Chapter 4

PRISONERS IN A GOLDEN CAGE

On a Wednesday morning in July 1896, a downhearted young man drifted into a store in Lima, Ohio, to shop for shoes. After sifting through the infant rack, he picked out two of the nicest pairs of shoes he could find, then brought them to the sales counter. Because he had but a few cents to his name, he asked the salesclerk if she would hold on to them until that afternoon when he would return with the money. Before leaving, he pulled out a picture of his two babies and his wife and showed them to the clerk. “I’m going to win one of the races,” he said in a concerned tone. Glancing at the attractive, young family curled up together in a loving pose, the salesclerk kindly obliged.

The man, “Poor Joe” Griebler, a quiet rider who had recently turned professional, walked out of the store and headed to the Lima racetrack. Standing at the starting line of a half-mile race with twelve other riders that afternoon, some observers thought Griebler looked and spoke nervously. Out of the gate, the riders bunched together in close formation until the final turn when Griebler suddenly broke from the pack. He dropped his head lower to his bike, then oddly raced toward the outside lane at a “frightful speed.” As he charged farther toward the crowd in his all-red silks, racegoers noticed his face had a crazed, almost demonic look to it. When it became obvious he would soon run out of track but had not yet slowed down, they sensed something was wrong. They were right. Griebler catapulted up the track’s four-foot embankment and soared over racegoers’ heads, missing them by inches.

Behind them, they heard a loud splat.

The helmet-less Griebler had hit a post, cracking his skull.

With one of his ears ripped off, chin smashed in, and one eye loosed from his head, he lay prostrate on the ground, blood running out of his nose, ear, and mouth. Not knowing any better, a few people picked him up and carried him under the shade of a weeping willow tree, probably further injuring his neck and pressing a fractured bone farther into his brain. While the races continued unabated, a few general practitioners who were at the race stood vigil over him, but were of little help. Before dying twenty minutes later, Griebler eked out his last words. “Soft pillow-shoes,” he muttered, his one good eye flickering in and out. “I’m awfully sick.”

Afterward, there was talk of setting up a fund for his wife, Delia, three-year-old son, Walter William, and eight-month-old daughter, Pearl. The idea seemed to resonate with the young riders who could better relate to Griebler’s plight but had little money to contribute. Fred Longhead, one of the few successful riders who seemed shaken, went to the store and bought both pairs of shoes from a tearful salesclerk. He sent the tiny shoes and a touching letter back to Griebler’s inconsolable widow in Granite Falls, Minnesota, along with “Poor Joe” in a coffin.

Walter Sanger, one of the experienced riders in the race who had seen such desperation before, told authorities that Griebler “passed him with his face set and riding like a wild man.” When the rest of the wheelmen learned of his bizarre death, few seemed shocked. Their seeming indifference had roots in experience. At the time, there was much discussion among doctors and laypersons about the supposed harmful effects of bike riding. One doctor claimed that such irrational riding was caused by vertigo, dizziness, or ruptured blood vessels. Another claimed that cycling caused “irritation and congestion,” which led to chronic disease and insanity. Yet another contended that cycling caused thirst, which inevitably led to beer drinking, which triggered kidney stones. Together, they fashioned terrifying names for these maladies like “bicycle heart,” “bicycle eye,” “bicycle walk,” “bicycle face,” and “bicycle twitch.”

There was never one definitive diagnosis for Griebler’s tragic death. But for veterans like Sanger, Munger, and Zimmerman, it further symbolized what they had seen or experienced over the years. The life of a professional bicycle racer could be downright brutal. With all the un-air-conditioned train and sea travel, the countless hours training in intense summer heat or cold spring rains, the tremendous nutritional needs, and the high monetary cost of meeting those needs, few sports were more physically and mentally demanding than professional bike racing. In those days before effective helmets, nearly every seasoned racer suffered physical injuries or saw his body wear out. During his career Taylor himself would witness, or know of, more than a dozen riders who died of racing injuries. He would see many more knocked out of racing with debilitating injuries or for more mysterious reasons.

