Perched in the carambola tree of his St. Petersburg home, John Sinibaldi says: “At 90, I feel more aches and pains than I did before.” Nevertheless, he has a cure for what ails him: “When I get on the bike, I don’t feel pain. Everything goes away. Normal. Completely.”
You would be surprised to know how many miles Sinibaldi rides every week. He’s all focus during this February 2002 ride with fellow members of the St. Petersburg Bicycle Club.
[Times files]
John Sinibaldi, a 90-year-old former Olympic cyclist, in cycling gear, is seen in one of his photographs from 1936.
ST. PETERSBURG - What is John Sinibaldi's secret to a long and satisfying life? I will tell you what I found out. Ride your bike like crazy. Eat your vegetables. Listen to classical music. Avoid television. Whenever possible, go barefoot.
"This is Florida," he says as we amble beneath his backyard fruit trees. "With all this humidity, you'll get fungus if you wear shoes too much. Maybe I'll wear them to the store, and when I ride my bike, but that's about it."
John turns 90 this week. He is unlike any 90-year-old person I have met. He doesn't wear glasses. His hearing is good. His hair features more black than white. He keeps up with current events by reading his newspaper cover to cover every day. He values friends of all ages.
He rides his bike 150 miles a week.
A bunch of us are going to celebrate his birthday by going on a bike ride at 8 a.m. on Saturday. We will follow John's favorite route, from the parking lot at North Shore Pool, south along the city waterfront to Coquina Key, Pinellas Point, Lakewood and back to our starting point.
We will stimulate our appetites by riding 20 miles. We will go to John's favorite restaurant, the Gold Cup Coffee Shop, at 336 First Ave. N, for his favorite breakfast, pancakes. Then everybody will go home, including John. He will ride his bike, of course.
"I have a car, it's nice, but what does anybody want to drive a car around for?" he asks. "Too much traffic. All this tension on the roads. You can have it."
I have known him for years. I tried to remember ever seeing him behind the wheel of a car. I gave up.
"Well, I keep it in the garage. Only time I take it out is to go to Kash n' Karry for groceries. It's a Ford. I bought it new in 1988. It has 55,000 miles on it."
Everywhere else he goes by bike. His bike is a racy Kestrel with thin tires. When John gets up a head of steam, he looks like he's in a hurry. In Louisville, Ky., in August, he rode 12.5 miles in 47 minutes and 8 seconds and won the USA Cycling National Time Trial Championship, the 85-and-older division. It was his 14th national championship.
"Not a big deal," he says. When he was a younger man - go back seven decades - he was the fastest rider in the nation at any age. In fact, he set a record that lasted almost half a century: 100 kilometers - about 62 miles - in 2 hours, 25 minutes and 9 seconds on a one-speed bike. "Oh, I was fast then," he says.
He rode in two Olympics, in 1932 in Los Angeles and 1936 in Berlin. He saw Hitler in Berlin; John could understand no German, but even now he remembers the sound of Hitler's voice, loud and self important. Jesse Owens, the African-American track star, dominated the Olympics and put a lie to Hitler's notion of a master race.
"In the 1932 Olympics I don't know what happened, I drank something that didn't agree with me. It made me sick. The 1936 Olympics, I was strong. I had a couple of bad falls, but I kept getting up. I was ahead near the end, when my rear wheel collapsed. I went down. That was it. Oh, well. What are you going to do?"
He lives alone in a modest house in St. Petersburg. His wife of a half century, Betty, passed away three years ago, though her voice is still on their telephone answering machine. She was sick for a long time and he took care of her.
Now he wakes at 5 a.m. Eats oatmeal and raisins. Has hot tea. Reads his paper and does the crossword puzzle to keep his mind sharp. After sunrise he pedals over to North Shore Pool, meets St. Petersburg Bicycle Club friends and does his ride. Then he enjoys a second breakfast and goes home to his garden.
Gardening runs in his family. His grandfather was a farmer in Italy. John was born in Brooklyn and made a living as a sheetmetal worker in New Jersey, but he always gardened and cultivated fruit trees. When he and Betty retired to St. Petersburg in 1975, the moving van carried 150 quarts of peaches and 150 quarts of apple sauce to Florida.
In St. Petersburg, he grows figs, bananas, oranges, papayas, carambolas, strawberries and pineapples. On rainy days, when he can't ride his bike, he cans strawberry and pineapple preserves. He eats them for lunch - along with his homemade peanut butter. In addition to growing peanuts, he babies several pecan trees and his garden. Lately, he has been working on the soil, getting it ready: By winter he should be harvesting tomatoes, squash, carrots and green beans.
"You know what I like to do? I like to buy me a nice big soup bone and make stock out of it. I make 5 gallons at a time and freeze it in these little containers. I thaw a container out and go to my garden and pick some tomatoes and green beans, maybe a little celery, and then I have fresh vegetable soup."
He also eats chicken, pork and fish. He likes pasta but only when he has made his noodles from scratch. He drinks mostly water and fresh-squeezed orange juice - he says he suffered his last cold in 1973. As for alcohol, "I drink a little red wine, but that's it."
In the afternoon, he listens to music, but only if it was composed long before his birth. "Nothing from after the 19th century. I really love Mozart. But Schubert, he's my favorite. Oh, God. I love Schubert."
He owns a television, but he barely watches except for the news. "Mostly I like public television. Partly that's because I don't have cable and that's the station that comes in the strongest. But I like those science and nature shows on Channel 3. And I hate commercials. Aren't they stupid? And they use all this sex. What the hell they use sex for? They're selling you a car, for heaven's sake."
John Sinibaldi comes from a line of long-lived people. His mother lived to be 96. His father died from a bleeding ulcer in his 70s, but his doctors said he otherwise had a young man's body. John's two baby sisters will be 90 in a few years themselves.
"I don't go to the doctor if I can help it, though I did recently because my heartbeat was funny. You know, I felt a little dizzy. But it seems to be okay now, especially when I'm riding my bike hard. The harder I work, the better I feel."
He has been hurt on the bike during falls, but he has been lucky. "It's hard to remember when it's happening, but when you feel yourself going down, hang on to the handlebars and keep your feet in the pedals. If you put your hands out, and your legs out, you'll break them. So keep them in. You'll get scraped up - I never had skin on my shoulders when I was young - but you'll save your bones."
When he rides, he feels young and alive.
"My goal is to celebrate my 91st birthday next year," he says, bare feet gripping the soil under a pecan tree. "I would like to live to be 100, but I'm not promising anything."
