The plucky Swede strained every muscle until they stood out like whipcords to win, and the German girl, with every thread in her clothing saturated with perspiration, rode like mad every foot of the route.
—“Glaw the Winner,” Toledo Commercial, July 29, 1897
Early on in the new era, Dottie Farnsworth was able to establish herself as Tillie’s chief rival largely because of Lizzie Glaw’s halting entry into the profession. In 1896 Lizzie never traveled, racing only in her hometown, Chicago. She and Tillie had debuted together at the six-day race at the Second Regiment Armory in January 1896, but they’d run in separate squads, so they didn’t go head-to-head. At the six-day race at Tattersall’s in March of that year, they’d raced together only when placed in the leaders’ squad for the final two nights. In that race, after losing a disputed battle for second to Helen Baldwin, Lizzie first showed her hardheadedness by refusing third money. Tillie won both of those races. Then, for reasons unclear, Lizzie went a full year before entering another six-day race.
Beginning in Columbus in February 1897, Lizzie committed to full-time professional racing with the backing of Cleveland Bicycles. Over the next four and a half years, Lizzie “Cleveland” Glaw entered something like forty multistage races, winning at least fifteen of them. No other rider managed to beat Tillie Anderson more than once; Lizzie did it seven times. All but two of Lizzie’s career losses came against Tillie—and indeed no one but Tillie managed to beat Lizzie more than once. The pair of them were, without question, the two greatest women racers of the 1890s.
Unlike Tillie, Dottie, and most of the other racers, Lizzie shunned the limelight—disdained it, really—and rarely spoke with the press or promoted herself in any way. As a result, very little is known about her. Born in Germany in 1875, she likely came to America in 1893 or 1894. She may have been the first woman ever to ride a bicycle on the streets of Berlin, or she may have picked up cycling only after settling on Chicago’s West Side—it depends on the source. Some say she came to America expressly to enter the great international race in Chicago in January 1896, yet she definitely ran a good number of Elgin–Aurora centuries through the summer of 1895. She herself said she picked up cycling in 1893, so it’s likely that she started shortly after immigrating.1
Few photographs of Lizzie exist; in those that do she is uniformly grim and businesslike, hunched over the wheel, her impatient gaze boring straight ahead as if all she saw or thought about was that distant finish line—or perhaps getting the studio photography session over with. There are no “glamour” shots of Lizzie. The profile that emerges from newspaper coverage is remarkably consistent: with a self-confidence bordering on arrogance, motivated not by fame or glory but by the simple promise of prize money, she insisted always on riding her own race, heedless of the escalating pulse of the band or the encouraging cheers of the crowd. The Syracuse Evening Herald described her as “sticking to business all the time.”2 Promoters wanted tight jockeying with frequent spurts and lead changes; all Lizzie wanted to do was win. Most often that meant hugging the wheel of the pacemaker—usually Tillie or Dottie—and stubbornly biding her time until the final sprint. “I like this business because I make money,” she told Fanny Darling in 1897.3 It was a simple approach, and she lived it out in every race she ran. Lizzie was, in the ethnic-conscious parlance of the day, a Teuton through and through.
The exact nature of Lizzie’s friendship with Tillie Anderson is impossible to know. The two surely became aware of each other during the summer of 1895, when they both sought the Elgin–Aurora course record. They had much in common. Both were twenty years old that summer and fairly new to the united States. Based in Chicago, they often traveled together once their racing-circuit journeys began, crisscrossing the Midwest. They usually stayed in the same hotels. At times the war of words played out between them in newspapers seemed genuinely hateful, yet when pressed the two cycling stars claimed to be friends. One of Tillie’s trading-card-type photographs of Lizzie, signed at the height of their rivalry in Toledo in July 1897, is inscribed, “Yours very truly, Lizzie Glaw.” In competition they remained heated rivals. Indeed, the day after Lizzie gave Tillie that photo they began an unprecedented head-to-head matchup—three consecutive days, a one-hour race each day—that captivated the sports world and brought out some of the harshest rhetoric yet seen in women’s athletics.
