Steve Tilford Foundation

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Steve Tilford Foundation

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Our Mission is to help young people of all backgrounds find and chase their passion through the sport of cycling by promoting education, mentorship, and access to quality cycling opportunities.

09/02/2026

Your STF Epic ride weekend starts Friday, not Saturday.

Packet pickup is at Sunflower Outdoor and Bike, September 25, 4:00 to 7:00. Pick up your packet, see a bunch of your best friends, stay for dinner at the cafe. Just remember the shop closes at 6:00, so if you need last minute parts or nutrition, show up before then.

is sponsoring STF Epic in its first year. They have been holding up the Lawrence cycling scene from Mass Street longer than most of us have been riding.

Saturday is the ride. Snake Farm Ranch, four distances, pizza and beer at the finish, and every entry helps buy a new bike and helmet for about 400 second graders at eight Title I schools in Lawrence.

Get signed up: bikereg.com/stf-epic

08/27/2026

Steve wrote this in 2012, and it might be as close as he ever got to explaining why this foundation thinks about bikes the way it does.

He'd been watching a movie the night before and heard a line that stuck with him: "The world is a playground. We all knew that when we were kids. Somewhere along the way we lost that thought."

Then he told a story about his high school girlfriend's father, a man in his fifties who called Steve up out of the blue asking what kind of bike he should get. Steve brought a mountain bike over and showed him how the shifting worked. The first couple minutes looked like a kid learning to ride all over again, unsteady and a little scared. Then he got it down and disappeared for about ten minutes. When he came back, Steve said his face was pure joy and freedom.

Steve's point was that cyclists hold onto something most adults lose. It takes a certain amount of discipline to not get so caught up in the adult world, and to keep seeing things the way a kid does. He said that's what makes life more enjoyable.

Lawrence kids have been back in school for a couple weeks now, which is exactly the time of year we start thinking hardest about this. This fall we're giving about 400 bikes and helmets to second graders at Title I schools here in town, so more of them get that same feeling a lot earlier in life than the man in that story did.

If you want to help: https://www.stevetilfordfoundation.org/lets-ride/

Full post: stevetilford.com/2012/05/13/the-world-is-a-playground/

08/25/2026

The courses for STF Epic are live.

https://ridewithgps.com/collections/8215439

Four distances this year: Whole Pie at 77.5 miles with 4,401 feet of climbing, Half Pie at 57.7 miles, Slice at 27.1 miles, and Half Slice at 13.8 miles for anyone who wants a shorter day at Snake Farm Ranch.

Routes are up on Ride with GPS now if you want to study the single-track sections and climbs before September 26. Every entry goes toward getting more kids on bikes through Let's Ride!.

Register at bikereg.com/stf-epic

08/24/2026

We're about a month out from delivery day for Let's Ride!.

On September 22 and 23, we're delivering new bikes and helmets to second graders at eight Title I schools in Lawrence, about 400 kids in all. For a lot of them, it will be the first bike they've ever owned.

A $200 gift covers one kid's bike and helmet. If you want to be the reason a specific kid rides home that week, this is the moment:

https://www.stevetilfordfoundation.org/lets-ride/

08/18/2026

Steve rode his first Tour of Kansas City in 1975, as an intermediate. He was 14, and the field that year had half the 1976 Olympic team in it. He wrote another time that it was the first time he had ever seen real bike racers up close.

He kept coming back to that race for the next forty years, and the Cliff Drive circuit was his favorite part of it. The course sits east of downtown, under three miles a lap, two hills, a tight u-turn and then a sweeping 40 mph corner right after. He won it a couple of times.

In 2015, forty years after that first one, he lined up on Cliff Drive again and attacked with a lap and a half to go, which is what he did whether or not it was going to work. Here is what happened next, in his words:

"I looked back and had maybe 10 seconds, but right then Kent Woermann, another Olathe Subaru rider, came by."

Kent is our Program and Development Director now. The two of them traded pulls, got caught about 300 meters from the bottom of the last climb, and Steve wrote that he was already toast by then. He also wrote that he could not be too disappointed about it, because he raced bikes trying to win bike races and that is what he had tried to do.

The Tour of KC used to run in early August, so this is the time of year a lot of people around here remember suffering on that hill. If you raced Cliff Drive, or stood on the climb and watched it, tell us about your day out there. Some of us would really love to see that race come back.