In Griebler’s case, there were two likely causes. One was long gaps in and incomplete knowledge of nutrition; Griebler was a penniless new pro rider who had trained relentlessly for years without a full understanding of the nutritional demands of such a lifestyle. As a result, he probably yo-yoed between energy gluts and shortages. Second, given the era and several witnesses who said he had “glassy eyes,” drugs likely played a role. Griebler had heard stories of the fame and fortune of riders like Arthur Zimmerman. In his need to provide for his family during those depression years, he had likely punished his body and mind beyond its capacity to cope. For years, he had ridden in the star’s shadow and had eventually been crushed under the wheels of his evasive greatness. As bike racers would often say, Griebler had “cracked.”

In the days of horse and train travel and before readily available supplements, bike racers often had large gaps in their daily food and beverage needs, resulting in nitrogen imbalances. Water quality also varied drastically from one town to the next, often causing gastrointestinal problems. With little real data with which to work, the first nutritionists basically just winged it. Their first utterance in the late 1880s was for fewer fruit and vegetables. Their ignorance is understandable. Few knew about vitamins and enzymes until the 1910s, and vitamin-enriched foods didn’t hit grocery shelves until the 1920s. No one had even broken down the carbohydrates, proteins, or fats in foods until the federal government’s first director of agriculture began tabulating those figures in the late 1880s. When he did, few people listened to his call for increased fruits and vegetables, preferring instead to mock his findings as “lacking significance.”

Even if they had heeded his call, without widespread refrigeration in homes, athletes would have found it difficult to do so regularly. Moreover, most Americans were not yet familiar with the benefit of eating more frequent but lighter meals—an approach that stabilizes nitrogen balance resulting in fewer energy spikes and increased endurance, both crucial for athletes. So people ate infrequently and when they did, it was often in marathon feeding sessions involving fat-rich meals. The era rightfully became known as the “groaning tables” period. In line with this ritual popularized during the Gilded Age, people associated corpulence with “success and well-being.” Fittingly, a book named How to be Plump flew off the shelves. Dyspepsia and other digestive problems were so common in the 1880s and 1890s that a handful of men became exceedingly wealthy peddling their supposed cures.

Eaten mainly by the middle and upper classes, fresh fruit was considered exotic and expensive. And because 50 to 60 percent of the average person’s wages was spent on food, the lower class, and even some middle-class families, often went without these important nutritional staples. During the severe economic downturn of the 1890s, many athletes had to cut back on essentials.

If a rider could afford and manage a proper diet, he would have found it at least as difficult to avoid harmful drugs. When Birdie Munger forecast a bright future for Taylor, he was careful to insert a disclaimer: He must abstain from drugs and alcohol. As a veteran racer, Munger had good reason for adding that clause. Their era was described as a “dope fiend’s paradise.” Opium was for sale legally at low prices throughout the century. Morphine came into common use during and after the Civil War. And heroin was marketed toward the end of the century as a “safer” substitute for morphine. These opiates and countless pharmaceutical preparations containing them were as freely accessible as aspirin is today. Grocery stores, general stores, and drugstores sold opiates over the counter or by mail without a prescription.

To avoid any stigma attached to being a street “druggie,” riders could easily buy any of six hundred “legitimate” medicines laced with opiates—magic potions like Ayer’s Cherry Pectoral, Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup, Darby’s Carminative, Godfrey’s Cordial, McMunn’s Elixir of Opium, and Dover’s Powder. Opium also found its way into alcohol in the form of a highly addictive concoction called laudanum, or wine of opium, which was popular because it was cheaper than gin or wine and produced a vicious initial kick. Some of these products were marketed as teething syrups for young children, some as soothing syrups, and others for diarrhea, dyspepsia, and dysentery. Cocaine, because of its easy abundance, was also used by cyclists, racehorses, and prizefighters—the most popular cocaine mixtures were called “Physic” and “Eagle Soup,” or “fly like an eagle”—as was strychnine and trimethylene. All of these products were addictive and their long-term effects not yet fully understood.

Despite the drugs’ addictiveness, this term was seldom used. Addicts continued their daily routines instead of being treated or institutionalized. Riders kept riding, children stayed in school, and workers worked. Newsmen largely kept their editorial mouths shut, giving the epidemic, as some called it, scant attention; they had been strong-armed by manufacturers into signing a “code of silence” forbidding them from writing about the addictiveness of their products. They had their rationale: their biggest advertisers were the cycling industry and the patent medicine men. In the 1890s, sixteen thousand newspapers carried ads for Halls Catarrh Cure alone. And the face of their national ad was a popular professional cyclist named Tom Cooper, “the prettiest rider in the business.” The prevalence of the drug habit, warned one reformer in his lonely speech before Congress, “is now startling the whole civilized and uncivilized world.”