It was when Lizzie joined Tillie, Dottie, Helen, and May for the February 1897 Park Rink race in Columbus that the new era of women’s racing began its peak stretch. Mate Christopher competed for the final time the week of January 18, 1897, in Indianapolis. She hadn’t raced in six months and no longer looked like the White Cyclone. She finished dead last. Despite Mate’s superior sprinting ability and occasional nightly victories over Dottie and even Tillie, it appears in the end that Mate’s heart simply wasn’t as fully into racing as some of the others’. After losing an obligatory match race to Helen after the main race in Indianapolis, Mate boarded a train and was married three days later, on Thursday, January 28, at the Clinton House in Chicago to a man named Harry Mandeville. The Minneapolis-born Mandeville had recently secured a position in Chicago at a dry-goods firm, and the couple intended to settle there.4 Mate announced her retirement from racing and disappeared into private life. She was twenty-four.
So now both Frankie and Mate were gone. Those remaining were dubbed the Big Five, which played well in the papers, but the truth was that Helen, May, and even Dottie had no realistic shot at victory whenever Tillie or Lizzie were involved. Tillie edged out Lizzie in Columbus, then again in Cleveland, and once more in Cincinnati before Lizzie finally came out on top in her well-publicized breakthrough victory in Chicago in March. The race promoters then made a concerted effort to “distribute” the Big Five—with two or three racing in one city while the other two or three raced in another—most often keeping Tillie and Lizzie apart, shrewdly building expectations for a head-to-head showdown. That showdown came in Toledo in July.
Lizzie’s victory at Tattersall’s in March 1897 cast sudden doubt over Tillie’s claim to the world’s championship, and many considered Lizzie the new champion. Nineteenth-century sports audiences generally believed that the best contestant—whether horse or human—always won an athletic event, assuming of course the event wasn’t fixed ahead of time. As women’s racing struggled to gain acceptance as a legitimate sport, charges of “hippodroming” were common. Sports historian Melvin L. Adelman has defined hippodroming as the practice of splitting the gate among the contestants rather than having them compete earnestly for actual prizes, even when race publicity emphasized large stakes to draw in spectators. Such races were seen as exhibitions rather than legitimate sporting events. Charges of fixing were common in every sport, from harness racing and boxing to baseball and bicycle racing. Adelman argues that many nineteenth-century spectators found it easier to believe a “fix” than an “upset”; that is, they believed that the best athlete (or horse) should win every time, and when that didn’t happen, it proved the event was fixed. Adelman says the fact that athletes have better and worse days didn’t become commonly accepted until the twentieth century.5
Ironically, one of the best arguments for the legitimacy of women’s racing was that, until the March 1897 Chicago race, Tillie Anderson had won every time. This suggested that the women were in fact trying their best and that Tillie was simply the strongest and fastest rider. So when Lizzie upset her, most racing fans drew one of two conclusions: either the fix was on, or Lizzie was now the undisputed champion. It didn’t matter that Tillie had beaten Lizzie in fifteen of the sixteen times they’d raced. With just the one victory, many believed, Lizzie was now the top woman cyclist.
Tillie and Lizzie didn’t face each other again for four months. Like boxers vying for a unified championship, they began a dance of threats and challenges that were too tantalizing to the general public and too profitable at the box office to jeopardize by actually matching the two rivals in a race. Instead, that spring and summer there was a more or less orchestrated dispersal of the best women racers into two or three overlapping circuits that took the headliners all around middle America. The management teams were so intertwined as to suggest that perhaps they and the bicycle manufacturers agreed that more races in more locations would be best for the sport—and, not incidentally, for spreading the word about the “new and improved” annual bicycle models the manufacturers were cranking out. Bicycle sales had exploded in 1895 and 1896, but by 1897 the market was becoming saturated. Improvements tended to be as cosmetic as some of those seen in the auto industry of the twentieth century, and those who already owned a bicycle were increasingly willing to hold on to it rather than buy a brand-new one. Bicycle races were a proven method of expanding markets and advertising new models, so it made sense to run races in as many towns and cities as possible.
