Hallucinations affected one rider. Another would be simple as a child. Irritability and a mania to keep on at all hazards were exhibited by some, while the most intense desire to drop and go to sleep were exhibited by others. The trainers urged, cajoled, threatened, and at times used physical violence to keep their men going. . . . Men would go asleep on their wheels and tumble to the floor. One rider’s arms and hands were so benumbed by injections of cocaine, used to deaden the aches, that he could not feel the handle bars.
—“The Man in the Clock Tower,” Forest and Stream, December 18, 1897
After a three-year layoff while the safety bicycle took root in American culture, men’s round-the-clock six-day races returned to Madison Square Garden in December 1896 and soon spread to other cities as well. Known—and patronized—almost entirely for the cruel hardship they inflicted on riders, the races quickly lost even LAW support. At the national assembly in Albany, New York, in February 1897, outgoing racing board chairman George Gideon recommended a halt to sanctioning six-day races, calling them “injurious to the sport.”1 No formal action was taken, however, and race promoters continued to stage the marathon events for the next two years—when they were at last banned entirely.
Occasionally, men’s and women’s races took place in close proximity, sometimes on the same track a week or two apart, and then the stark contrast between the sports was laid bare. It was not good news for the men. Two Chicago races—a February 22–27 men’s race and the March 15–20 women’s race—neatly demonstrate why women’s racing was such a popular hit. Both took place at Tattersall’s on a track designed and built by H. O. Messier. Before the men’s race, the Chicago Tribune credited Messier with inventing the saucer-shaped design and building the first one in Minneapolis in 1895. The paper lists other cities where Messier had built tracks—St. Paul, Duluth, Winnipeg, Indianapolis—without bothering to mention they were for women’s races.2 The track in Chicago was ten laps to the mile, a bit smaller than usual for the men and a bit larger than usual for the women. Other than occurring on the same track, the two races couldn’t have been more different.
Thanks to the efforts of Fred Gerlach, the men’s race was fully sanctioned by the LAW. It was a “go-as-you-please” event, running 142 hours, from 12:05 a.m. Monday to 10:05 p.m. Saturday. The promoters offered nearly $4,000 in prizes, with $1,000 for first place, which attracted twenty-three starters, including several notable champions. Charles Ashinger and Teddy Hale had won the annual championship six-day races at Madison Square Garden, and Charles Miller would go on to win the 1897 and 1898 races there. Hale’s 1896 total at the Garden was considered the current record, 1,910 miles and eight laps—an average of about 13.5 mph. Chicago rider John Lawson, still calling himself the Terrible Swede, was among the starters and credited with holding the world’s unpaced records from twenty-five to fifty miles. Also participating was Dottie Farnsworth’s trainer, A. A. Hansen of Minneapolis, a thirty-year-old native of Denmark.
The number of race officials gives some sense of the size and scope of the production. More than thirty referees, twenty timers, fifty judges, and a hundred umpires were scheduled to take shifts during the week. The hall was elaborately decorated as a “winter garden,” with palm trees and evergreens surrounding the track and arches of moss placed at six-foot intervals around the circle. The arches were studded with incandescent lights, and thousands of other electric lights dotted the huge building’s interior. As with the women’s races, music was featured throughout, but given the round-the-clock schedule, no fewer than six orchestras had been hired. There was also the usual rickety wooden bridge leading from the stands across the track to the “paddock,” or infield. The infield itself was outfitted with small huts for the riders, each equipped with lights, a portable heater, a cot, and plenty of bandages, sponges, and liniments.
Fred Schinneer, a twenty-four-year-old German, covered 417 miles in the first twenty-four hours, an average of 17.4 mph. That would be the week’s best score, as the contest devolved quickly, and predictably, into a simple test of will and endurance. Much early coverage focused on the relative fitness of the riders and their likelihood of finishing the race. Lawson, for example, was “the plumpest, softest looking rider in the lot,” while Ashinger started the race “a bundle of sinew and bone.” Indeed, besides tracking the countless laps and hundreds of miles logged by each rider, the chief entertainment was watching the riders for signs of collapse. “The change that takes place in the appearance and manner” of the riders, according to the Tribune, “will be an interesting feature for those who attend the race.”3
The riders employed a full range of strategies, each riding very much his own race. Some, like Lawson, settled into a steady pace and ignored the other riders. Others, like Ashinger, sprinted often and refused to let others pass him. Some riders rode fairly hard and then took long rests, while others stayed in the saddle pretty much around the clock. Besides keeping track of the endless laps, the crowds had little to watch other than the gradual attrition of the field.