The exact scope of drug use in the professional peloton was murky, but not because it was uncommon. Considering the strain of the profession—“you have to be a masochist to suffer so much,” recalled one wheelman—the problem was surely at least as significant with riders as with the population in general. A caricature in one paper left some clues. It depicted a sweaty, half-crazed cyclist—his body looking skeletal and malnourished—a $1,300 prize dangling in front of his eyes and a deep, dark hole dug in the track ahead, as if waiting for him to fall into the abyss.

Cyclists took opiates and cocaine for the immediate “rush” or, more often than not, as a form of escapism. Since medicinal ingredients were not required to be listed in most states, sometimes users didn’t even know they were taking them. In the mid-’90s, racing officials became suspicious when, out of the blue, an elite rider named Jimmy Michaels collapsed on the track. Michaels picked himself up, stared airily into space, remounted, then tore around the track. He was clipping along at a surprisingly fast pace—that is, until someone told him he was going in the wrong direction. Apparently his coach Choppy Warburton—whose riders almost always won and nearly as often died young—had a secret he kept from his rider. Hidden in his shirt pocket, Warburton held a tiny bottle housing his secret formula—probably laudanum or cocaine-cola, “the drink that relieves exhaustion.”

Whatever it was, the ICU, bike racing’s international governing body, didn’t particularly care for it. Figuring he needed a little rehabbing of his own, they eventually suspended Warburton for life, making him perhaps the first casualty in cycling’s long war on drugs.

All these factors—when combined with brutal travel schedules and demands from managers, fans, and sponsors—could make riders weak, emaciated, restless, delusional, neurotic, peevish, and apathetic. They resulted in injuries, or in Griebler’s case, death.

Certainly, the resulting injuries could be extensive. Reggie McNamara, a well-known six-day racer, clearly deserved his status as a wheelsman legend and the nickname “Iron Man.” During his career, in addition to almost daily scrapes and bruises, he crashed fifteen-hundred times, broke his collarbone twenty-seven times, his jaw twice, and his skull once. He also had a hard time hanging on to his teeth. At more than one race, he crashed violently, passed out, eventually woke up, plucked several of his teeth out of the track’s wooden slats, handed them to his trainer-dentist, then returned to riding. McNamara knew he was cut out for the rough-and-tumble world of bike racing at an early age. After his finger had been bitten by a snake when he was nine, his brother suggested that they cut it off just in case it had been poisoned. “All right,” he deadpanned, as if someone just asked him if he wanted his fingernails clipped, “chop it off.” And off it went! “Now you won’t die,” his ten-year-old brother blurted right before receiving the thrashing of his life from their parents.

While McNamara somehow rode on, others were not so fortunate. Before a sold-out crowd at the Cleveland Track, a rider named Harry Hovan became a human projectile, flying over the track rail before coming to a flesh-tearing halt. When they finally plucked his hapless form from the crowd, he had a broken leg, a broken jaw, four cracked ribs, a fractured wrist, a broken arm, and a concussion. “Other than that,” remarked one hardened rider, “he was just fine.”

Being a hardened tough guy like McNamara and Hovan was a by-product of the era and the vocation, and professional cyclists took this ethos seriously. The first crude helmets—nothing more than pillbox-peaked cloth caps or colorized pith helmets—emanated from the hellish facial bloodlettings inherent during the high-wheel period. These helmets were better than nothing, but usually accomplished little more than to soak up whatever blood resulted after one of those infamous high-wheelers took a “header.”

Helmets improved little once the “safety” bike arrived—leather rings around riders’ foreheads and thick, woolen pads that crossed the top of their heads—yet few cyclists dared to be seen wearing one. After all, the public viewed cyclists in the same vein as matadors. A rider didn’t dare show signs of weakness or dearth of bravado for fear of his rivals swooping in for the kill. When one rider was asked about helmets, he responded as any strapping matador would. “Only the clumsy get themselves killed,” he boasted. Soon after, he did just that, cracking his helmet-less skull on a concrete track.

Since the first bicycle race took place two years after the first Kentucky Derby, wheelmen borrowed some of the same tactics, language, and even the same tracks as horsemen. And like horse racing, due to the high speeds involved, the sport of bike-track racing was dangerous enough without the riders making it even more so. But some did just that. Elbowing is evident in old photos that show riders dipping their heads toward their handlebars, trying to avoid another elbow blow to their faces or bodies.