After “King Cotton” Benedict’s impromptu wedding to Garnet Hursey in Chicago, management of the Cycle Carnival Company temporarily fell to other men, and its publicity agent, Bobby Smiley, broke off and began promoting races of his own. H. O. Messier continued to work, sometimes under the Cycle Carnival banner and sometimes independently. There seemed to be a tacit agreement to keep Tillie and Lizzie, in particular, off the same track, as each laid claim to the “champion lady rider” title, which of course helped with advertising. Dottie and Helen—still popular draws themselves—headlined a race in Louisville the week of March 22 in a field that featured Frankie Mack, who hadn’t been seen since Butte the previous summer, and three newcomers. The next week Lizzie beat Dottie and May in Columbus. The plan seemed to be to feature at least two members of the Big Five in each race. When that wasn’t possible, the promoters got creative: in Akron the week of April 5, for example, Lizzie was the Big Five’s lone representative, so management sent out an unknown local, a young woman later identified only as Miss Radebaugh, who impersonated May Allen, Union Jack sash and all. Miss Radebaugh stuck around to race the following week, this time using her real name, against Tillie and the real May Allen, and then she disappeared forever from the sports pages.
Tillie’s first race after Tattersall’s was that same week of April 5. With Lizzie in Akron, the other four of the Big Five came together at the Detroit Auditorium under the management of Bobby Smiley. The highlight was the finish, a ten-minute sprint that began with Dottie leading Helen and Tillie. With six minutes to go, Tillie jumped into what the Free Press called her “famous double spurt,” during which she pushed the leaders hard for three laps, let up for just an instant to make the others think the sprint was over, and then charged ahead and took the lead before the front-runners could again gather their strength. She held the lead until the pistol shot signaling the final three laps, when Dottie gained steadily and lapped Tillie’s rear wheel. Helen slid into the pocket behind Tillie, and the three circled the track twice, tightly bunched. In the final lap, Helen forced her way inside of Dottie and, with more than two thousand cheering fans on their feet, grabbed second place, and the three finished in what looked like a dead heat.6
“I’ve seen most all of the big sporting events in the past few years,” remarked a horseman visiting Detroit from the South, “but I never saw a crowd get so excited before in my life.”7 It was, said the Free Press, “the most remarkable bicycle race ever held in this city.”8
Tillie won the race. The following Monday, April 12, her Thistle was put on exhibition at Strassburg’s store on Detroit’s Woodward Avenue. “It’s a 72¾ gear, with 6-inch cranks, and 1⅜-inch Morgan & Wright tires,” reported the Journal, “and is finished in the new onyx enamel, which is very handsome.”9 Helen left for Minneapolis, where she was joined by Lizzie, who’d finished in Akron on Saturday night. On Tuesday, Tillie and May left Detroit for Akron and a four-day race that began on Wednesday. The promoters in Akron were expecting Dottie to race there as well, but at the last minute she decided to go back home for the Minneapolis race that began April 19.
Although some were understandably disappointed when Dottie didn’t appear in Akron as advertised, large crowds filled Columbia Hall for the abbreviated four-day, four-hour race, despite having witnessed a race just the week before. The speeds were breakneck, enabled by the single-hour format used both weeks. Lizzie was reported to have gone twenty-three miles and seven laps on her opening night; Tillie led the way on hers with twenty-two miles and six laps—still quite fast, but the crowd wanted more. “Took It Easy,” one headline writer complained. On the second night, Tillie and May each scored twenty-three miles and four laps, and Harry Jeffs, acting as manager of both riders, announced his willingness to wager $100 that Tillie would surpass Lizzie’s track record on Friday or Saturday night. So Tillie and Lizzie were competing without actually appearing together. With all the local talk about Lizzie, Jeffs also sent out a challenge to Lizzie’s backers to arrange a match race at $500 a side, and he placed $100 earnest money with the Akron Beacon. When no matching funds materialized, the Beacon mocked Glaw’s fans: “Where, oh where are the friends of Lizzie Glaw who on Wednesday and yesterday forenoon were so loud in their praises of the German girl and were so sure that she could beat Tillie Anderson?”10 Friday and Saturday, Tillie fell short of twenty-three miles each night, but she finished the four-hour race with over ninety miles (about 22.5 mph, faster than Lizzie’s overall average), winning easily in the final laps.
