Steve Tilford has sewn up his place in cyclocross history — but he isn't done

Perched on the edge of his couch, Steve Tilford performs minor surgery wearing nothing but a pair of jeans and a silver medal of St. Christopher that rests just below his neck.

The late-December afternoon casts dim light through the window of his single-story Topeka home. A plastic bag with a biohazard symbol stamped on the front spills its contents on the coffee table. The kit is missing a needle, the one that Tilford is gingerly using to thread stitches through the leg of a black-and-white English setter.

Tilford's angular face and the small hoop in his earlobe are partly obscured by his wavy, shoulder-length hair, giving him the tousled look of an Orange County surfer rather than a lifelong Kansan. His eyes hover a few inches above the bloody gash that the dog sustained in a run-in with a barbed-wired fence earlier that day.

The dog bucks slightly as the thread pulls together the edges of the wound, but Tilford's biceps barely flinch as he holds the animal steady. His concentration is steely and silent. As a professional cyclist, he's accustomed to the sight of blood and the practice of mending his own torn flesh.

Chris Tilford stands calmly to the side as his brother plays veterinarian."He's got plenty of experience on himself," Chris says with the amused smile of someone who has watched this scene play out before but still can't get over the oddity.

A track of scars on the back of Tilford's head shows where a crush of mountain bikers, surging with adrenaline at the start of a race, rolled over his head and punctured his skull. By his count, he has busted his clavicle at least three times on each side and fractured a dozen other bones. For the more minor rips and gashes, though, Tilford has his own bag of sutures and anesthetic. He has learned to stitch up his own wounds.

Acting as his own doctor or sewing up a minced dog leg on a Friday afternoon isn't what makes Steve Tilford eccentric, though. He's a Kansan who has spent 30 years at the top of a sport first elevated by Europeans. Next month, he'll turn 49 years old, but he's still pounding away in a profession that spits out even its most dedicated by the time they're in their late 30s.

For Tilford to stop competing, something will have to take him out — something more disabling than broken bones, something more persistent than the constant questions about retirement. Because, after all these years, the only discomfort that spooks him is giving up the hard-knock life.

In the time it takes Tilford to stride across Massachusetts Street, he has downed a banana in a few bites. It's a few weeks before Christmas, and Tilford is swinging through Lawrence for a party at the Sunflower Outdoor and Bike Shop down the street.

To get to Lawrence from his home in Topeka — for Tilford, 30 miles over back roads — there's no need to jump in his Honda Insight hybrid or his boxy 1986 Isuzu Trooper. For such a short jaunt, to fetch a double shot of espresso or join friends for a few beers, he just rides his bike. When he arrives on this frigid afternoon, his face is flushed. He acknowledges the cold with a little sniffle.

Had he followed his family's lead, Tilford would have been a musician. His grandfather was a violinist, his grandmother a pianist. They met working silent movies in the 1920s and landed in Topeka because it was a wide-open market for a piano store. That's where Tilford's father worked; his mother was a homemaker. By age 7, Tilford could play a Bach sonata.

Tilford was athletic but didn't gravitate toward team sports. He broke his leg twice in seventh grade — once falling out of a tree, the second time skiing — and fell behind the curve of other kids trying out for football and basketball. But that was in the mid-1970s. The 10-speed craze had hit. A Schwinn bike shop had opened in Topeka. Cycling was catching on, and Tilford was drawn to the solitary sport. "I was hooked on it early," he says. "I spent every free minute of my day thinking about cycling."

At 14, he started racing with a team sponsored by the University of Kansas. The first year he competed regularly, he won the state's junior championship. He then qualified for the national championship but broke his collarbone a week before the race. He competed anyway. Tilford traveled around the country for Olympic development races. By the time he was 17, famed cycling coach Eddie Borysewicz was scouting him for the U.S. Junior National Team, a small group groomed for international racing.

"I graduated high school a year early just to get out and race bikes," Tilford says with a mischievous grin. "Then I went to KU and thought, OK, this is going to be cool, you know, going to college. After a week, I realized that going to college is just like high school, only you go to class half as much. So I skipped out on the first semester and went to Florida for three weeks to race."