As Stephan Wanger pedaled east into Indiana on July 21, 2004, it seemed a perfect day for a bike ride, sunny and not too hot. But just on the other side of Michigan City, he was ambushed by a summer storm. Strong winds pushed his flagpole–flying the flag of the city of Chicago–so far forward that it hit his bike’s handlebars, smashing his $270 navigational computer.
When Wanger, then 37, got back to Chicago he had no job and, as he’d sublet his Printers Row loft before the ride, no place to live. He’d broken up with his girlfriend between New Orleans and San Antonio, and now she wasn’t returning his calls or e-mails. But Krebill’s post, along with those from several others, cheered him. “I was shooting to build a Sears Tower, but I only got a third done,” Wanger says. “They helped me to understand that a third of the Sears Tower is still pretty tall.”
Another buddy, art director Wyatt Mitchell, recalls a product Wanger dreamed up: a camera built into an automobile that would function like the black box on an airplane. “He thought it’d be a big hit, and there is something to it, but it never went anywhere,” Mitchell says. “He has a way, once he has an idea, of making that idea bigger and bigger in his head.” When Mitchell first heard about Wanger’s plan for the Pedal he says he thought, “‘Oh, Stephan’s gone nuts now–what’s he talking about?’ But as he started to train and plan, it was pretty quickly obvious that he was serious.”
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Wanger visited 20 countries during his four years as a sailor. He remembers being struck as a 19-year-old by living conditions in Venezuela: huts of scrap metal, the foul odors of clogged streets. “Germany has it so good,” he thought. “Any skinhead, instead of being sent to jail, they need to visit these cities.” It was aboard a destroyer called the Hessen in the late 80s that Wanger first came to Chicago.
The next summer he used all his vacation days to travel in the United States, and within a year he’d decided to move here for good. On his 23rd birthday, in 1990, Wanger flew to Chicago with two suitcases and an invitation to stay with a female friend he’d met during his travels. He and that friend soon married, in part so he could get a green card–they divorced a few years later. Wanger studied English at the Lakeview Learning Center, got his GED, and earned a degree in marketing and public relations from Columbia College. He waited tables at Maggiano’s, where he also filled in as a baker from time to time, and interned at the Field Museum. And he volunteered to organize lodging and transportation for the U.S. Soccer Cup, held in Chicago in 1993. That led to paying PR and marketing jobs with the host committees for the 1994 World Cup and the 1996 Democratic National Convention.
Wanger says he had the training vessel in mind when he founded Aspire to Inspire in July 2003. But Aspire’s first effort, he decided, would be the Continental Pedal, which would “gain credibility on a worldwide level.”
Wanger tried bike manufacturers. He says many told him the project sounded great but that they didn’t have money to commit or that it was too late in the fiscal year to fund anything new. He also approached the city’s tourism office, thinking that he could act as a “traveling kiosk” for the city during the Pedal, but all it could offer him were some brochures to take along.
