The fascination which attended the old six days’ walking match is nothing compared with that of watching the riders go around the track on the bicycles, flashing in and out among each other in their scorching with several pairs of black clad limbs working like piston rods while the riders are endeavoring to pass the pacemaker. There is not only fascination about it, but also a certain feeling of dizziness as one sees the riders dash around those sharp curves with the bicycle apparently standing on the sharply pitched curves. They go so fast, too, that one has hardly time to watch them for the details of their costumes and how they look.
—“Breaking Records,” Detroit Journal, March 24, 1896
Next to the women’s alluring costumes, H. O. Messier’s newly designed tracks were the most striking visual change in the new era. These banked tracks, built from scratch in each town he visited and torn down for scrap when the racing was over, were smaller and steeper than anything anyone had ever seen. The clumsy high-wheels had been too unstable for such a track design, and most of the large outdoor tracks men and women had raced on in the 1880s were made of dirt or cinder, originally designed for walking and running, with no banked turns. The safeties were faster and nimbler, and over the first year of the new era Messier gradually increased the banks to nearly forty-five degrees around the turns. The men, meanwhile, continued racing on unbanked outdoor tracks or indoor or outdoor tracks banked only on the turns—and nowhere near forty-five degrees. An 1892 Sporting Life article describing how to build a state-of-the-art outdoor four-lap track recommended flat straightaways and turns banked at a gentle twenty-two degrees.1
The women’s bicycles were modified for the short, steeply banked tracks. The wheels were small and set close together on a shortened frame to allow for sharp turns. The crank hanger (where the pedal crank arms were mounted) was raised about two inches higher than normal so the women’s pedals wouldn’t strike the track surface when they leaned into the turns. The riders generally set their gears between seventy-two and seventy-eight. It wasn’t just the pneumatic tires that made the safeties faster. The chain-driven gearing also created a revolutionary ability to manipulate the wheel-to-pedal ratio, enabling riders to get many more inches out of every rotation of the pedals. The pedals of the old high-wheels were attached directly to the hub of the front wheel; one rotation of the pedals made for one rotation of the wheel. Recall that the radius of the wheel was determined by the inseam of the rider, so the largest wheels were perhaps sixty inches in diameter. A very tall man might be able to ride a sixty-six-inch wheel. But with the chain and sprocket assembly, the distance covered by, say, a twenty-seven-inch wheel could be tripled or quadrupled simply by creating a 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 ratio between the front chain-ring and the rear sprocket. Suddenly, one rotation of the pedals now resulted in three or even four rotations of the wheel. A twenty-seven-inch wheel with a 3-to-1 gear ratio was exactly equivalent to an eighty-one-inch high-wheel, which of course no one could possibly ride. Most single-speed safeties were geared between fifty-five and seventy-five inches, about a middle gear for today’s recreational cyclists, which made for reasonable speeds and relatively easy pedaling, but racers soon began experimenting with much higher gears. In the early days of the safety, cyclists still used the high-wheel as the standard measure; the “gearing” told riders what size high-wheel they’d have to ride to get the same distance out of one rotation of the pedals. And to compensate for the short frames, the saddles were set a good ways back. These adjustments obviously made the bicycles ride differently, enabling the women to develop an expertise quite distinct from other racers and recreational cyclists. Everyone who watched them marveled at the women’s ability to spin around the small tracks, pretty much like marbles in a bowl.