In races involving multiple riders, the borrowed horseracing tactic of “pocketing” was often employed to “smoke out” the race favorite. An example of this scheme would find the race favorite trapped behind one rider while a second man rode up on the outside and pinned him in a box. For further effect, a third man would ride up from the back tightening the pocket all the more. A fourth man would then come streaking from the back, slipping by the boxed group and in for the money. While perhaps unfair, this tactic was not then illegal. When race favorites began adjusting to the tactics, the offending jockeys would occasionally pay a third-class rider—usually someone who had no chance of winning—to “dump” the competition. As the number one target of these tactics during his career, Taylor had to be vastly superior to his competitors to overcome them.

Some of the most horrific spills were the mass pileups. During one six-day race at the Mutual Street Indoor Arena in Toronto, Reggie McNamara and Charlie Winter were in the final sprint for the finish. The two men were in the lead riding side by side when suddenly their handlebars jammed, meshing them together like two deer locking horns. As though they were piloting what looked like a sideways bicycle built for two, they veered together toward the rail, then sailed in unison up the steep bank and over the fence, sending them to the hospital with serious wounds. But the real horror took place behind them. In their wake, their accident triggered an avalanche of carnage, with bodies and twisted steel strewn all over the track. In tending to the riders, track doctors disposed of two hundred yards of adhesive tape, ten gallons of witch hazel, five gallons of olive oil, and three dozen bottles of iodine and petrogen.

Perhaps the most bizarre pileup came at an indoor race before a packed house in Montreal. While a full field of riders circled the track at top speed, the lights in the arena suddenly went out. For the first time all day, the crowd went completely silent. The only noise permeating the smoky auditorium was first the Doppler drone of the racers’ tires, followed by the clanging of metal on metal, wooden fences snapping, bones breaking, and the distinctive echo of men discharging their agony through a series of earsplitting profanities. After gathering their senses, people noticed something unusual about the black out. It had lasted exactly one minute. The lights had flickered on sixty seconds later, revealing thousands of horrified fans as well as a mangled pile of wheels, frames, and broken bodies. The only man left intact was Peter Van Kempen, a rider who somehow found his way to the top rail, which he clung to for dear life. It turns out it was Thomas Edison Day. And in those days before widespread electricity and communications, instead of honoring this invention by flying a flag or scheduling a national holiday, unbeknownst to racing officials, the power was shut off in the city for exactly one minute.

Extreme soreness resulting from overtraining or malnutrition was also a problem. Riders trained for hours every day and usually hurt all over. They habitually had sore necks, knees, hamstrings, rumps, calves, and backs stemming from spills or from riding in a fixed position for long periods. The most painful injuries came from road or track rash—injuries that often knocked them out for days, weeks, or even months. Most riders were battle-hardened men who could easily get over minor scrapes and bruises. “Sometimes,” wrote the Washington Post, “riders appeared on the track, done up in bandages almost from head to foot.”

Nearly every rider left chunks of their hide ensconced in tracks throughout the country. Or, large chunks of the track wound up inside the rider. Flying along at a race in Providence, Rhode Island, a rider named Dan Pisceone was slammed into the boards on the outside railing. While his rim and frame fell to the ground twisting like a pretzel, Pisceone skidded face down on the track, leaving a long, lurid trail of blood behind. One of the wooden slats on the track had loosened and lodged in his abdomen. When he failed to get up, his horrified trainer ran to him, then proceeded to turn over a dead man.

Wherever there were accidents, there were doctors—or those who hung out a shingle to that effect. One man affectionately referred to as “Spills” prowled around the tracks during major races, always ready to comfort a fallen rider. Whenever a racer who looked seriously injured asked if he should go to the hospital, Spills assured the rider he would take good care of him. His methods were decidedly unorthodox, but somehow he kept riders going while orthopedic surgeons would have had them bedside, all trussed up with casts, pulleys, and weights. “Get ’em back on the bikes as quick as you can,” Spills often said. “That stops congestion and swelling.” Race managers loved him as well. “He’d kid ’em into thinking they aren’t hurt, tired or highly strung,” raved one manager. “Keep ’em working.”