Seven riders dropped out in the first thirty-six hours. By the second afternoon, only four of the sixteen remaining riders “did not seem on the verge of dropping from sheer exhaustion.” By the end of the fourth day, nine riders were still on the track. A feature in the Tribune provided daily etchings of the leaders, showing their increasing pallor and fatigue. Basically, the artist began with a day 1 portrait and added lines and shadows each day. By day 4 the men’s hair was messy, their eyes were dull and sunken, their mouths and cheeks were drooping. Ashinger practically slept as he ground away, machine-like: “He has pads for his saddle and handle bars,” said the Tribune, “and a chest rest which is fastened on the frame in front of the saddle post. His favorite position finds him bending over the rest with his right and left forearms resting alternately on the handle bars.”4
Virtually all the men relied on stimulants to keep themselves going. As early as the second day, Teddy Hale was kept aloft “by means of administering hypodermic injections of morphine.”5 The attendant physician at the race, a Dr. P. C. Boomer, apparently viewed the race as a kind of pharmacological study. “We have found that strychnine is the best stimulant,” Dr. Boomer explained. “All the men except Stewart take the drug in their mouths, while [he] insists on hypodermic injections. At the beginning of the race we tried morphine, but it affected the digestive organs and we were obliged to give it up. Kola had the same effect, and it is to this drug that I attribute Ashinger’s haggard appearance. This man has used Kola freely.” “Cocaine has as good an effect as any of the drugs for a time,” Dr. Boomer went on, “but its effect is short and we have not used it lately. Hannant was all played out on Wednesday and I gave him an injection of atrophia. It had an excellent effect and he has suffered no ill effects except a flushed face.”6
Other riders suffered more dramatic effects from all the drugs. Arthur E. “Letter Carrier” Smith was a twenty-seven-year-old road racer from Wheeling, Illinois, participating in his very first track race. He held the twelve- and twenty-four-hour American road records, the five-hundred-mile American road record, and the Chicago–New York overland road record. According to Dr. Boomer, Smith believed that he could win the six-day race if only he could get enough morphine. But the drug plus the continuous riding was causing him to lose his bearings, to say the least. “On Wednesday he followed the black line around trying to find the way out of the course,” the doctor said. “He told the attendants who took him off that he was in a cage and couldn’t get out.”7
Only five men finished the race. Schinneer led the way with 1,788.4 miles, a 12.5 mph average. He led Miller by 25 miles, Ashinger by 61 miles, Lawson by 81 miles, and Hansen by 185 miles. Clearly, there was no hair-raising sprint to the finish, as there often was at the women’s races. In fact, the way the Tribune described it, there was hardly a sense of a “race” at all:
Occasionally a man rode on a bicycle by the rows of faces. Then there were great cheers. The men had faces that were peaked, as if after an encounter with a plague. Their eyes were as big as saucers. They wore garments that were originally and are still technically known as “tights.” But the garments bagged at the knees and elsewhere on the attenuated wearers. Occasionally someone would hand out a bunch of flowers to the riders, who were none others than the winners of the six-day bicycle race.