In each new town or city the women visited, reporters struggled to convey to the uninitiated just how steep and intimidating the tracks were. Observers frequently began with the physical dimensions. In the early races, the tracks were about fifteen feet wide, six feet high on the turns, and three feet high on the short straightaways.2 By the winter of 1896–97, the tracks had grown narrower (fourteen feet wide on the turns and twelve feet on the straightaways) and steeper (six-and-a-half feet on the turns).3 By 1898 the twelve-foot-wide tracks were raised eight feet on the ends and four feet on the sides—that is, a forty-two-degree bank on the turns and a nineteen-degree bank on the straightaways.4 By comparison, the men’s six-day race held in Madison Square Garden in December 1897 was run on a wider track raised just twenty-eight degrees on the turns.5
The slopes of today’s Olympic-grade velodromes are very close to Messier’s tracks, typically forty-three degrees on the turns and fifteen degrees on the straightaways.6 It didn’t take long, in other words, for Messier and the other managers of women’s racing to hit on a banking calculus that would hold good for well over a hundred years. Today’s velodromes are quite a bit larger than those Messier constructed—typically 250 meters around, roughly 820 feet, or about six-and-a-half laps per mile. The 1897 men’s track at Madison Square Garden was called a nine-lap track but actually measured a bit shorter, at 556 feet.7 Most women’s tracks ranged from fourteen to eighteen laps per mile—three hundred to four hundred feet around. Several times the women competed on even smaller tracks. The track for an 1897 race in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was reported to be twenty-two laps per mile, only 240 feet around. With racing speeds of twenty miles per hour or more, the women would thus complete laps in fewer than eight seconds.
The effect was dizzying, and it left many spectators incredulous. In Columbus in 1897 the Ohio State Journal reported that to the uninitiated “it would appear almost impossible to walk around [the track’s] steep banks, let alone piloting a bicycle over its smooth surface.”8 First-time spectators were said to gasp in astonishment or hold their breath as the cyclists made their way around the dish. People scratched their heads, wondering why the riders didn’t simply topple over. The reason they didn’t, of course, was the centrifugal force they generated. Indeed, the women had to keep up a steady speed in order to hold the track—at least eighteen miles per hour, according to one estimate.9 This guaranteed a dizzying pace and also went a long way to ensure good, competitive races; the women literally could not ride slowly and expect to hold the track.
Reporters came up with a full range of analogies to help explain the visual effect. To a reporter in Indianapolis, “the surface looked more like that of a slide than it did a racing track.”10 A Burlington, Iowa, headline said, “They go around just like spiders on a wall,” and then by way of explanation added, “The saucer-shaped track makes it look like that.”11 The Cleveland Leader said it was “more like flies walking on a wall than anything else it could be compared to.”12 In Butte, Montana, a writer worked especially hard to capture the effect: “As a rider takes the stretch on the curve her body and wheel are deflected at an angle of even sharper than 45 degrees. Perhaps a better description would be found in the statement that she seems to be reclined on an invisible couch in mid-air.”13
Such descriptions continued through the era’s last races. A May 1902 race in Johnstown, New York, was run on a twenty-lap track (264 feet around) whose twelve-foot-wide turns rose nine feet for an astonishing forty-nine-degree bank. “It is a sort of a loop the loop arrangement,” reported the Daily Republican, “and the wonder is that the riders are not all sea sick.”14
Messier opened his tracks to the cycling public as soon as construction was completed both to scout for potential local entrants and to generate the inevitable and alluring reports on how difficult the tracks were to master. In Racine, Wisconsin, for example, Miss Bessie Woodruff, who locally had “attained some fame as a fast and daring rider,” confidently entered her name as a contestant in an upcoming six-day race, but after trying the track she soon withdrew. Those in attendance called her a “sensible girl,” judging that riding full speed on such a track would be “akin to self-destruction.”15
Not surprisingly, the small tracks drew the attention of male cyclists as well, and in city after city both local wheelmen and nationally known professional racers defied LAW rules prohibiting their appearance on the unsanctioned tracks and tested their ability to keep up with the women. Dad Moulton, the athletic trainer who partnered with Messier throughout the era, goaded on the men by claiming that on the small track the women could beat any man in the country—and he should know, he said, having trained top riders on the men’s national circuit.16 In Indianapolis in 1897 one such professional, W. E. Becker—a man who later that year would jump during a race from his bicycle onto the back of famed African American racer Major Taylor, wrestling him to the ground and choking him into unconsciousness17—made good time on the women’s track, but afterward declared that there wasn’t a man in the city who could keep up with the best of the women.18