Bike racers were a very tough breed in those days—they had to be. “If you didn’t ride,” remembered one former rider, “you didn’t eat.” And there was no such thing as an injured reserve list. Bad strains and fractures of the wrist, collar bone, and ribs were quickly assuaged with yards of tape, laxatives, liver pills, a bottle of Payne’s celery tonic, a few quick prayers, and for some, a side of whiskey. Then it was back in the saddle. In fact, the only time “Iron Man” McNamara left his bike was when a “regular” doctor taped his shoulder the “right” way. “If Fred [Spills] had done it,” he told a reporter, “I’d been back riding in thirty minutes instead of the six months recommended by the doctor.”

Since meaningful insurance was nonexistent at the time, riders either paid for their medical care out of their own pockets or received financial help from sympathetic cycling fans, including famous celebrities. In the 1890s, it was men like Diamond Jim Brady, his actress girlfriend Lillian Russell, and Broadway producer William Brady. In later years, it was two of bike racing’s most avid fans, Bing Crosby and Ernest Hemingway. Both men traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe to see the races. Crosby enjoyed the races so much he often picked up the hospital tab for injured riders, hoping to see them back on the track as soon as possible.

Hemingway helped out as well. He was known to linger all night in his box at the races with his wife Hadley passed out on his lap. “I’ll never forget the time I set up operations in a box at the finish line of the six-day bike races to work on the proofs of A Farewell to Arms. There was good, inexpensive champagne,” he wrote, “and when I got hungry, they sent over Crab Mexicaine from Prunier. I had rewritten the ending thirty-nine times in manuscript and now I worked it over thirty times in proof, trying to get it right. There [at the racetrack], I finally got it right.”

In their never-ending quest for more speed, riders occasionally employed pacers to block the wind in front of them. At first the pacers rode tandem bikes, or bicycles built for two. When their speed no longer sufficed, they moved up to quads, sextuplets, even octuplets. Six to eight men on one long, unwieldy bike dashing along at more than forty miles per hour bred the potential for serious carnage. A pace rider on one of these machines had to be strong and absolutely fearless. At one race in Cleveland, a sextuplet clipped along at a record-breaking pace when the front tire buckled under the strain of nearly a half-ton of riders. Choosing the lesser of several evils, the riders simply “abandoned ship,” all six of them catapulting into a complicated pile of humanity that even Spills couldn’t cure.

When the hell-for-leather pace set by octuplets no longer satisfied America’s appetite for speed, a new contraption called the motorcycle entered the scene in the late 1890s. Early motorpace riding (bicycle racers riding behind a speeding motorcycle) was not for the faint of heart. Charles Walthour set twenty-six motorpace world records, but only after enduring twenty-eight fractures of his right collarbone, eighteen of the left, thirty-two broken ribs, and sixty stitches to his face and head. Bike racing, concluded the Washington Post, “is the most dangerous sport in the entire catalogue . . . by the side of it, football appears a game fit for juveniles only.”

Walthour’s brushes with serious injury, even death, had no bounds. Once, according to his family, he was given up for dead after a spill in Paris and abruptly whisked off to the county morgue. There, a man wearing black sepulchral clothing and a shiny silver cross hovered over his remains while reading from the Scriptures. Whatever he said, Walthour apparently didn’t care for it. He opened his eyes, got up off the slat, walked out of his premature eulogy, and went on to live another thirty-three years.

George Leander, Walthour’s good friend and rival, wasn’t so fortunate. In 1903, while zinging along behind motorpace at ninety kilometers per hour, an inexplicable encounter between bicycle and motorcycle occurred. To this day, no one knows exactly how Leander’s long frame wound up airborne, hovering some sixteen feet above the track. What is known is that his body belly flopped on the top of the steep wooden track and teetered there for thousands of horrified fans to see before finally rolling back to the center of the track, lifeless. His decidedly dead body wound up in the same morgue where his good friend had decided not to die.