Such was the inglorious ending of that great event.8
With the crowds coming and going all week, exact attendance figures weren’t often reported, but the Saturday-night finish drew ten thousand people, with an incredible two or three thousand jammed into the pit within the oval track. A hundred or more men and boys were allowed to watch from the low bridge connecting the galleries and the paddock, and at nine o’clock that evening the bridge and stairway finally gave out. “Men were piled up in indescribable confusion for a time,” the Tribune reported. “Strange to say, no one was seriously hurt.” The collapse of the bridge did strand those inside the track, however, a bunch of whom “wanted to go home” and made a rush for the east side of the building. They tore down part of the fence leading to the stands and open air.9
Only $2,150 of the $4,000 of available prize money was distributed, partly because there were only five finishers and partly because no intermediate records were set. Despite early talk of Messier’s track being the fastest ever built, Schinneer’s final total lagged some 122 miles behind Teddy Hale’s American record. A Chicago record for an hour’s ride in competition was set at 23.8 miles, but otherwise the event failed to merit much distinction. “The announcement that the men had won the prizes was made from the press stand,” yawned the Tribune. “The crowds seemed glad of it, although they had not seen any racing.” Fred Gerlach paid close attention all week and was not impressed, reminding the Tribune of the LAW’s recent recommendation to prohibit the go-as-you-please races. “The six-day continuous race is rather severe on the riders,” he said. His solution? “Long distance races should be limited to twelve hours a day.”10
Gerlach and the LAW weren’t the only ones disgusted by the men’s races. Later that year, shortly after the annual Madison Square Garden race, Forest and Stream published an editorial that captured the growing public revulsion to the round-the-clock marathons. The writer compared the bicycle races to prizefighting. Each sport featured dank, smoky auditoriums filled with betting men—and almost no women. The fights and the races were both brutal affairs, the patrons of which “find pleasure only in physical struggling, with an incidental opportunity for gambling.”11 Yet the bicycle races were by far the more brutal. Boxing rounds lasted just three minutes each, and the match ended if one fighter became exhausted or incapacitated. The races, meanwhile, went on for six full days, and neither exhaustion nor incapacitation was grounds for quitting; indeed, they were both the very point of the contests.
Prompted by such withering criticisms, the New York legislature passed a law banning anyone from racing more than twelve hours a day, and the LAW followed suit by refusing to sanction such races from that point forward.12 The flagging popularity of the races undoubtedly contributed as well. The final men’s go-as-you-please six-day race was held at Madison Square Garden in 1898.
Two weeks after the lurid spectacle at Tattersall’s, the women’s race began. It featured a large opening field as well, although the eighteen women were divided into two squads, one professional and one amateur, the “amateur” designation apparently just meaning local and inexperienced, as both squads raced for a share of the roughly $1,000 in prize money. The ten amateurs raced in the afternoons, leaving the better-attended evenings for the eight professionals, among them the Big Five of Tillie, Dottie, Lizzie, Helen, and May. Pearl Keyes and Lucy Berry also began the race, along with newcomer Elsie Gable from Chicago.
The race was, of course, unsanctioned by the LAW, but right away Chicago cycling fans amply demonstrated a preference for the women. “Women cyclists proved better attractions than men in six day races last night,” reported the Chronicle. “Twelve thousand people crowded into the big building to see Tillie Anderson and seven female competitors break records and win the handsome purses put up by the Cycle Carnival Company.”13 In contrast to the men, whose only goal was to finish ahead no matter how fast or slow the pace, the women had to complete a certain number of miles to qualify for a prize. For the professionals, the required mark was 225 miles, or 18.75 mph over the twelve hours. The amateurs needed to make 215 miles. The minimums ensured a brisk pace throughout, and indeed Tillie spun for over twenty-one miles in the first hour—“only two laps behind the distance made by Fred Schinneer,” noted the Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, “in his six-day ride over the same track.” It’s hard to compare the men’s and women’s times, given the unending grind of the men’s event, but the newspaper still pointed out that Tillie’s two-hour total of forty-one miles was just two miles behind the record made by the men in the same time. “Their performance,” said the paper, referring to the women, “was in many respects phenomenal.”14
“Such a crowd has never been seen at the start of a cycle event,” the Chronicle added. “Cheers from the crowd encouraged the women to go for the intermediate distances, and the people nearly went wild when new marks were announced for five, ten and fifteen miles respectively.”15 Urged on by the enthusiastic crowd, Tillie captured each new record, followed closely by Lizzie, Dottie, and May. Helen lagged behind. She’d ordered a seventy-six-gear bicycle, but an eighty-eight-gear was delivered before the race, and the pedaling proved too difficult for her. One newspaper cited the high gear, while two others mentioned a sick stomach. Whatever the reason, after a little more than three miles, Helen dropped out, just as she had in her last race in Columbus. Pearl Keyes withdrew as well, leaving Elsie Gable and Lucy Berry to trail the four leaders.
