They were the scourge of the streets in the 1980s, the black spandex road warriors who zipped everything from letters and jewels and live animals to wedding gowns and baseball uniforms, up, down, all over the town, with terrifying speed.

Everyone hated them.

There was a time when there were 5,000 of these sinewy speedsters, with names like 42 Street Loan Shark, Atomic, Fireball, Zoom, Total Crud and Golden Boy.

"Kamikazes on two wheels," "pit bulls on bikes" and just plain "lunatics" was how the sane folk saw them.

These were New York City's bicycle messengers - careering the wrong way on one-way streets, leaping potholes, blowing whistles, flinging curses at cabbies, terrorizing the elderly and mothers with babes in strollers, sending jaywalkers flying tail over teacups.

Swiftest among these was a young man from the Harlem projects. His name was Nelson Vails - but he was known as Cheetah, the fastest cat in the jungle.

The sprint he sharpened on Manhattan's perilous streets would carry him to Olympic glory, one of the few blacks ever to reach such heights in the expensive and mostly white world of competitive cycling.

His sporting philosophy, also refined on the streets: "Get out of my way. This is what I got to do, whether you like it or not."

Nelson Vails was the youngest of 10 children born to a janitor and nurse, and he grew up at Fifth Ave. and 115th St. When he was 6, his brother bought him a two-wheeler and insisted the kid get off his trike and learn to balance on this new machine, or it was going back to the store.

Little Nelson wasted no time, fast maturing into a self-proclaimed "bicycle nut." Friends said he always had his eyes on escaping the projects, and as he grew stronger and faster it became clear that his powerful legs were going to be his ticket out. It wasn't long before the now-teenage Vails started showing up at local races in Central Park and at the bumpy gray concrete oval in Queens that passed in New York for a velodrome, or bicycle racing track.

Vails would race with a grab bag of cheap equipment, shorts with holes in them and shoes that were too big. Still, he would hold his own against well-trained athletes on the fancy light imports from Italy and France.

Then he started winning, first in the Harlem Championships, a bicycle race held for local kids.

He soon caught the eye of New York's Toga/Tempo racing team. They were impressed when this unknown on an undersize pink bicycle whipped the best of their riders. Toga/Tempo offered the 19-year-old a spot in 1980.

But Vails couldn't devote himself solely to cycling. By 1981, he was a married father of two. He had to make money. Bicycle messenger was the natural career choice.

It was possible for a rider who was fast and fearless to deliver 40 packages a day, earning as much as $500 or more a week - if he lived. Vails tossed himself into the fray, learning the rules of the jungle and making up some of his own, like it's bad form to hit a baby carriage on a sidewalk but a jaywalking pedestrian is fair game.

He learned to zip through the tiny spaces between speeding cars. He learned to coast behind a truck by tucking himself into the little pocket of air inches from the bumper. He also learned the value of diplomacy. When one driver slapped him because he had put a hand on the car to balance at a light, the 190-pounder with 27-inch thighs gently rested his bike on a nearby parked car, then ripped open the driver's door and challenged him to "do something." The last Vails saw of that driver, he was cowering in the passenger seat.

After that encounter, though, Vails realized that haggling took time, and time was money. From then on he avoided confrontation. It would seem that 10 or so hours of this would be enough time in the saddle for anyone, but not Vails. As good as the on-the-job workout was, it wasn't enough to take this racer where he wanted to go.

So sometimes before he started his workday, he'd take a refreshing early-morning 40-mile jaunt up to Ossining and back. He rode after work, he rode on weekends. He rode all the time.

By 1982, it all paid off, when he earned a spot on the U.S. team, then a gold medal in 1983 in the Pan American games in Venezuela. A year later, he just missed a spot on the Olympic team.

But the lights turned green for Vails when the Soviets dropped out, allowing the U.S. another cyclist for the games in Los Angeles.

His specialty was the 1,000-meter sprint, in which two riders creep along a banked track until the end, when they pump like madmen for the last 200 meters. It was a cat-and-mouse game for which Vails had been well prepared playing taxi tag in New York.

Seventy-two years had passed since the last U.S. cyclists captured any Olympic medals, and the 1984 team seemed hellbent on making up for lost time. They won nine, four gold.

One medal - a silver in the match sprint - went to Vails, the guy in the red helmet with the New York City skyline on it. Back in New York on Aug. 15, the one-time messenger marched up some of the same streets he had navigated by bike two years earlier. This time, the Cheetah had to go slow, as he and his 220 fellow Olympians waded through knee-deep confetti along the Canyon of Heroes.

Originally published on September 9, 2003