Up at the Minneapolis Exposition Building, Lizzie held off Dottie each of the six nights and won easily over her and Helen. The race was marked by a desperate bid on the fifth night by Amy Kalgren, the St. Paul rider from the riot race. To keep up with the leaders she asked a physician to prepare her an injection of cocaine. But the race manager, Jim Wirtensohn, “informed Kalgren that she must either forego the proposed medical treatment or leave the track,” and she chose to remain in the race.11 The St. Paul Globe cheered Wirtensohn for his efforts to keep the race clean—cleaner than the men’s races, to be sure. Soon after, however, Kalgren lost whatever energy she had left and quit the race.
Tillie and May headlined three races over the next six weeks—in Youngstown, Grand Rapids, and Dayton. Benedict was back as manager, and as the weather improved he added one more crowd-pleasing attraction to the weekly lineup: one or two afternoons each week, he arranged to block off a stretch of city street to allow Tillie to go after short-distance records. It was one such event that inspired the Sweet’s Hotel postcard calling Tillie “the fastest bicyclist of her sex.” Benedict couldn’t charge anyone, of course, on the public streets, but the sprints were fantastic publicity for the nightly races. Residents were excited by the possibility of seeing a national record—unofficial as the women’s records were—set along their own local streets. In Youngstown, Benedict cleared a half-mile straightaway along Mahoning Avenue, and Tillie rode it twice, paced by local men on a tandem. The first time, on the afternoon of the final night’s race, curious spectators lined the street and sidewalks, sat atop billboards, houses, and telephone poles, and filled delivery wagons hired out for the occasion. As the sprint progressed, the crowd pressed in on the course, making it difficult for the riders to fully let loose. Tillie managed 55 seconds, a 32.7 mph clip. On Monday morning she tried again, this time without any advance notice to alert the “throng of unmanageable spectators,” as the Youngstown Telegram put it. This time she made it in 52.6 seconds, or 34.2 mph—the fastest half mile ever ridden by a woman, according to Benedict, and just two-fifths of a second short of the world’s amateur half-mile paced track record for men, according to the Telegram.12
Farther west, Lizzie also helped make the women riders’ case against male superiority. In Kansas City in early June, just after she edged Dottie and three others in a six-day race, a gentleman named C. A. Treadway challenged Lizzie to a ten-mile race, straight up. While the dollar amount of the bet was never published, the final result was: Lizzie won by almost a full lap, finishing the ten miles one second short of twenty-eight minutes. So impressed was one local horseman that the following week he fielded a filly with the name Lizzie Glaw.
Tillie and the Cycle Carnival Company stayed in Ohio virtually the entire summer of 1897. From Dayton they moved on to Cincinnati, then to Johnson’s Island in Sandusky Bay, down to Findlay, back up to Toledo, and east again to Cleveland. For most of the tour Tillie rode alone with second-tier competitors, as May decided to join up with Lizzie and/or Helen in other cities. The racing offered few highlights, as Tillie dominated, sometimes appearing to toy with the other riders. In Toledo, for example, she gained several laps a night, and when any of the others tried to jump ahead to gain a lap back, Tillie would let them go for twenty-five feet or so and then smile to the crowd before quickly and easily closing the gap. On the fifth night Tillie suffered a punctured tire, and when the other riders jumped into a sprint to try to gain back a lap, as they always did in such cases, Tillie took their challenge almost as an affront to her superiority: when she returned to the track she dug hard for several miles, hitting speeds upward of twenty-six miles an hour, and gained several more laps on the field. Moments like these, as well as the hot sprints at the end of each night, were enough to keep the large crowds satisfied.
