I can see this paradigm being true, based on my experiences. I don't know that it's generally true, but it jives with what I've seen, anyway.

When I got my first real road bike, during high school in '86, a new Lotus Odyssey (or was it Excelle?), it was certainly true that the wealthy kids in my town didn't seem to ride much. My ride buddies during those years turned out to be from pretty middle-class families; children of teachers, engineers, and social workers, all with modest incomes. We were looked upon as weirdos for riding to school, for example. Sure, a couple of us got cars when we got our licenses, but I wonder to what extent being able to afford a car made cycling more or less to appealing to kids in our age grade.

At the university, as I started to hang out at the bike shops and get more immersed in cycling culture--early '90s at this point--I noticed that the other folks who came to the shops and who were obviously cyclists, weren't wealthy folks, either. Lots of educated types, thoughtful, geeky types, but perhaps not rich. It's hard to know, of course, but that was the feeling.

Throughout this time, I was visiting Italy often, and during the university years started taking my bikes with me to ride the hills around my family home there. I became somewhat familiar with the Italian cycling scene through friends I was making there, including a young guy who was a pro rider. I learned that professional cycling in Italy was seen as a job, like a vocational position, suited to kids who weren't going to college or who didn't have a family business to take over. The wealthy kids from Milano and Firenze, whom I also counted among my friends, spent their time with cars and scooters.

So, with that background, like Stevegor, what I see around me today is, in fact, cycling as a more "universal sport" (to borrow his phrase), taken up by a wider range of socioeconomic classes. But, that could just be the perspective from my little corner of the world.