Steve's full post is here: https://stevetilford.com/2015/05/31/tour-of-kansas-city-cliff-drive/

He got started because somebody put him in a bike race as a kid. That is the whole idea behind Let's Ride!, which puts a new bike and a helmet that fits under about 420 second graders at the eight Title I elementary schools in Lawrence. We are at $28,601 of our $100,000 goal, and $200 covers one kid.

https://www.stevetilfordfoundation.org/lets-ride

08/05/2026

The Tour de France Femmes is happening right now and it finishes Sunday. The first time women raced the Tour was 1984, and an American named Marianne Martin won it.

She was nearly not there at all. She had been fighting anemia that spring, missed the top six at the Olympic trials, and the coaches left her off the Tour team along with the other riders who had finished behind her. By the time she got home there was still one spot open. Steve drove her to Colorado Springs and told her to go find Eddie Borysewicz, the national coach, and ask for it herself.

Here is what she told the Guardian about that drive, more than thirty years later: "I don't know if I would have had the guts to go myself. I had to wait a few hours to see him. I had just started to come into fitness and I felt good about it, but I really didn't have any proof, so I kind of begged him to let me on the team. The last thing I said to him was, 'Believe me, Eddie, you won't be disappointed.'"

She got the last spot on the team a few weeks before the race started. Thirty-six women, six teams, eighteen stages over the same climbs the men rode, and a French press openly asking in print whether any of them would even reach Paris. Marianne won the whole race.

When Steve wrote about all of this in 2016, he hardly mentioned his own part in it. The only thing he said he did was lend her some money, because it had come together so late, and he thought it might have been about four hundred dollars. His post is worth reading for the rest of it, including how he knew her, the Graham Watson photo of Marianne on the podium with Laurent Fignon, and a link to the full Guardian story.

https://stevetilford.com/2016/07/12/marianne-martin-first-tour-de-france-womens-winner/

A car ride, four hundred dollars, and somebody telling her to go ask. That was the difference between Marianne Martin watching the first women's Tour de France and winning it.

Let's Ride! is that same math on a smaller scale. Two hundred dollars puts a bike and a helmet under a second grader in Lawrence who does not have one yet, and what they do with it is up to them.

https://www.stevetilfordfoundation.org/lets-ride/

07/31/2026

Steve Tilford Foundation Epic
🐍 Snake Farm Ranch - Lawrence, KS
📆 September 26th, 2026

https://www.stevetilfordfoundation.org/stf-epic/
https://www.bikereg.com/stf-epic

07/28/2026

"Looking back, that was probably the moment we realized we had a cyclist on our hands."

That's how Sawyer Schaeffer's mom remembers the day it clicked. It started earlier, when Sawyer was about 18 months old and got a Strider bike. He took to it almost immediately, and it wasn't long before his parents were encouraging him to lift his feet and coast.

Their neighborhood had a circular route that worked like a little racetrack, complete with a long downhill. One day, Sawyer rounded the corner at the top, lifted his feet exactly as he'd been taught, and took off. His mom ran behind him, yelling for him to slow down, while Sawyer calmly flew down the hill. When it finally leveled out, he put his feet down, came to a graceful stop, and turned around with a huge smile, wondering why she was so out of breath.

Since then, they've chased him down more hills, run alongside him at cyclocross races, built ramps in the driveway, cleared trails, and gone through more bikes, shoes, and helmets than they can count. This summer, Sawyer is spending part of his season racing in the Netherlands.

That's what a first bike can become.

This fall, about 420 second graders at eight Title I schools in Lawrence will receive brand-new bikes and properly fitted helmets of their own. Most of them won't become elite racers. Many won't race at all. But every one of them deserves the chance to discover where a bike might take them.

If you'd like to help another child begin a story of their own, we'd love to have you along for the ride.

https://www.stevetilfordfoundation.org/lets-ride/

07/26/2026

The Tour de France ends today. The 1986 edition was the famous one, when LeMond and Hinault rode for the same team and finished first and second in Paris. Two weeks later they were both in the US racing the Coors Classic, which meant guys like Steve got to line up against them.

At the Reno criterium, Hinault went to the front from the gun and just drilled it. He didn't care about the money; he mostly wanted to stay out of crashes. Steve figured out pretty quickly that there was prime money nearly every lap, so he sat on the five-time Tour winner's wheel and won prime after prime while Hinault towed him around. Steve's take: "We had different agendas, so it was all good."

Somewhere in that same race series, he also won a prime for being the first rider from Kansas across the line. He was the only rider from Kansas in the race.

Full story: stevetilford.com/2015/03/12/cherry-picking-primes-from-bernard-hinault/

Address

Fayetteville, AR
72701–72704

Website

http://www.stevetilfordfoundation.org/stf-epic, https://www.strava.com/clubs/2158424, https://www.stevetilfordfoundation

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