By J. David Goodman
CITY ROOM / NY TIMES

Among the city’s riders, few approach cycling with more intensity than the ones holding down day jobs in the financial sector.

These biking bankers, stalwarts of the Central Park amateur racing scene and of local triathlons, squeeze in long rides on 9W and state-of-the-art training sessions out of a dedication to the sport that borders on obsession.

(Their particular intensity has not always been well received by other riders or users of the city’s common spaces, though to be fair, Central Park is its own sort of beast for bikers.)

As a result, the economic downturn has been rapidly and acutely felt at the upper registers of the biking scene.

At high-end bike shops like Cadence on Hudson Street, where bikes can cost as much as $20,000, the change was swift. “You can pinpoint the traumatic events with our drop in sales: Bear Stearns, etc,” Matt Heitmann, co-founder of the Philadelphia-based company, wrote in an e-mail message. “On those days, or the days directly after, our sales plunged. Then a huge percentage of our customers just evaporated.”

Before the crisis, he said, roughly 80 percent of his customers were from Wall Street and the financial sector — “we were too Gucci, too Neiman Marcus, and not enough Macy’s.”

Ken Harris, a board member of Century Road Club Association, a Central Park racing club where finance- and otherwise-employed riders mix, said that while the number of racers this year seemed to be holding steady and may even have increased slightly over last year, teams associated with Wall Street have been transformed. Predictably, Merrill Lynch Cycling is no more, having been rechristened with beer and clothing company sponsorships as Pacifico-Hincapie Sportswear. (Perhaps some day it can be renamed for Bank of America.)

Foundation, the local racing team most closely tied to Wall Street, has also seen changes, though Ric Wolfe, a team captain, dismissed any idea that the downturn was to blame. Though many bankers did quit the team, and in some cases even the city, he said: “Nobody has left because of the economy. Actually, we have a bigger team this year.”

“The people on Wall Street,” Mr. Wolfe added, “they’re riding more right now for two reasons: Either they lost their job, or they’re frustrated at work.”

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