I’m sad to announce that Ian Dickinson was the cyclist who lost his life in Sunday afternoon’s collision with a motorcyclist near Horsetooth Mountain Park.
Ian had gone out for a ride that morning—something he had done nearly every day since retiring from Hewlett-Packard in 2020—but tragically, he did not return home to his wife, Vivienne.
As many of you know, Ian was a longtime and deeply valued member of our community. He had been active in the Tuesday/Friday Ride (TFr) group for at least 15 years and served as the Friday ride leader for more than a decade. Alongside Steve Douglas, Ian was instrumental in building a warm, welcoming, and safety-first culture that helped define the ride for many.
Ian and his wife, Vivienne, moved from Bradley Stoke, near Bristol in the UK, to Fremont, California, in 1998, before settling in Fort Collins in 2001. Ian and Vivienne were married for 41 years and raised two sons, Michael and Simon. He retired from HP in 2020 after 31 years of service as a procurement and supply chain engineer.
His son, Michael, has this to say about his dad.
My dad was a lifelong rider; he and his parents Leslie (father) and Jean (mother) were also lifelong cyclists. Their vacations often involved multi-day touring the Northwest of England. He raced constantly through his twenties and thirties, mostly time trials, and was an active member of the Nottingham Castle Cycling Club. In the nineties, he put riding and racing on the back burner for his family and career, moved to Fort Collins by way of Fremont, California, continuing to commute and make grocery runs by bike, and embracing the weekend warrior lifestyle. He was a firm believer in squeezing every drop of life out of every tire, component, and threadbare chamois, and continued to run steel frames with drop tube shifters and until circa 2007. He “got serious” again when I started showing interest in riding when I was in high school and racing in college. He told me he had “started riding more and eating fries less,” promptly dropped sixty pounds of cubicle weight, and started terrorizing local group rides. He bought a shiny new Fuji (that, like every part of his setup, he rode into the ground), followed by a Kestral, Canyon, and Trek Gravel bike. You probably knew him not only for his 45 RPM cadence, crooked-toothed smile, Union Jack bicycle jerseys and gnarly varicose veins, but for his boundless energy on and off the bike and his advocacy for safe bicycle routes, separated bicycle paths, and infrastructure improvements. Beyond cycling, he was also a voracious reader; brilliant engineer, builder and problem solver; loved aviation, military history, rugby, and was a master of puns. I know he genuinely treasured the friendship and community that he found in the Fort Collins cycling community. Thank you all for that gift, and the overwhelming extension of love and support we have felt since his passing.
I can’t claim to have known Ian well—we exchanged messages about cycling from time to time, and chatted at the start of the YGR Time Trials he attended. But even in those brief interactions, his passion for cycling was clear and infectious. He cared deeply about the sport and his fellow riders. My heart goes out to all who loved and trusted Ian, especially his family and the TFr crew.
Thanks to Tim Wooten and Mike Moses of Bike Fort Collins for working so quickly to have a ghost bike installed at the scene in Ian’s honor.
