATs,” he said — the standardized test for medical school applications. “I didn’t want to add any additional pressure,” he said. She is coming to New York for the weekend as she approaches graduation from Binghamton University and is applying to medical school.

Bike New York, which runs the Five Boro Bike tour, says that 210 riders with disabilities will be in the ride on Sunday and that 101 of them will be visually impaired cyclists on tandem bicycles. Ken Podziba, the president of Bike New York, first rode in the tour in 2002 on a tandem bike with Matthew Sapolin, a friend who was blind and was the commissioner of the Mayor’s Office for People With Disabilities under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Podziba, the sports commissioner under Bloomberg, loved it and ended up working for Bike New York.

Thomas Panek said their tandem is “a long vehicle,” adding that “you have to account for the fact that it’s almost like pulling a trailer.”

“On a tandem bike,” he said, “you’re pedaling for two. If I get tired at some point, Madeleine can pick up the level of effort.” And vice versa, he said. “But on the Verrazzano, it’s going to take everything from both of us.”