The fate of Harry Elkes and Will Stinson, friends of dead Leander and almost-dead Walthour, capped off the particularly gruesome motorpace year of 1903. At the Charles River Track in Boston, a motorpace driver named E. A. Gateley slowed to pace Stinson while Elkes sped ahead. Tragically Elkes, whose doctor told him “he will someday drop from his wheel a corpse,” blew a tire. He then fell off his bike right in front of the motorcycle, causing all hell to break loose on top of him. In addition to bicycle and motorcycle parts strewn everywhere, a horror-stricken crowd of ten thousand people saw Stinson wind up on top of the heap, Gateley in the middle, Elkes on the bottom. From the scrum’s apex came a noisy trio of crashing bodies and squalid ululations. By the time it was all sorted out, Elkes, by then a friend of Taylor’s, was hauled to the morgue, his head crushed. The motorpace driver was stammering around the track with an amputated foot. And Stinson lay in a hospital bed suffering from internal injuries and loss of an eye—all while the remaining races continued unabated. Miraculously, from what some believed was his deathbed, Stinson was somehow able to push out a few words. “I want to ride again,” said the cycling matador, his remaining eye twitching uncontrollably, “tonight.”

Through it all, riders kept riding and people kept attending races—“it is the danger in the sport that makes it thrilling,” wrote the Washington Post, “and it’s the thrilling feature that makes it attractive.” In the ’90s, thousands would join the pro ranks looking for fame and fortune. And for good reason: the financial rewards for elite riders were substantial. But many riders, clinging to the hope that they would someday be the next Zimmerman, struggled just to meet expenses or afford their next meals. The bigger the sport became, the more it was necessary for a racer to have a good handler and a well-designed program of individual training. But this did not come cheaply. A personal trainer cost between eighteen and thirty dollars a week, plus his expenses and a share of any winnings. Then there was the extensive train travel, cost of hotels, and the huge nutritional intake needed by the riders. And if a racer was a real “flash,” he had to factor in the cost of a valet.

But few were so fortunate. Some of the low-level riders took to sleeping on cots at the track or train stations to save on hotel costs. For most riders, this day-to-day grind formed a brutal, hardscrabble existence. In the end, only a small fraction of them became affluent, a few lived well, and the rest—the bulk of the men like “Poor Joe” Griebler—were flat broke. “Let us be content to applaud these few cycle stars,” wrote Bearings, “because there exist a large number of ciphers who have a hard time to keep body and soul together.”

This itinerant way of life strained personal relationships, forcing most riders, including Munger and Zimmerman, to be bachelors, marry later in life, or scatter their passions from one city to the next. For those few riders who had them, it could also be hell on their families. In their private moments together before his tragic racing death, Joseph Griebler shared his darkest fears with his young wife, Delia. But he didn’t have to say too much to convince her of the hazards and hardships of his chosen profession. “Poor Joe,” touted as another “promising” future Zimmerman, had been away from home and injured enough times to make her dread the next race—or the telegram telling her of another injury.

She may in fact have been the only one who knew of the grim eye injury he had received during a pileup; had he told League officials, he may have had his racing license stripped from him. His doctor had told him he needed to see an eye specialist or face losing all sight in his bum eye. But without meaningful insurance and no money, he continued competing while his eye went uncared for—“going after a few more dollars for the kids,” he would often say.

Before boarding a train from Minneapolis to Lima, Ohio, days before that fatal July day, he had just recovered from another injury that had sidelined him for months, bringing him near bankruptcy. He seemed to be too proud to tell anyone of his circumstances besides Delia, the love of his life and the pretty woman whose pictures he showed to everybody he met. “He was doubtless thinking of how the prize money would gladden the hearts of the little ones at home,” wrote one reporter after his death.

During his life, Delia was seized with fear, thinking of the moment she and her two infants would be left alone with nothing but memories of his short life and a future wrought with emptiness and poverty. “Well,” he had strangely augured as he hugged and kissed her for the last time, “I expect that you will see me brought back dead before two weeks are gone.”

At the moment doctors stood sentinel over Joe’s dying body under that stand of weeping willow trees and hearing his last grieving words—“I’m awfully sick”—Delia was visiting family and friends in the backyard of a home in Granite Falls. She was rolling a ball to Walter William with one arm, holding Pearl in her other arm, when Joe’s mother, who had just buried another son in a similar tragedy, handed her the telegram: Joe Griebler is dead, killed in a race in Lima, Ohio. You notify his wife.

None of Joe’s extraordinary premonitions could have adequately prepared her for that frightful message. His coffin soon arrived, along with the two tiny pair of shoes that he had carefully picked out—probably his only material possessions that passed on through the years. While her kids continued to play on in the lazy summer sun, oblivious to it all, Delia stood there speechless, rivulets of sweat and tears dripping down her face. Described as being on the brink of collapse and possibly suicidal, Delia likely heard Joe’s recent words ring in her head. “If I don’t get killed before the season closes,” he had confided, “I am going to quit.”

