Visualize a horde of sweaty, drooping, exhausted people. They're giving their all in a gruelling, non-stop, 24-hour marathon and looking as if they're about to drop dead. Must be desperate, Depression-era dancers, right?

Wrong. The puffing, panting crowd of 2,500 competitors at Mississauga's Hershey Centre last month may have been as pooped as their predecessors. But they weren't struggling to stay on their feet. They were sitting down, frantically pedalling stationary bicycles, spinning to raise more than $500,000 to battle breast cancer.

Welcome to cycling 21st- century style. And to a brand-new breed of bikeshop owners who are springing up in Ontario and elsewhere, driving their industry in previously undreamed-of directions.

Not to mention propelling annual sales at bicycle shops in Canada by almost $200 million between 1999, when it hit $562 million, and 2003, when it topped $756 million, according to industry analyst Rennie Media Inc.'s Market Research Group of Collingwood.

Ken Kerr, Business Edge
Ira Kargel gives co-owner Kevin Wallace a shot of water as he works out on an exercise bike.

It was Kevin Wallace and Ira Kargel, co-owners of Gears Bike Shop in Mississauga, who orchestrated and hosted the sixth annual 24-Hour Spin. The longtime friends dreamed up the event after Wallace's mother died of breast cancer.

So far, the duo and their supporters - which include such corporate biggies as Bell Canada, BMO Nesbitt Burns, Wilson International and AstraZeneca, all of whom sponsored teams at the spinathon - have raised and donated more than $2 million to create the recently opened Betty Wallace Women's Health Centre at the Trillium Health Centre in Etobicoke.

Today, Wallace's and Kargel's cutting-edge operation - which by all accounts exemplifies the most innovative of the new-style cycling centres - is an airy and stylish, 6,500-sq.-ft. space in a trendy neighbourhood near the shores of Lake Ontario. Gears was recently cited by Mountain Bike Magazine as "one of the most influential forces in Canadian cycling today."

But its beginnings were about as humble as it gets. The shop was launched 17 years ago in a dirt-floor shed in Wallace's backyard when he was fresh out of high school, fixing a few bikes and selling a few cycling-related items.

Then he ploughed whatever puny profits he could scare up back into his nascent business.

Fast-forward to 1996, by which time Kargel had joined Wallace in growing Gears to the point where it could afford to be what she calls "a real bikestore on the main drag.”

By 2000, they had bought and renovated their current property, where the annual sales are now running at about $2 million.

"We know that we have to be more than just a retail store," says Kargel. "We give people experiences that make them customers forever."

These experiences include regularly throwing parties for hundreds of clients and sponsoring Gears Racing, which is devoted to helping Canadian athletes reach their potential and encompasses professional mountain bike, road cycling, triathlon and adventure racing teams.

One of the key elements in the success of Gears and similar full-service bikeshops, says Janet O'Connell, executive director of the Newmarket-based Bicycle Trade Association of Canada, is that they found an imaginative way around the revenue-killing obstacle of winter, when only diehards keep on biking.

The brightest of the bunch simply brought the sport indoors via specially designed stationary bikes. Then they offered classes, added perky, fitness-type instructors and pounding music tracks and dubbed it spinning. Voila, a seasonal industry was transformed into year-round operations whose "level of professionalism and creativity is increasing enormously," says O'Connell.

Marissa Schroder, editor of Toronto-based Get Out There magazine, agrees. An avid cycling enthusiast, she chose Gears as her bikeshop, even though getting there means driving 30 minutes from her home, passing many traditional bikeshops along the way.

"It's not just the spinning facilities and classes at Gears and the best of the other shops, but especially the club atmosphere and all the activities they organize," she says. "You get such a sense of belonging when you walk in and people ask how your mountain biking went last weekend or whatever."

Schroder says that another good example of what she considers the best in breed is Caledon Hills Cycling, in Caledon. Laura Watson, who owns the shop with husband Mike, says people are actually moving to the area because of its many cycling opportunities and fellow enthusiasts.

"In addition to the shop, we have a club with 250 members who not only get together for rides and races, but do wonderful work on behalf of trail advocacy," says Watson. "When there was a threat that some of the trails around here would be closed down, we actually acquired some of them."

Yet another not-your-grandpa's bikeshop is D'Ornellas in Scarborough. Owner Eon D'Ornellas is a two-time Canadian cycling champion and has represented his native Guyana and later Canada at the Olympic, Commonwealth and PanAmerican Games.

While his shop sells and services the very latest in technologically advanced bicycles, he says the D'Ornellas Fitness Factory School of Cycling runs classes "to help people develop the most efficient pedal stroke and bike fit so they can sit properly to avoid injuries."

As well, D'Ornellas sponsors a triathlon race team and organizes recreational rides in scenic areas of Ontario and Vermont.

And then there's Epic Cycling, which opened four months ago in the Beaches area of Toronto, a hotbed of cycling if ever there was one as evidenced by the monthly doubling of its membership to its current level of about 100.

Co-owned by husband and wife Jesse and Christine Pilkington, Epic focuses primarily on what Jesse calls the underserved niche of athletic development for serious cyclists. Instead of selling and servicing bicycles - although doing so at a second location is already on the drawing board - Epic offers computerized performance testing, a spinning studio, cycling clinics, group rides and a shop area where riding shoes and other apparel and accessories are sold along with nutritional products.

How does Jesse feel about his stock in trade and that of similarly advanced bikeshops?

"When you go into your typical bikestore, you're going to find a bunch of guys in the corner with lots of grease on their hands fixing bikes and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.

"We just wanted to bring a different take to that, a new kind of bikeshop for a new century."

(Terry Poulton can be reached at poulton@businessedge.ca)