For Tillie, the race at Tattersall’s promised to be a triumphant culmination to a record-setting run. Beginning with her last appearance there a year earlier, she’d won all twelve multistage races she’d entered, as well as sixteen short-distance races. Her lone defeat came in a three-mile distance race against Lizzie in September, during a week in which she beat Lizzie in nine other races of various distances. Her only other major setback had come in Minneapolis in February 1896, when she’d lost three laps due to punctured tires before withdrawing before the final night’s competition. Unfortunately for Tillie, lost laps due to punctured tires would cost her again—this time in front of a raucous hometown crowd.
In the 1897 season, Manager Benedict had so far stipulated six laps per accident on tracks of fifteen and eighteen laps in Cleveland, Indianapolis, Columbus, and Cincinnati. Because the Tattersall’s track was ten laps per mile, he quite reasonably wanted to reduce the allowance, but instead of allowing four laps (about sixty seconds) or even three (about forty-five seconds), he reduced the allowance to just two laps per accident or puncture, which amounted to no more than thirty seconds. On the second night of the race, Tillie suffered a punctured front tire and fell to the inside of the track. Sensing an opportunity, Dottie immediately leaped into a hard sprint, with Lizzie and May tagging along behind. Phil had arranged for backup bicycles at both sides of the infield, but somehow only one bike was available when Tillie fell. With the center of the paddock packed with milling spectators, Phil had to run halfway around the course. By the time Tillie rejoined the others they’d managed three laps, putting Tillie one all-important lap behind.
A year or two earlier, a one-lap deficit on day 2 of a six-day race wouldn’t have been viewed as anything insurmountable, but now the fans and reporters understood that the racing game had changed. “Tillie Anderson, the champion woman cyclist of Chicago,” the Chronicle intoned, “has in all likelihood lost her first race.”16 The four thousand spectators were shocked and disappointed to see their hometown favorite suffer such bad luck so early in the contest. According to the Chicago Record, their cheers turned into “deathlike gurgles,” and suddenly the old horse market looked like an undertakers’ convention.17 “The accident has its favorable side, however,” insisted the Times Herald, “as it will doubtless incite Anderson to speedier work.”18 Indeed, Tillie found herself in an unusual and unenviable position, riding side by side with her three toughest rivals all one lap ahead of her. And it did spur her on to desperate—and some would say reckless—riding for the remainder of the race, which made for some excellent sport for the thousands of fans who filled the arena each night.
At the end of that second night, the final three-lap sprint began with Lizzie in the lead, Dottie lapping her rear wheel, and May in the pocket. On the second-to-last lap, as the pack tightened going into the north turn, Tillie made her move along the outside, but she and May collided at top speed and fell to the boards with terrific force. May had to be carried off the track. Tillie was helped to her feet, complaining of a sharp pain in her side. As the accident happened within the final two laps, neither rider lost any ground to the leaders, but as the Inter Ocean put it, “The war which has been threatening has broken out.”19
May blamed the fall on Tillie, saying she tried to cut in on Dottie and clipped May’s wheel in the process. Dottie agreed and even alleged that Tillie had tried intentionally to throw her but that Dottie herself had skillfully managed to avoid the intended bump. For her part, Tillie claimed that Dottie fouled her by turning in on the pole, leaving Tillie no choice but to turn in as well, and that was how she clipped May. May wasn’t buying it. “If it had been anyone else,” she insisted, “they would have thrown her out.”20
Lizzie won the night’s heat, but the talk of the town was Tillie’s lost lap. “She lost her temper,” said the Tribune, “and vowed vengeance on everybody connected with the race.”21
Phil’s immediate concern was Tillie’s painful left side. “The fall was as bad a one as I have ever seen on a track,” he said, “and it may be possible that Miss Anderson will be unable to start again. She is suffering from bruises received on the eastern tracks and these, with the accident tonight, may combine to lay her up.”22 Neither he nor Tillie could expect any sympathy from the other riders, however, all of whom still nursed the fairly serious wounds suffered in Columbus.
