His 2 great loves: Baseball, biking

Firefighter flew to Charlotte to start annual summer trek

Saturday, July 7, 2007

By Marcie Young
Charlotte Observer Staff Writer

Call it his Tour de South.

Jeff Sambur, a 52-year-old cyclist from Colorado, is taking to Southern roads this summer, riding from city to city to catch minor league baseball games in the Carolinas and three other states.

He's been in North Carolina less than a week, but the Fort Collins firefighter already has covered more than 100 miles.

He flew into Charlotte on Tuesday, and by Friday afternoon had already taken in a Knights game, watched the Hickory Crawdads play and fought U.S. 321 traffic as he headed into Boone.

"I'm batting 1,000 so far," he said.

By the end of his nearly six-week journey, Sambur -- who has been cycling since 1980 and has biked with seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong -- will have traveled about 1,800 miles through five states and cheered for the home team at a couple of dozen games.

Sambur is an old hand at traveling long distances on his bike. He cycled from Paris to Barcelona, Spain, for the 1992 Olympics and from Washington, D.C., to Atlanta for the games four years later.

In 2002, he rode through the Midwest to watch nine minor league games, and two years ago, he biked about 4,000 miles through the Nez Perce National Historical Park, spread among four states in the Northwest.

"That was the best thing I've ever done," he said of the trip, which tracked the route of the Nez Perce Indians in 1877, when they were forced off their homelands. "You got to see history right there."

These summer trips, Sambur said, is why he never married and why he works long hours, weeks and months for about nine months out of the year. He saves the other three for traveling.

"That's the big joke in the fire department," he said. "What's Jeff going to do this summer?"

Randy Callahan, one of Sambur's colleagues, has taken trips with the Bronx native and said no one knows how to enjoy cycling like Sambur.

"That guy can ride a bike like nobody I've ever met," he said. "He lives for the summer on his bike. ... He knows how to do it."

Sambur may be retiring next year, but he said that's when he'll start making a dent in his 30-page list of rides he wants to take.

"The first thing I'm going to do is go cross country diagonally, from San Diego to Maine," he said. "There's so much to see."


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