The race on Johnson’s Island was particularly successful. The island had housed a prisoner of war depot during the Civil War, but then in 1894 the twenty-acre Pleasure Resort was opened there. Between five and six thousand locals visited the island for the second day of racing, when the Sandusky Cycle Club, the resort management, and the Cycle Carnival Company joined forces to offer free ferry rides to the island and free admission to the resort and to the track. “It was the biggest day in the history of Johnson’s Island,” exclaimed the Sandusky Journal.13 Each day during the week, new rows of bleachers had to be added to accommodate the growing masses.
The women raced for an hour in the afternoon and then an hour in the evening, and while the afternoon racing was fast, the evening racing was marred by swarming mayflies—locals back then called them June flies or June bugs—attracted to the electric lights circling the track. So many bugs were crunched under the women’s tires that the track became slippery. There wasn’t much for the riders to do but slow down and try to keep their mouths closed. “Spit ’em out!” was the only advice they got from their trainers.14
All summer, talk of a head-to-head Tillie/Lizzie championship match race got as much attention as the races themselves. After her March victory in Chicago, Lizzie had wasted no time in printing calling cards that read, “Lizzie ‘Cleveland’ Glaw, Champion Lady Cyclist of the World.”15
As Tillie and Lizzie moved from city to city, their paths gradually began to overlap, teasing locals eager for the inevitable clash. The same week Tillie raced at Johnson’s Island, Lizzie raced at Cedar Point—barely two miles away across Sandusky Bay. A cat-and-mouse game ensued in the local papers. Managing the Cedar Point race, William Benedict publicly challenged Tillie to complete twenty-two miles in an hour on his track. Phil said he and Tillie would be happy to appear on Benedict’s track as soon as they saw fifty dollars in earnest money. A Sandusky newspaper reported that Lizzie wanted to arrange a match race at the end of that week, but Phil treated that report as idle chatter. “I wish to say that I am tired of depositing money in every city I go,” he wrote to the Journal, “trying to get on a match race between the two ladies, so if Miss Glaw’s backers will kindly deposit a sum of money with some newspaper it will be covered without delay.”16
Benedict responded on behalf of Lizzie: “We are tired of talking about a match between Miss Glaw and Miss Anderson,” he said. “We’ve already given the latter too much gratuitous publicity and we alone are responsible for placing her where she is today. Miss Anderson has money and could well afford to meet Miss Glaw. If Miss Anderson is in earnest let her come to the Journal and Local office and put up five hundred dollars. We will cover the money and will bet her any amount within reason. The match race must be brought off at once, if it is to be brought off at all.”17 With neither side willing to post money first, the race failed to materialize. Tillie and Lizzie won their respective races and left town, each still claiming the title of world champion.
Tillie’s group went to Findlay, where they used an existing eight-lap clay track at Athletic Park, popular with the local men. After each night’s regular race, Tillie ran a series of time trials, once riding a mile in 2:14. After watching Tillie make such times on his local track, a Findlay man named Knepper challenged her to a five-mile match to be held on Saturday afternoon, prior to the finish of the six-day race. That Saturday morning, however, midway through a practice run behind a tandem, Tillie suffered a vicious fall when the fork of the tandem broke and pitched her fifteen feet through the air. She landed hard on the heap of men and metal and suffered severe cuts and bruises. Unable to ride the match race, Tillie did recover enough to complete her victory in the six-day race that evening, but her injuries would stay with her and become something of an issue between her and Lizzie.
A week later, the two rival troupes landed again in the same city. This time it was Toledo, where Lizzie, May, Helen, and two others ran a six-day race at the Casino outdoor track while Tillie and three others ran their own race just a few blocks away at Armory Park. Smiley managed Tillie’s race, while a man named Frank Burt managed Lizzie’s. Burt worked under the banner of the Cycle Carnival Company, so it’s likely that the two groups had colluded to bring about the cross-town competition, both of which attracted plenty of fans. Five thousand people jammed into Armory Park for opening night.