Perhaps recalling Dottie’s comment following that Columbus race—“It’s only too bad that those who deserved to get hurt escaped without injury”—Phil suggested that Tillie’s accident could be a conspiratorial case of payback. “It looked as if some of the entries in the contest had combined to put Miss Anderson out of the event,” he said.23
Because of her local renown and close second-place finishes in Columbus, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, Lizzie became the new favorite, and the race settled into a typical women’s six-day race—that is to say, speedy, tightly contested, and sprinkled with side stories and incidents that were by turns silly, controversial, and heartwarming.
The return of the split squads worked well for Benedict and company. The slower afternoon squad was dominated by local newcomers to the sport who managed a consistent pace of 16 to 18 mph. They competed well and earnestly—“better, in fact, than men riders usually do,” asserted the Times Herald. “They raced, and that is much more than may be said regarding most male long distance contests.”24
Any thought that Tuesday night’s controversy would be forgotten was shattered the next afternoon. Dottie and some of the other professionals were watching the amateur race from the press stand inside the oval when Tillie walked in front of the stand and pointed over several rows of people between her and Dottie. “You can’t win,” Tillie charged, “except by taking advantage of an accident.”25 A skirmish ensued, quickly broken up by the trainers, but even so, the rivalry between Tillie and Dottie clearly continued to burn. Tillie and Lizzie were said to be friendly, and at least one newspaper suggested that Lizzie might well prefer to lose than to stand in the way of Tillie’s attempts to overtake Dottie.26
The riding that night was marked by as much intensity as anyone had seen on the track, particularly among Lizzie, Dottie, and Tillie. As the women lined up to start their third night’s racing, the referee paused to warn them against unfair tactics and threatened to disqualify anyone he or any other judge saw resorting to trickiness. “They listened to his admonition,” the Times Herald reported, “and while doing so cynical smiles played around the features of the three.” The three rivals and May, “imbued with doggedness,” started slowly, wary of taking the lead, and Tillie was forced to settle on the straightforward strategy of outriding the others, hoping to tire them out so she could steal a lap sometime before the finish.27
This was St. Patrick’s Day, and many of the four thousand in the crowd “had holiday breaths.”28 Betting on the race had picked up overnight, with Lizzie and Dottie the favorites and Tillie now the dark horse. It was also the night of “The Fight of the Century” out in Carson City, Nevada—the fourteen-round heavyweight championship bout between Gentleman Jim Corbett and challenger Bob Fitzsimmons. A round-by-round report was delivered from the starter’s stand. Fitzsimmons went down in the sixth round, but Corbett later tired, and the fight was eventually won in the fourteenth round by the challenger, who claimed a $15,000 purse. Fitzsimmons had done to Corbett what Tillie hoped to do to the others in Chicago: pound away, keep the pressure on, tire them out, then pounce when the opening finally came.
Attendance swelled to nearly ten thousand the next night, which saw Tillie try repeatedly to gain back her lost lap. The leaders now simply stuck tenaciously to Tillie’s pace, and as a result the racing was both fast and exciting. Lizzie was the only one who dared on occasion to get in front of Tillie. Dottie, who’d been criticized in the past for overreacting to the music or the crowd and taking the pace too often, benefited most by the group strategy, allowing Lizzie to watch most closely for Tillie’s jumps and pedaling relatively easily in third place ahead of May. The crowd sensed her gathering strength for the final push, and her prospects for victory seemed to rise as each mile was posted on the scoreboard. She was presented with two bouquets during the night as reward for her good work.
Tillie’s urgent riding discomfited the Chicago crowd. It was unnerving to see their Tillie, who in the past had sometimes seemed to toy with her adversaries, ride with such desperate urgency. The constant work took its toll on her. When she dismounted at the end of the fourth night, the Chronicle reported, “Her face was white and drawn and she walked with difficulty.”29 Led finally by Lizzie as she tried to keep Dottie in second place, the four leaders rode the final lap in 13.2 seconds—over twenty-seven miles per hour. Tillie remained in fourth place.
