Legendary cyclist, speedskater, and race announcer Dick Ring Dies at Age 89

For generations of cyclists in New England, race announcer Dick Ring calling your name at the finish line ranked as the highnote of the summer.  You might have been in a breakaway, making a move at the front, winning a sprint … or chasing valiantly off the back. It didn’t matter if it was a first-timers race in a parking lot or a pro-am pack in a big downtown criterium – Ring’s enthusiasm on the microphone was equal for all.

After a life of sport on bicycles, speedskates, and behind the microphone, Richard M Ring passed away on Jan 25, 2024, at age 89, in Chelmsford, MA.

Ring is best known as the voice that echoed around New England bicycle race courses for more than 60 years, but his roots in cycling – and speedskating – reach back a further two decades. He grew up in a working class family in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston.  In 1943, at age 9, he cut an entry form out of the newspaper and mailed it in along with a twenty–five cent fee to enter the famed Silver Skates Derby on the ice of the Boston Garden arena.  It was a time when speedskating races, held pack-style, drew thousands of competitors and massive crowds.

“I had never been inside the Boston Garden before”, recalled Ring in a 2017 interview.  After skating in the “midget” races, he stuck around in a packed house of 15,000 spectators. “I stayed and watched the pros race. They’d float across the ice at speeds you wouldn’t believe.  I made up my mind, ‘someday I’m going to learn to skate like these guys’” Ring was smitten, and right there in the Gahdin’ became forever hooked on a life of racing.

It was the start of an incomparable life of sport – on blades, bicycles, and behind the microphone. Ring’s own racing accomplishments are a story in themselves, like a win at the Silver Skates Derby, and North American championship titles on the ice. He claimed similar results on the bike. He narrowly missed inclusion on both the 1956 US Olympic speedskating and cycling teams, and instead was named as an alternate.

An athlete who did make history as a member of both those 1956 Olympic teams was Ring’s friend and training partner Arthur Longsjo. By 1958 Longsjo had reached the peak of his career, when he capped a rollicking season with a win in the epic 170 mile long Quebec-Montreal  road race, with Ring as a teammate. Tragically, Longsjo perished in car crash on his return home from the Montreal win.

Ring was on the startline in 1960 when Longsjo’s hometown of Fitchburg first held a memorial race. In the early editions, he finished in the top 10 among a national-caliber field. In the race’s fourth year, Ring had a front-row call-up, when Longsjo’s widow Terry approached him on the start line. The race announcer had failed to show, Terry said, and asked Ring if he could take the microphone. He stashed his bike in his car, went to the finish line stand, and called the 50 mile race wearing his wool shorts and team jersey.

That day launched, quite unintentionally, 60 years of race announcing – both for cycling, and speedskating. Ring was on the microphone in Fitchburg for the next 40 years, plus an encore of five additional years as co-announcer when he was in his 80s. The Longsjo race served as the cornerstone event of his announcing, but Ring’s voice boomed well beyond Fitchburg.

Ask any New England cyclist who competed from the mid 1960s through the early 2000s, and they’ll tell you how Ring’s announcing defined the race scene. From downtown criteriums packed with thousands of spectators, to barren office park circuit races, to muddy cyclocross venues, to track racing on ¼ mile car ovals, Ring was on the microphone most every weekend. He packed a PA system into his car, setting-up long before he called the first race to the start line, and packing-up in the fading daylight after the final race was won. It was no full-time gig – on Monday mornings, Ring returned to his vocation as a union pipefitter, working to construct sites like the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

Years of race weekends built him a rich knowledge of riders, and their lives on and off the bicycle, aided by a salesman’s-level knack for remembering names and faces. And therein, lies what for many, are their richest memories of Dick Ring: the stories.

Ring calling your name on the PA was surely was a prize of its own to New England cyclists. But it maybe ranked as the second best thing. Even more precious was Ring making up a tale about you for the crowd. All done subtly with believable anecdotes, often conjured up on the spot.

Any cyclist who he had seen on the ice was an “International speedskater” — regardless of their experience. Beth Mills, who lived in a coastal Massachusetts town, spontaneously became a champion open water marathon swimmer on her way to winning Fitchburg. Ring’s friend and neighbor Mark Thompson, who was born the UK but moved to the US as a small child, “Came all the way from Manchester England just for this race!” each week.

Ring’s antics weren’t reserved just for racers. There was Henry Simpson, a hobbyist photographer who took his son Brian to the races every weekend. “Ladies and gentlemen, there’s Henry Simpson, photographer for Sports Illustrated!” Many regulars on the race scene believed it. One week he told the crowd that referee Charlie Smith, who was manning the prime/lap bell, had “…escaped the Swiss revolution as a child, and he could only carry one item from home with him when he fled over the Alps– the precious bell he’s ringing today.”

