Mert Lawwill, a national champion motorcyclist turned mountain bike trailblazer, died Wednesday in Boise, the city where he was born.
Lawwill was 85 years old. His death was reported by Cloverdale Funeral Home and confirmed in a press release from the American Motorcylcist Association, an organization that inducted him into its hall of fame in 1998.
Casual fans met Mert Lawwill as a 5-foot-6, 29-year-old in banker’s garb on the streets of San Francisco during the opening scenes of Bruce Brown’s 1971 Academy Award-nominated documentary “On Any Sunday,” a dive into the culture and competition of flat-track motorcycle racing. That was Lawwill’s world…