Trek Founder Passes Away at 73

The sport of cycling has lost a true pioneer. Richard Burke, a founder of the Trek Bicycle Corporation, which capitalized on the luster of Lance Armstrong’s victories in the Tour de France to reshape the way top-of-the-line bikes are manufactured, died Monday in Milwaukee at 73.

It was on a $6,500 carbon-fiber Model 5500 bike built by Trek that Mr. Armstrong won his first Tour de France in 1999, the first of his seven straight Tour titles. With that, Trek became the first American bike company to win the Tour and the first to build a carbon-fiber bike that won the Tour,” John Bradley, a senior editor and the cycling expert at Outside magazine, said Wednesday. “It was a watershed moment.”Racing bikes must be as light and stiff as possible. Before being made of carbon fiber, which has the best stiffness-to-weight ratio, the bikes were made of steel, titanium or aluminum.

With his friend Bevil Hogg, Mr. Burke started the Trek company in 1976, in a barn in Waterloo, Wis. It now has 1,600 employees and sells through more than 5,000 dealers in 75 countries. It makes more than 300 models, priced from $140 to $8,500. Mr. Burke owned an appliance distributorship in Milwaukee before turning to bicycles. European models long dominated, and there were few luxury American brands. But in the mid-’70s, as American biking boomed, Mr. Burke saw potential. That first year in the barn, Trek produced 805 handmade, finely detailed road bikes and earned $161,000. Last year, it manufactured 1.5 million bikes and had revenue of $670 million.

In 2001, the company got a publicity lift when Mr. Armstrong went to the White House and presented President Bush with a Trek, which he rode avidly on weekends at his Texas ranch. In May 2004, when the president took a spill, his bike became temporary fodder for his opponent in his re-election campaign. The Democratic nominee, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, made what he believed was an off-the-record remark: “Did the training wheels fall off?”

Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. Burke was not an avid biker. He did, however, run in five New York City Marathons and three Boston Marathons, his son said.