Because of the threat of LAW sanction, direct competition between men and women was rare, but sometimes men ventured onto the track while the women were in training. In Columbus in 1897, for example, professionals Tom Eddy and Con Baker spun around the track every afternoon when the women weren’t racing. Eddy took four or five hard falls that week before mastering the turns. Baker felt more comfortable on the track, and on the Monday following the women’s race, with the arena closed to the public, Tillie—by then widely considered to be the top woman racer—joined the two men for several mile-long sprints. The pace was too fast for Eddy, who couldn’t hold the track and finally flew into the outer railing, snapping off a two-by-four post with his shoulder. Baker did better, and he and Tillie completed one sixteen-lap mile in 2:45 (21.8 mph), the first half with Tillie in the pace and the second half with Baker leading the way. Both riders were likely holding back, however, as Baker had earlier in the week completed five miles at 22.7 mph, and at that point in her career Tillie’s one-mile record was an amazing 2:09, or 27.9 mph.19
More common were the instances in which local men tried and failed to handle the short laps and steep banks—often after confidently challenging Tillie or one of the other women to a match race. Joe Tattro, a long-distance road cyclist then halfway into a well-publicized trek from New York to San Francisco, challenged Tillie in Des Moines, Iowa, in July 1898 but couldn’t make more than a few slow circuits on the fourteen-lap track.20 Tillie, meanwhile, won that week’s women’s race with an average speed of 22.7 mph.
The speed of the riders forced the audience to pay attention to something other than the women’s bodies and outfits. The Detroit race, held at the auditorium from March 23 to 28, 1896, demonstrated how spectators and reporters alike gradually realized that these New Women were much more than just a bunch of pretty faces. According to the Detroit News, Tillie, for example, transformed from the beautifully attired woman who strolled out of the dressing rooms into something abstract and machine-like on the track: “A streak of maroon, blond hair and stars and stripes, which are tied around her waist, floating in the wind, a pair of black stockings moving like the piston-rods of a locomotive, are all that can be seen as she tears around the steep curves of the track at an angle that makes the spectator dizzy.”21 According to the Tribune, Tillie “flashed around the turns like an unchained meteor.”22
For spectators at the races, it was fascinating to watch from the high perch of the gallery seats, taking in the entire group of riders as they flashed in and out among each other and battled for the pole, the women’s black-clad legs pumping the pedals into a blur. “From the gallery,” said the Journal, “the scene is one of pleasure, but the spectator who tries to watch from the floor speedily becomes half way dazed from the frequency with which the riders pass a given point.”23 The speeds were variously described as “scorching,” “lightning fast,” “break-neck,” “heart-breaking,” and “killing.”24
The omnipresent element of danger added to the fascination. “The nerves of the spectator are constantly alert,” said the Detroit Evening News, “waiting for something to happen.”25 At express-train speeds, the riders would bunch together as they swung in unison into turns. Challengers would swing wide and then cut the corners sharp to try to gain the lead. Everyone realized that the slightest wobble could take down the entire group. The Detroit Journal put it bluntly: “The fascination in main consists in looking for an accident.”26
If sheer speed wasn’t enough, there were two added hazards in Detroit. First, as in Chicago, the builders here had constructed a wooden bridge leading from the stands to the track’s interior, but the overhead clearance was tight for the women as they ducked under the bridge, and the stairway leading to the track descended alarmingly close to the inside of the track. “Some of them seem to miss it by a scant inch,” observed the Journal. “[O]thers by a wide curve pass feet away, but with all the riding there is always a danger that they will strike one of the bridge supports and striking it cause trouble.”27 Given that the women were making laps in as little as nine seconds, this must have been a constant source of anxiety for anyone watching. Second, beginning on the very first afternoon, at least one boy seated near the outer edge of the track had brought with him a supply of tacks, “and he took delight in throwing them on the board track. Several punctured tires were caused by his mischievous actions.”28 It was indeed a wonder that more accidents didn’t take place.