A heartening moment occurred before Friday’s heat, albeit likely a staged one. Even with a terrific rainstorm, more than seven thousand diehard fans turned out. Dottie had told reporters in the afternoon that despite Lizzie’s achievements, she still worried only about Tillie. Concerned about possible foul play, the referee pulled Dottie and Tillie aside before the race and enjoined them to set aside their simmering differences, and to the crowd’s delight the two rivals clasped hands and held them high as they circled the course during warm-ups. It was unclear, however, how sincere the two riders actually were.
Dottie took the pace early, and within half an hour Tillie darted out from third position, followed closely by Lizzie. The two sprinted past Dottie and May, and before the two front-runners could react, Tillie and Lizzie had gained half a lap. But Dottie rose to the challenge and gradually reeled in the two sprinters. Once the bunch had re-formed, Tillie kept up the hot pace for six more laps in another effort to tire out her competitors. During the sprint she made one lap in 12.8 seconds—twenty-eight miles per hour—but still couldn’t shake Dottie or Lizzie, who trailed no more than twenty feet behind. Finally Tillie eased off, her face set in a dejected glare, and the crowd cheered heartily for the spirited effort. It was Dottie, though, not Tillie, who soon received a large bouquet of American Beauties.
“The saddest thing about the affair,” observed the Record, “is that the irresistible rider is losing her identity.” Never before had the sports community seen Tillie so frustrated. Always before she’d found a hidden reserve of power and speed to outdistance her rivals at the crucial moment. Now moment after moment passed, with no success. “Her reputation is being swallowed,” the Record went on, “by Glaw’s clinging tendencies and Farnsworth’s trailing capacity.”30
Tillie herself seemed on the verge of conceding the race. “These many falls I have had,” she admitted later that night, “seem to have taken the sprint out of me. I’m going to be game just the same, and I’ll make the others do the best riding of their lives to keep me from getting that lap back.” Looking forward to Saturday’s finale, she tried her best to spin things in her favor. “I think I can accomplish the task before the finish,” she said, “and if I get the lap, the event is surely mine.”31
The final evening lived up to all expectations. “No race of its kind has ever attracted such crowds,” the Times Herald said. “Tattersall’s was packed to witness the finish.” The leaders began the night at exactly two hundred miles. As on previous nights, Tillie and Lizzie alternated the pacemaking, the first five miles riding at a near sprint while Dottie and May struggled to keep up. Elsie Gable and Lucy Berry, both miles behind, were nonfactors, focused mainly on reaching the 225-mile minimum and a share of the purse. On the sideline, Tom Eck began timing laps as Tillie and Lizzie continued to push the pace. The 206th mile of the race was run in 2:24, a full twenty-five miles per hour—the fastest mile Eck had ever seen by women in competition.32 It was a ten-lap sprint that saw the two Chicago rivals gradually pull away from the others. May gave up early in the sprint, but Dottie fought hard for half a mile as the crowd urged on the local riders. Tillie and Lizzie lapped May first and then closed in on Dottie. By the time they reached her, they’d lapped May again. With ninety minutes still to race, Tillie had drawn even with Dottie in second place, a lap ahead of May but still one behind Lizzie.
The prospect of the Chicago riders finishing first and second left the partisan spectators delirious. Tillie had been the favorite at the start, and plenty of fans had pulled for her each night to win back the lost lap, but by now Lizzie had gained an appreciable following. The crowd was happy. As the final hour opened, Tillie made another strong attempt to pick up a lap, but while Lizzie was willing to alternate pace to help Tillie gain on Dottie, she was unwilling to jeopardize her own lead, and she held back enough while in front to protect herself against a Tillie sprint, allowing Dottie to stay close. As the end drew near, it became clear that Lizzie had plenty of strength to withstand Tillie’s rushes.
