plant could better serve them by producing mopeds, instead. Bicycles were no longer produced in Latvia, beginning 1961.

Set against the more linear development of the U.S. cycling industry, the story of its Latvian equivalent is no simple tale of boom and bust, or even merger and acquisition, but one of perseverance and resourcefulness. The full historical details are captured in the excellent “From Leutner to Erenpreiss,” a bilingual volume which carefully chases down the succession of loose threads and new beginnings thrown up by decades of upheaval. The book is available through the Saulkrasti Bicycle Museum, a must-see destination for any visiting cyclist, located up the coast a short train ride from Riga. (The museum offers rental bikes and repair services as well.)

Varis Auzins, a lifelong cyclist and a co-founder of Open Bikes, Riga’s first community bike shop, was 13 years old when Latvia finally exited the Soviet Union in 1991. He describes a bleak picture of life, towards the end of the occupation. What we know as bike shops were simply not around, he says; there were only a few garages, serving motorists. Connections were needed, in order to obtain new parts. Bicycles were generally fixed at home, within the family.

Growing up in Sigulda in central Latvia, and impressed by images of BMX bikes originating in the West, the young Varis and his friends sought to create facsimiles of their own the only way they could: by tearing apart old Soviet bikes and welding the tubes back together, using more BMX-like angles. They had no blueprints to work from; only pictures clipped from Western magazines. He and his friends cut their own dropouts from steel plate, enlisting sections of tubular bed frames to make the fork legs.

Uldis Austrins, another Riga cyclist originally from Bauska, a small town in the South of the country, recalls a similar setting. “It was nearly impossible to buy a bike,” he says. Where he lived, “there was a shop where you could sometimes buy a bike,” but only if you were lucky.

Toms Kohs, a road racer who also builds freak bikes with Riga’s Apokalipses Jātnieki (Riders of the Apocalypse) club, describes a broadly similar experience. Road bikes were not available in sizes to fit ten-year-old racing enthusiasts, so his coach and parents worked together to reduce the dimensions of adult bikes to better accommodate them. Fast kids’ bikes simply were not available, Toms says—his coach, unable to get by on his salary alone, maintained a side line repairing and modifying bikes.

Kohs also notes how bicycles effectively skipped a generation: while both he and his grandparents had them, his parents did not. “The Soviets decided there was no future for bicycles,” he says. “The number of cyclists decreased radically.”

Latvia is a very different place, 22 years after regaining its independence. The changes are not always immediately evident to visitors from the west, but conversations with those living there serve to underline their depth and scope. Five years after establishing their original workshop in a decrepit and unheated industrial building in Riga’s riverside Andrejsala district, the Apokalipses Jātnieki riders faced an unanticipated new challenge: the neighborhood around them was going upscale, and as summer began in 2013 they found themselves evicted. Yet their creative and expressive presence, like the course of the city’s development itself, still represents a significant departure from Soviet times. (New quarters with other, more pedestrian problems have since been located across town. Kohs is optimistic that the club, lately focusing more on building cargo bikes, will continue to flourish.)

Bike culture in Latvia is lately going from strength to strength. BMX is much more of a phenomenon, now—it was of course Māris Štrombergs, a Latvian from Valmiera, who first won the gold medal in BMX at the 2008 Olympics, and then retained the title at the London Olympic Games 4 years later. Toms Erenpreiss, the great grandson of founder Gustav Erenpreiss’ brother, has succeeded in bringing the family business into the modern era, first through reconditioning the prized original examples, and more recently by offering classically-styled new bicycles under the same illustrious name. The Riga Hardcourt Bike Polo group regularly coordinates events through Facebook, with local teams traveling to compete in tournaments around the region. Riga’s annual Bike Week has grown to reflect this burgeoning scene, and in 2013 included a tweed ride, a freak bike parade and the biggest Critical Mass ride in the country’s history, among many other unique events.

Piens Velo, tucked handily beneath the popular Piens Bars in central Riga, has emerged as a real hub for