The worst accident of the race occurred on opening night. Pearl Keyes, Lillie Williams, Kittie Staples, and Maggie Smith comprised the first squad, while Tillie, Jennie Brown, May Allen, Elsie Gable, and Lucy Berry made up the second. Lizzie Glaw had been scheduled to ride, but she objected to being placed in the first squad, not in the second squad with Tillie. Lizzie refused to take the track, so the first squad had only four racers. In the afternoon, Lillie Williams led her group with twenty miles and thirteen laps, and then in the evening she kept up the fast pace for the first hundred minutes, all the while battling an equally fast Pearl Keyes. By the time the final fifteen minutes began, Lillie, who’d never before maintained such a pace, was exhausted. With some eighty laps left to ride and clinging to a narrow lead over Pearl and Kittie, Lillie caught up to the much slower local entrant, Maggie Smith, the young lady in bloomers. Just as the pack neared the low-slung bridge and its angled support beams, Lillie yelled for the pole, apparently startling Maggie into swerving not upward into the bank but downward, closer to the inside line. Lillie swerved too, and she crashed headlong into the bridge, directly under the stairway leading to the center of the floor. Understandably stunned, she rested for a moment, shook herself off, and was helped back to her feet by her trainer. A reporter noted that she looked “very white and faint.” Within half a minute she remounted her wheel and wobbled back onto the track. The crowd, which must have been waiting all evening for someone to hit that bridge support, burst into applause as they admired Lillie’s pluck. By now, several years into the bicycle boom, virtually everyone in attendance must have tried riding a bicycle, and they well knew how much it hurt to take a tumble, let alone crash head-first into a heavy beam at twenty miles an hour. And this was a woman. Lillie made it around a couple times more, but she was clearly dazed, and she fell again. Again she remounted, and again she fell—“and everyone thought that this time she was surely done for.” The other riders continued to spin around, steering clear as Lillie tried one more time to get herself under way. Scarcely paying attention now to the leaders, the crowd urged her on, and she once again reached full speed, but then she seemed to grow dizzy again, and as she approached the bridge she fell a fourth time, striking her head against one of the posts. “This time,” said the News, “she gave in and was helped off the track.”29
Lillie’s trainer later claimed that her front tire had come loose from the wheel, which he said accounted for her repeated falls, but to most observers she simply looked exhausted and dizzy, too injured to ride. By the time the others had finished, Lillie had lost sixty-five laps, slightly more than four miles, which effectively put her out of the running. Nevertheless, she left the auditorium that night under her own power, an admirably courageous gladiator in the minds of the crowd, and the newspapers reported that she would be ready to race the next day.
That first day, the second squad had no serious accidents, just Tillie’s wonderful riding. She finished almost a mile ahead with twenty-one miles and eleven laps, another new first-hour record. On the second day the management put Tillie’s squad out first, and she again surpassed twenty-one miles in the afternoon hour, extending her lead and looking as fresh and strong as ever. When the other squad appeared, it looked as if only Pearl Keyes was in any condition to compete with the leaders of Tillie’s squad. Kittie Staples complained of muscle soreness and told people on the infield that she’d be lucky to last five minutes. Maggie Smith seemed okay, but she began the day fifteen miles back. Lillie Williams, her left hand and forearm heavily bandaged after her brutal finish the previous night, looked pale and haggard, with an egg-sized lump on the side of her head. The crowd was surprised and delighted, then, when Pearl, Kittie, and Lillie all started off as briskly as the day before and maintained the strong pace for the entire hour. Maggie Smith again trailed behind, seemingly in a world of her own.