In the final laps, Tillie and Lizzie again led the way, with Dottie tucked in the pocket. Tillie was now fighting only for second place, but perhaps for pride’s sake she also wanted to outsprint Lizzie for the tape. As they entered the first turn of the final lap, Lizzie had inside position and a slight lead, and Tillie leaned so far into the turn that she caught a pedal on the surface and “fairly flew in the air for twenty feet,” landing on her already injured left side and striking the outer fence.33
Dottie and May were close behind but managed to avoid a collision. Dottie hugged the inside and just missed Tillie’s tumbling bicycle, while May rode high and skimmed along the fence. As the crowd stood and screamed, Lizzie completed the lap and crossed the tape, half a lap ahead of Dottie and three-quarters of a lap ahead of May. Tillie limped to her bicycle and managed to remount, but before making it to the tape she toppled into Phil’s arms, and while the crowd applauded her gameness, Phil pushed her across the tape. With the accident, she had fallen to fourth place.
Lizzie took home the $300 purse plus smaller prizes for winning ten of the twelve hourly finishes. With matching awards from her sponsor, the Cleveland Cycle Company, Lizzie earned close to $700 for the week. Tillie’s prize was just $100, but her loss was much more an emotional one, her seeming invincibility suddenly gone. “Lizzie Glaw of Chicago is now the six-day champion woman rider of the world,” claimed the Chronicle.34 Messier announced that Lizzie’s 240 miles and five laps (20.04 mph average) had beaten the best previous twelve-hour score, citing Mate Christopher’s 239 miles and eight laps from an 1896 race as the previous record. Tillie had made 241 miles and a lap at Tattersall’s in March 1896, but that was part of an eighteen-hour race. She’d totaled more than 247 miles in Detroit, more than 246 miles in Indianapolis, and more than 242 miles in Cleveland, but those races were on smaller tracks, so apparently Messier considered them separate records. For the purposes of publicity, Messier was more interested in announcing new records than in preserving Tillie’s old ones, and right now he and the Cycle Carnival Company had a new champion and record holder in Lizzie Glaw.
Dottie pronounced herself satisfied with the results, having finally seen her archrival beaten at the finish. She also suggested that Tillie’s fall at the end was a bit of melodrama, something else to point to as an excuse for her loss.35 On Sunday afternoon, the Chicago Record spoke with Tillie. “I cried all day because I didn’t win,” she said. “And the worst was I made such a mess of it all by falling.” Then, according to the reporter, she remembered there would be other days, and other races, and she was able to smile at the thought of regaining her championship and, more importantly, her lost identity.36
Despite Tillie’s devastating loss, the women’s race at Tattersall’s was a thoroughgoing success, and it demonstrated, in Chicago at least, that women’s racing was as popular as men’s and in most ways more competitive and exciting. That the LAW refused to sanction women’s races mattered little to the fans and affected the women only insofar as they couldn’t test their skills against the top male riders.
A few days after Lizzie’s dramatic victory, the cultural tensions regarding women’s racing were captured nicely in a brief recap of the race in the American Wheelman, a publication of the LAW. The article began by denying outright any claim women might have to championship status. “From an ethical standpoint,” the authors said, “no one has ever undertaken to champion female races, as the very nature of such contests is at variance with the better instincts of cultured society.” Once that underlying premise was laid, the authors acknowledged the excellent competition they and others had witnessed in the previous week: “But to the spectator who can appreciate good racing without regard to the personality of the racers, the riding which has attracted large crowds at Tattersall’s every evening during the past week was by far the most spirited and interesting that Chicagoans have had the opportunity of witnessing on an indoor track.”
This was a startling admission, especially considering that a men’s championship race had closed on the very same indoor track only three weeks earlier. But rather than credit the women for running a spirited and interesting race, the American Wheelman writers joined the chorus of other male journalists in city after city along the women’s circuit and pointed to a stereotypical female attribute—bitter jealousy—as the primary reason the women race as hard and competitively as they do. “The four who figured most prominently in the race were very evenly matched,” the writers claimed, “and each was actuated by the bitterest rivalry and jealousy to prove her superiority as ‘a racing man’ over the others, a factor in women’s races which is never so keen or potent among the opposite sex.”37