Sometime in the early 1900s, a man took his daily ride around the grounds of his school, the Munich University in Germany, atop a fat-tired bicycle. As the sun dropped below the horizon, he reached down and flipped on the headlamp. On those regular evening rides, he began observing a few important things that would eventually change the world. One was that the bobbing beam cast from his headlamp always traveled at the same speed whether he was cruising at a quick pace or coasting to a stop. A theory—that light from a moving source has the same speed as light from a stationary source—was born on those rides. The man, perhaps the greatest genius who ever lived, was Albert Einstein; his discovery, Einstein’s theory of relativity, laid the foundation for an explosion of scientific theory.

As significant and well-known as that discovery was to the world, Einstein’s other discoveries were as important to him personally as any of his later inventions. There were two items that he—and more than one billion people since—noticed about the bicycle while riding. The first was how it made him feel—the sensations of youth, how freely discovery came to him, the intoxicating adrenaline rush.

Einstein’s second discovery was that, despite its apparent simplicity, the bicycle itself was nothing short of a scientific, mechanical, and technological wonder. In the nearly two hundred years since the first crude velocipede was wheeled out of an anonymous shed somewhere in Europe, man had yet to duplicate its efficiency. “The machine appears uncomplicated but the theories governing its motion are nightmarish,” explained bicycle physicist Chester Kyle. “Some things can’t be easily defined by physics and mathematics. The interactions of the body, mind, muscles, terrain, gravity, air, and bicycle are so complex that they defy exact mathematical solutions. The feel and handling of a bike borders on art,” Kyle continued. “Like the violin, it’s been largely designed by touch, inspiration, and experimentation.” The bicycle is indeed a remarkable feet of engineering. It can carry ten times its own weight and uses energy more efficiently than a soaring eagle. Yet a six-year-old child can master its mechanics.

In those early years, even hardened pros with thousands of miles on their machines still harbored fresh memories of their first childhood rides down their neighborhood roads. Before the bicycle, children experienced similar emotions when they were first hoisted atop the family horse. But the horse had a mind of its own and a large stomach to feed. The bicycle was under their control, free from the bucking, kicking, and neighing they had become accustomed to. Despite the many machines professional cyclists burned out over their careers, fond memories of each one clung to them like old friends throughout their lives. “No sport,” remembered one pro rider, “has a greater connection between man and machine than bike racing.”

Major Taylor, Arthur Zimmerman, and Birdie Munger had become bewitched by the world of bike track racing, a sport that could chew men up and spit them out. When man and bicycle whirled over the finish line with thousands cheering him on, his mind and body became overwhelmed with a sense of liberation and supreme personal empowerment. “Hearing that bell on the last lap,” explained one rider, “is a lot like being on some powerful drug . . .”

Riders who struggled to describe the emotions in their own words deferred to those of Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes’ stories. “When the spirits are low,” he wrote at the bottom of the ’90s depression, “when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.”

On an August day in 1890, a crowd had filled the new horsetrack at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. People peered down in awe as a regal chestnut named Salvator blazed down the track. At the tape, timekeepers glanced at their watches. As with bike-track racing, slashing a horse-racing record by one second raises eyebrows. Salvator had destroyed not only the American record but also the world record by four full seconds, finishing the mile in 1:35.5.*

At a different track, a few years after Salvator’s record, another man would throw his legs over his steed and charge out of the gate, breaking Salvator’s record. Only this time he would be piloting a steel steed. Decades worth of technological advances and improved conditioning would finally resolve the issue of speed in favor of the bicycle over the horse.

For a few decades before and after the turn of the century, bike racers were the men of the hour. The eyes of the nation’s press and sporting public were fixed on them. Gracefully riding high atop their saddles, with their lungs wide open and hearts thumping, Taylor, Zimmerman, and the rest of the peloton sped full steam ahead. Their magical moment was upon them. They were Arthur Doyle’s men, “without thought on anything but the ride they were taking.”

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* Salvator’s one-mile record stood for more than twenty-eight years before it was finally eclipsed by another horse named Roamer. Much like bike-racing records, it is difficult to compare the records of horses from different eras because of the varying track conditions. Salvator’s record—and the wheelman’s—were achieved on a straight track, which some historians believe is faster than an oval.