That night, after Tillie extended her lead over Jennie Brown to two miles, the original first squad took the track once again. Except for Maggie Smith, they rode well for an hour and fifty minutes. Then, as the Tribune put it, “the spectators were treated to a mix-up of girls and wheels.”30 As they’d been doing the entire race, the three leaders approached Maggie Smith to lap her once again, and Kittie Staples, who had just a moment before spurted into the lead and was moving at top speed, yelled, “Pole!” Instead of steering out, however, Maggie turned her wheel in, just as she’d done the night before, and skidded into the infield before swerving back onto the track. Kittie, Lillie, and Pearl all smashed into her, and the four women “all went into a picturesque heap.” People rushed to the spot, according to the Evening News, “expecting to see someone killed or badly injured,” but to the crowd’s amazement, all four women were back on their feet within a few seconds.31 Pearl Keyes and Lillie Williams appeared uninjured. Kittie Staples, her fashionable black stockings torn to shreds, had cut and bruised her leg and wrenched her back, but she jumped back on her bike and took off after the others. The crowd loved it. Only Maggie Smith, so hopelessly behind, retired for the night.
As entertaining as these accidents were to some in the crowd, and as impressed as the crowd was by how quickly and casually the women recovered from what seemed to be grave injuries, the race managers recognized their danger—and they also understood that the local gal, Maggie Smith, had caused both accidents and was likely to cause even more if allowed to continue in the race. Lillie Williams had lost four miles the first night because of her falls, and all three of the first-squad leaders had lost several laps because of their accident on the second night. Maggie’s inexperience was holding back the other riders. Maggie ended the night thirty miles behind, and as one newspaper observed, Pearl, Kittie, and Lillie were forced to lap Maggie about once every six laps, which, even when they managed to negotiate it successfully, must have slowed them down to some degree. It’s possible that without Maggie Smith on the track, the three other riders could have pressed Tillie and Jennie Brown for the lead. So the management approached Miss Smith and offered her the twenty dollars they’d guaranteed to all finishers, and she officially withdrew from the race.
On the third day the squads returned to their original order, and the now unfettered trio of Pearl, Kittie, and Lillie took advantage of their new freedom and reeled off over twenty miles. Pearl Keyes finished first, temporarily setting a new record for seven hours. Then it was Tillie’s squad’s turn, and now they had the misfortune to have to deal with a flagging rider. Lucy Berry, the sixteen-year-old, had shown signs of real speed over the first two days but hadn’t displayed much stamina, slackening regularly to rest. On the third afternoon, she finally lost her strength. At first she just rode slowly, but soon she was also zigzagging as she ground away at the pedals. Tillie, who had no intention of losing ground on another record-breaking run, passed her once or twice and then called out to the officials: “Take her off, she’s going to faint!”32 The other riders joined in, and while Lucy was at first determined to continue, she soon crumbled under the pressure of the other women. With tears streaming down her face, she quit the track several laps before the finish.
When everyone had finished and she was back in her robe, Tillie found the race manager, a man named A. G. Gray. “We won’t start tonight,” she said, “if she’s allowed to go on.” Showing little sympathy for the plight of the other squad in having to accommodate Maggie Smith for the first two nights and perhaps also revealing how well she understood the influence her sudden prominence in the ranks of professional women cyclists had given her, Tillie added, “You can’t expect me to win the race when she’s in the way all the time. . . . If she goes on, I will not finish the race.”33
Whether or not he had any further discussion with Tillie is unknown, but Manager Gray chose not to ask Lucy Berry to withdraw—and Tillie was back on the track, as scheduled, four hours later, apparently with nothing to say about Lucy’s presence. “Miss Anderson,” said the Tribune, “had a woman’s privilege to shift her mind and did.”34 Fortunately, Lucy seemed to have recovered somewhat, and she rode steadily, if slowly, through the eighth and ninth hours. Tillie finished the night with 185 miles plus one lap, breaking Pearl’s newly set nine-hour record by some five and a half miles.