All week the Toledo papers carried accounts of both races, but a running thread in their reporting was the possibility of the long-awaited head-to-head match race between the two champions right there in Toledo. On Tuesday rumors circulated that Lizzie would race on Saturday night with Tillie’s group at Armory Park, but Smiley and Burt each published letters in the Commercial stoutly denying the possibility. Fans and reporters began to weary of the endless postponements. Even so, the women seemed intent on settling matters with a race long enough to leave no doubt about who was fastest and strongest—either a one-hour match race or perhaps best two out of three, alternating between the two tracks. On Thursday afternoon Tillie was seen talking with Lizzie at the Casino track, and on Thursday night Lizzie caught the end of Tillie’s sprint at Armory Park. The final sticking point was a stipulation requested by management whereby the riders agreed to forfeit $150 if they failed to cover twenty miles—a clause aimed at preventing “a funeral procession” in which the riders would settle into position and cruise for most of the hour, stubbornly awaiting the final sprint. That seemed highly unlikely, however, between these bitter rivals.
As the two Chicago riders neared an agreement, the Toledo sporting world preened. “This would be a race that would pay anyone to come many miles to see, and Toledo can be congratulated should it come off here, as Chicago and Cleveland parties have been trying to pull such a race off ever since last March without results.”18 Finally, on Saturday afternoon, articles of agreement were drawn up, and the two women met at the Toledo Casino Company offices. Tension clearly still existed between them, as Lizzie refused to enter the office until Tillie had left. “I won’t go in where the old Swede is,” she was quoted as saying.19 Tillie signed first and left; only then would Lizzie sign. They agreed to race at the Casino track Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday the following week, best two of three one-hour heats. They’d ride behind pacemakers maintaining a clip of twenty miles an hour or more. Each contestant posted $150, and Frank Burt posted the $300 winner-take-all purse.
Looking at Tillie’s name as she signed the document, Lizzie vowed, “I’ll make her wish she never saw a bicycle.”20
Each of the women had several days to prepare for the big match. Because Lizzie had just completed the six-day race at the Casino track, she did most of her training on the open road, allowing Tillie plenty of time to accustom herself to the track. When the two did appear on the track at the same time, they refused to speak. “One calls the other an ignorant Swede,” said the Toledo Blade, “and the other is a German lobster.”21 But the animosity seemed mainly for show. Two days before the race, Tillie called on Lizzie at the Burnett House, and the two had a lengthy conversation, reminding themselves of their past friendship and agreeing to “bury the hatchet” in their off-the-track dealings while remaining “the bitterest enemies imaginable” on the track.22 Perhaps this is when Lizzie presented Tillie with her signed photograph. “Kissed and Made Up,” said the Blade.
The First Heat: “Black ink and cold type fail to adequately describe the affair,” exclaimed the Commercial.23 Riding behind two male pacemakers imported from Cleveland who alternated every half mile to remain fresh, the women covered nearly twenty-three miles in the first hour of their match. One pacemaker became so exhausted he failed to last out the hour. “Hurry up, you lobster,” shouted Tillie. “Do you think you’re driving a milk wagon?”24 After the first pacemaker quit, May Allen came on to share the duties, drawing loud cheers from the crowd and more effort from the second Cleveland man, but soon he, too, tuckered out and had trouble completing his half-mile stints.
Tillie led the way almost the entire hour. Like an “automaton,” Lizzie “glued her eyes to Tillie’s rear wheel and stayed there,” complained the Blade. “After a few miles had been covered Tillie wanted Glaw to come to the front, but the big German had planned her race and never even changed expression.”25 The first five miles were run at a 22.2 mph clip and the second five at an incredible 25.5 mph. Lizzie finally made her jump with three minutes to go, after the pacemakers had left the track. The final sprint was called “hair-raising in its excitement” by the Bee, “of the heart-disease order” by the Commercial.26 Lizzie pulled ahead over the final thirty seconds and won by a quarter lap.
