On September 12, 2016 Tahoe Weekly did a feature piece on Bike Tahoe’s Ty Polastri. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
From age 8, Ty Polastri began a lifelong connection to the bicycle. He rode one to school as a child and, eventually, to work as an adult. He has had passion for his occupations, which have included promoting recycling, manufacturing skiing simulators, training skiers and marketing and sales promotion, but it was the bicycle that has truly held his heart.
Polastri was born in Hayward; his parents built a home in South Lake Tahoe in the 1960s. He spent two weeks there every summer and, as often as he could, the rest of the year. He served in the Air Force Reserves for six years between 1965 and 1971 and he graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara in 1972. Then, he opened the South Tahoe Ecology Action Center. According to Polastri, it focused on “recycling of household waste and promoting bicycle advocacy. I laid out a bicycle path network proposal and submitted it to the City of South Lake Tahoe.”
He left Tahoe in 1978 and founded Interski, which manufactured large machines that six people could ski on. He began selling them at ski slopes across the country.
“We opened a world-class training center with two indoor ski slopes, trampolines and a ski jump,” he said.
The Enterski Marin Training Center, yet another of Polastri’s ventures, was located in Tiburon. Jonny Moseley, winner of the gold in the 1998 Winter Olympics, trained there from age 8 to 10. “We trained the public how to ski, as well as world-class athletes,” he said.
Then he produced a 13-week TV show for Ski Adventure. Corporate America liked what it saw and hired Polastri to do promotions and marketing, starting with skiing and then wind surfing. He sold the Interski businesses in 1986 and for the next 20 years worked in the field of marketing and promotion.
Marin County was the epicenter of mountain biking in the 1980s and 1990s and Polastri was there to enjoy it to the fullest.
“I got very involved in mountain biking, became a bicycle advocate for the Marin County Trails Council and produced the Marin County Mountain Biking Festival,” he said.
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