He’d season his announcing with unforgettable exclamations, like his trademark catchphrase: “Lord love a duck!” It was the title of an obscure early 1960s movie, but no one remembered that – it belonged to Ring exclusively. A rider might be “Tougher than a boiled owl”, while a close sprint finish might end up in the crowd hearing, “That’ll jah ya mutha’s preserves!”

The Dick Ring-isms are countless. “A prime, that’s a race within a race!” “Spectators in the front row, please no rubbah-necking out into the street.” “These ridahs will be sprinting from curb-to-curb”. And there was the horsetrack lingo about cash – a fin, a sawbuck, a double sawbuck.

In the Fall of 2003, Ring announced a cyclocross race in Pittsfield, MA, the town where he was born. As he wrapped up speaker cables and loaded equipment into his car, he decided that was it – he was retiring from announcing, some 40 years after he started. He wrote himself a note about his decision, sold his PA system, and told the local cycling association he was done. 

But there were more stories to come. He indeed retired from the grind of 10 hour announcing days, and schlepping around heavy speakers. But he’d still make appearances on the microphone for the next 15 years, when the next generation of announcers would ask him to join them and co-announce.

Through the decades he continued on with race wins and records in the masters ranks, both on blades and wheels. But there was more to Ring’s sports life than announcing and his own racing. He co-founded the Northeast Bicycle Club in 1957, still in existence today as New England’s oldest bicycle club. He’d lead weeknight training rides, coaching riders from the paceline. In the late 1970s, Ring and longtime friend Bill Farrell formed the New England Cycling Academy (later the North American School of Bicycling Racing), instructing hundreds of riders about the sport in multi-day training camps. He organized his own race, the Tour de Lowell, for more than 10 years. Through announcing, coaching, and organizing weeknight training races, Ring nurtured an uncountable number of cyclists. It was similar in speedskating, where was a leader and coach of the Bay State Skating Club.

His obituary read: He spent a lifetime encouraging and fostering the athletic pursuits of the young people in his life.

Ring leaves four children, eight grandchildren, and one great grandchild. He lost his son Timothy in 1988. His wife of 64 years, Patricia, passed away four days prior to Dick. On behalf of the cycling community in New England and beyond, our deepest sympathies go out to the Ring family on the loss of Dick and Pat.

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Afterword

My own place in the cycling world has been inextricably linked to Dick Ring. My father, Joseph Cote (1922-2008), began racing bikes at age 14. In the early 1950s he met a teenage Dick Ring – as seen in a wildly unlikely photo of the two of racing a horse on a dirt track in 1952. I was honored to talk about that long-lost horse race story as the intro of a video short about Ring produced by Nick Czerula.

Some of my earliest memories are of my Dad racing at Fitchburg, and hearing Dick Ring on the microphone.  I went on to be a second generation bike racer, and competed in the category 1-2-pro ranks for years – with far more pack finishes than podiums. Yet Dick Ring would remember the few good results I had, like calling me to the start line at the Tour de Lowell by acknowledging my 3^rd place finish weeks before at a tough road race in Putney, VT. It was like that for all the riders.

Dick Ring officially retired from announcing in 2003, and Richard Fries bought Ring’s PA system,  filling the announcing void left.  I soon took to the microphone too, with Fries or me … sometimes together… calling most every race Dick Ring once had. Ring would still attend races to watch, and his encouragement of me on the microphone was priceless. Particularly at Fitchburg, where I knew the responsibility carried of announcing the legacy event that  Dick Ring defined for so long. And of course, so much of what I knew about announcing bike races I learned from listening to him for decades.

In 2013, I reluctantly agreed to take the role of race director for Fitchburg two weeks before the scheduled race date, with a new profit group organizing the event after two years of cancellations. One of my first calls was to Dick Ring. “There’s always a microphone plugged in for you, if you want to announce”, I told him. At age 79, he was back on the air in Fitchburg, 10 years after he retired and 50 years after he started. Local media like the Fitchburg Sentinel and Worcester Telegram latched right on the story.

Dick Ring announced the Longsjo races (with stops in Leominster and Worcester, in addition to Fitchburg) for the next five years.  In 2018, at age 84, he called to tell me that he’d be at the race as always, but not to announce. He just wanted to soak in the event instead. He spent hours chatting with Tom Longsjo, Art’s younger brother, who flew in from Nevada for the re-booted race after not attending for decades.

Changing times in bike racing, sponsorship challenges, covid, and more, finally spelled the end for the Longsjo race, with the final edition held in 2019. Each year after, I’d phone Dick Ring in early July, the race’s traditional date. The calls would always start the same – he’d answer, and I’d say without identifying myself, “I’m looking for a guy who raced his bicycle against a horse.”  

There was no finer cycling life lived than Dick Ring’s.