The crowds in Detroit grew—from about a thousand on the first day to twenty-five hundred on the fourth and then “something like” five thousand on the sixth.35 Newspaper coverage shifted from flowing summaries of wardrobe changes and accident details to shorter, sometimes even breathless accounts of strategic positioning, spurts to the pole, and record-breaking speeds. The focus was no longer on women in costumes but rather on athletes in fierce competition. Tillie’s nine-hour total, according to the Tribune, came within a single minute of the men’s professional record, set in December 1895 in San Francisco.36 Early on day 4 she broke her own “double-century” record; late on day 5 it was her “triple-century” record. She set new hourly records from one to eighteen, finishing with 371 miles and three laps, more than eleven and a half miles farther than her record run in Chicago.
Jennie Brown (368 miles plus fourteen laps) and May Allen (365 miles plus fourteen laps) had also beaten Tillie’s Chicago record, so it wasn’t just Tillie gaining strength and speed. Toward the end of Saturday night’s racing, May, responding in part to the Wheelmen’s Band striking up the well-known Irish jig “Shandon Bells,” spurted to the front and held the position briefly, making Tillie hustle for the honor of being first across the tape. May and Jennie Brown finished the race very strong, keeping up their sixty-mile-a-day pace all week long. These women were working their way into top athletic condition—a peak of conditioning likely unprecedented in American history.
Tillie overcame May in the final laps and finished in the lead, where she belonged, and then, as the Sunday News-Tribune reported, “was able to negotiate several more when the flag dropped announcing that the tourney was a thing of the past.”37 It was as if she could ride forever at ever-increasing speeds. “She is a wonder,” said the Evening News.38
Women racers were not quite as fast as the men, but they were getting close. In Detroit Tillie had tallied 21.7 miles in the first hour of the race. At that time the men’s record for one hour in competition stood at 21.9 miles. Nine months later, in December, riding on a Madison Square Garden track that was now banked at the ends and on the sides, just like the women’s tracks, Englishman Tom Linton set a new men’s hour record at 23.2 miles.39 Even that was not far from the women’s reach. Over the following year Tillie and Lizzie routinely exceeded twenty-two or even twenty-three miles an hour. In Detroit again in April 1897 Tillie averaged slightly over twenty-two miles an hour for an entire twelve-hour race. She was indeed getting close.
Direct comparisons were not often made, however, in part because the women’s records were never officially sanctioned, which kept their race results unofficial and largely unrecognized. They were printed locally during races but never gathered together on a national level and printed in magazines and yearbooks, as the men’s records were. In addition, while the men’s tracks were carefully measured and formally certified before every race—they were generally eight or ten laps to the mile—the women’s tracks were more hastily assembled and less precisely measured. Indeed, many suspected that promoters intentionally built “short” tracks to ensure a steady supply of new records to announce as each race progressed. Thanksgiving week in 1897 in Kansas City, for example, saw Tillie complete 257 miles and fourteen laps—about 21.5 mph—on what was billed as a twenty-lap track at the Third Regiment Armory. But after the race the Kansas City Star acknowledged that during the week the track had been measured and found to be about two feet short of one-twentieth of a mile. Tillie had completed over five thousand laps, so her final total was exaggerated by about two miles. Even so, the paper insisted, “Anderson covered 255 miles if not more”—about 21.3 mph, still an exceptional pace.40 The next week in St. Louis “several parties” measured the track and found it to be fourteen feet short of the advertised length of one-tenth of a mile. Tillie again had won the race, this time with a total of 253 miles and nine laps, 21.2 mph. If the fourteen-foot allowance were granted, her total would be reduced by about 6.7 miles, an average of 20.6 mph. Track-builder Messier was confronted about the discrepancy and “remarked that he would make a statement to the audience of the fact,” according to the Republic. “This, however, he neglected to do,” and the Republic dutifully provided the uncorrected final numbers.41 The Post-Dispatch also reported the discrepancy, with all the adjusted records printed.42
There were times, then, when the women’s records had to be taken as approximations. Unfortunately, the uncertainty over their exact speeds gave skeptics an excuse for dismissing the women as inferior to the men. Regardless of whether the women were riding 21.5 mph or 20.6 mph, however, they were riding very fast, and it was clear to all who observed women’s racing that they would, if allowed, pose a legitimate threat to the male racers.