“Will I win?” said Lizzie back at the Burnett House. “Well, just watch my smoke. I’ll try as hard as any woman who ever donned a sweater, and if I lose it will be because Anderson is the best rider, and I don’t think she is.”27
The Second Heat: Before the race there was the usual talk of “hippodroming.” Cynics assured those willing to listen that Lizzie and Tillie would each win one of the first two heats, guaranteeing a highly profitable third night of racing for the Casino management. “I guess the people will quit talking about the race being fixed,” Lizzie said after the record-setting first night. “I will not sell out. All of my races have been on the square.”28 She was as good as her word in the second hour-long heat, repeating her strategy of the night before, lapping Tillie’s rear wheel at the start and staying there until the pistol signaled that three laps remained. The pace was as fast as the first night. Helen alternated with May and the two male pacemakers; to the delight of the crowd, the men again struggled to maintain the twenty-three-mile-an-hour pace. When the pistol snapped, Lizzie jumped past Tillie and grabbed the lead. Tillie stayed right with her, and then with half a lap to go, “by an almost superhuman spurt,” she rode high as she entered the final turn “and swooped down on her adversary like a hawk after a spring pullet.”29
It looked at first as if Tillie had passed Lizzie in the final few feet, but the judges made no call and ended up huddling for several seconds before declaring a virtual tie—a dead heat. The crowd erupted. Some thought Lizzie’s inside position had helped her to cross the tape first, while others were sure that Tillie shot past at the last second. The cynics smiled and said, “I told you so,” although it was clear that each racer had tried her best to win at the end. A dead heat was the honest call. In any case, there would be a third and final night.
The Third Heat: Determined as ever to ride her own race, Lizzie again forced Tillie to take the early lead and then refused to budge. Tillie had to manage the pace, calling on occasion to the pacemakers to “steady a little” or “pick me up.”30 Lizzie never said a word, content to follow at any speed. If anything, the pace was even faster than before. The pair ran the first ten miles at twenty-four miles an hour. They crossed the fifteen-mile mark in under thirty-nine minutes—better than twenty-three miles an hour. The two men from Cleveland alternated with Helen and May on tandems, each trying to outdo the other in a kind of shadow competition to the main event. The four thousand people jammed into the outdoor amphitheater loved it all. With four minutes left the pacemakers quit the track, and Tillie finally slowed down to gather herself for the final sprint. At the three-lap warning, Lizzie did what she’d done in each of the first two heats, shooting past Tillie and grabbing the inside position. Tillie once again tried to climb the bank and shoot past at the end, but she was too late.
“The audience went wild,” reported the Commercial, “and all the Germans in the crowd considered it a personal victory. They hugged one another and threw their hats in the air. Miss Glaw was surrounded by her admirers, who nearly shook her arm off.”31
Lizzie had run a smart race, doggedly sticking to her strategy of hugging Tillie’s wheel and conserving strength for the final push. Tillie hadn’t done enough to undermine Lizzie’s tactics. Only once, on the second night, had Tillie really forced the issue: when the starter’s gun sounded, Tillie refused to jump, wobbling forward a few inches at a time. But Lizzie was ready for such a gambit and also refused to go. The two entered the first turn like this, barely able to stay upright, as the clock ticked toward the end of the first minute. Someone had to start, or they wouldn’t make the required twenty miles in the hour. Having lost the first night, Tillie had more to lose, and midway through the turn she finally dug in and took the pace. Lizzie won by sticking to her plan, running virtually the same race all three nights. Tillie tried to push the pace and run Lizzie ragged, but Lizzie was too strong. All three nights came down to the final three laps, when Lizzie made the first move and secured the pole, and Tillie was left with only one last option, and that was to execute her signature move in the final turn. That worked just the one time, and even then it was ruled a dead heat.
“Anderson,” concluded the Commercial, “can beat any woman in the world—except Glaw.”32 The match race in Toledo marked the first time in Tillie’s eighteen-month career that she’d been flat-out beaten—no accidents, no punctured tires. Lizzie was indeed the new champion. She’d earned the title on her calling card. And as the Toledo Blade said, Tillie would now “be obliged to prefix an ‘ex-’ to her title.” Tillie Anderson, ex–champion lady rider of the world.