Those involved with men’s racing couldn’t help but notice. After a couple years focusing on field-day events featuring short-distance races and attempts to break various time and distance records—the mile and all its major fractions, as well as whole-mile distances from two to twenty-five, plus the coveted hour record—men’s go-as-you-please six-day racing was revived in December 1896 with the renewal of the annual Madison Square Garden race. No one ever said it, but the revival of men’s six-day racing was likely a response to the women’s obvious success with the format. In any case, the revival invited comparisons between the men’s and women’s events. In Detroit in early 1897, where a men’s race had finished up just two weeks earlier, reporters from several of the city papers judged the women’s races to be more competitive and entertaining than the men’s. Partly this had to do with the most obvious difference between the two circuits: men labored around the clock, while the women raced just two or three hours a night. The women’s Detroit race, said the Free Press shortly before the start, “will not be so much endurance as speed.”43 The Journal added that the women were spurred on by more highly pitched personal rivalries and promised that the race would be “a great race from the start to the finish—not a procession, as the men’s races are apt to turn out to be.”44 The News agreed, calling the women’s race “much more interesting” than the men’s race: “It is a sprint from start to finish, and a continual battle for the best position.”45
There was also the growing recognition that of all the sports currently in fashion that decade, cycling offered women the best chance to compete evenly with the men. “Whatever in athletics a woman does as well as a man is always more interesting,” mused the Syracuse Evening Herald, “whether from gallantry or from a feeling that it is more creditable in a woman to do it because she is not so naturally an athlete, so devoted to muscular development.” This reporter, at least, had difficulty taking women seriously in other sports, but cycling was different. “Women’s ball teams never attracted interest because women can’t play ball,” the Herald continued. “Women’s walking matches were fierce and women’s track meets won’t do, because women can’t run and jump as men can. But women can ride wheels.”46
In March 1897 the New York Sun published an article that reflected on just how far the women had come since the beginning of the new era. “A comparison made between the time made in the first women’s races on the safety and the performances of this year,” the article stated, “is going to be most interesting. . . . You see, the margin of speed between men and women riders is very small, and professional and amateur wheelmen and wheelwomen believe that [the Englishman Tom] Linton’s record will be equaled if not broken in the women’s race in progress now [in Chicago].”47
Linton’s record was not broken that week in Chicago, but the race captivated the city, attracting upward of twelve thousand people for opening night and overshadowing a men’s race held in the same venue just two weeks earlier. The proximity of the events served nicely to underscore the contrasts between the two. By all accounts the women’s race was faster paced, more competitive, and more exciting than the men’s. Indeed, while the popularity of men’s racing appeared to be on the wane, the women’s sport was clearly peaking.
After all the attention on the outfits worn by Tillie and the other racers, Tillie’s athletic prowess, in particular, stunned the Detroit reporters, and they said so after her record-setting victory there in March 1896. “She can stand any amount of hard work,” said an admiring Evening News, “and never seems to tire.”48 Now that Tillie had proven herself outside of her hometown, eclipsing every known record for women, people all across the country began to take note, acknowledging her as the finest of the new women racers. Newspapers in Denver, Peoria, Philadelphia, and Syracuse reported on her accomplishments in Detroit. She was becoming famous.
One report in particular, however, from Houston, Texas, must have been equal parts gratifying and bittersweet for Tillie—and everyone involved in women’s racing. It showed just how far news of the women’s exploits was now traveling and also how far women’s athletics had to go in order to be fully recognized alongside men’s: “Miss Tillie Anderson would be the only woman cyclist entitled to the championship of the United States,” declared the Houston Press, “if women could be champions.”49
As far as many in the sports world were concerned, that was still a big if.