Chapter 15

“THE MESSIAH”

Taylor staggered down the gangplank and onto the shores of Cherbourg, France, on the overcast afternoon of March 11, 1901. A large cluster of European photographers and special correspondents, babbling in a polyglot of foreign tongues, escorted him to the rail station. Flashbulbs popped in his ashen face. They hopped aboard a train pointed east. After the usual pleasantries, someone made the mistake of asking him how his first voyage across the beautiful Atlantic had gone. It had been perhaps the most miserable days of his life; he had spent four of the six days dangling over the ship’s railing or the nearest toilet, and had hardly eaten a morsel. His bloodshot eyes rolling in his head, Taylor mumbled something about how he had wanted the captain to turn back to New York, or better yet, to just throw him overboard.

The special train chugged out of the ancient fishing village, past the hedgerows, and into the city of lights, arriving in Paris at one in the morning. At the Gare St. Lazare rail station, every customs official and customs employee—none of whom had bothered to declare Taylor’s blue varnished bicycle case—formed a circle around him, ignoring all other passengers. Taylor learned that he wasn’t the only one feeling a bit woozy. Greeting him there, fresh from Coquelle’s wedding reception, was Breyer, anesthetized by an evening’s supply of vintage champagne. Delighted to hear someone speak fluent English, slurred or not, Taylor greeted him with a handshake. He told him how excited he was to finally be in France, and that he looked forward to seeing the beautiful country he had heard so much about.

As he would be for the next few months, Taylor was grilled for comment about his chances against World Champion Edmond Jacquelin. “They say he’s the best man in the world,” said Taylor, his voice starting to come around. “Well, when I’m in form, we’ll see how I measure up to him right enough.” The ubiquitous question about whether he would ever break his stance against Sunday racing brought a laugh, a shrug, and a classic Taylor reply: “Before I left home, I swore to God that I would never race on the Sabbath, and I don’t like the idea of going to hell.” Taylor seemed surprised when someone asked him if he sailed under an assumed name. “Why would I bother with a fake name?” he asked. “Everybody on board knew who I was.”

At three in the morning, veiled under a thick fog, the woozy party stumbled into the fabulous marble and gilt Hotel Scribe where visiting royalty often stayed. Breyer headed for the bar. Taylor, dying for rest in a motionless environment, went to bed.

Paris rocked.

The Paris Taylor entered that spring was a glittering thing. The final years of the 1890s brought forward so much prosperity, enterprise, and freedom, the French dubbed it La Belle Époque—the beautiful period. Life was humming along so well a pamphlet titled Right to be Lazy made the rounds, promoting three-hour work days and a healthful “regime of laziness.” Some took it seriously, demanding more pleasurable locales where prosperous Parisians or visitors could spend their newfound wealth and free time. To fill this void, racetracks, circuses, and operas sprang up all over. Plus there were the twenty-seven thousand cafès that, when combined with all the wine bars and cabarets, gave Paris the notable distinction of having more drinking establishments than any place on earth. France drank as never before.

All the fancy watering holes and eateries were splendid, but what really kept wheelmen, horsemen, and politicians coming back were places like the large stone building down on 12 rue Chabanais, near the Louvre Museum. On the outside, it was disguised as just another French cocktail lounge. But it wasn’t the façade that drew people to it. On the inside, excited men—some women too—were handed a green alcoholic drink called absinth and then escorted down a long corridor that wound past elaborate rooms lined with velvet, ormolu, and tiger skin. But it wasn’t the elaborate interior, either. Not until they arrived at the “selection salon,” where gorgeous women were dressed in scant lingerie and gesturing in velvety French accents was the real inspiration for their visit finally unmasked.

The building was the home of Le Chabanais, the world’s most famous and luxurious maison closes, a French euphemism for brothels. It had none of the cavorting monkeys like the Moulin Rouge, just some of the world’s most beautiful women in the grandest possible settings—ne plus ultra, as the French called it.

In later years, Ernest Hemingway, between visits to the six-day bike races, drew inspiration there or at neighboring cabarets, as did performers Humphrey Bogart, Marlene Dietrich, and Cary Grant.

Artists found themselves so captivated they lived there—literally. The famous French painter Henry de Toulouse-Lautrec, an avid bike-racing fan who sketched several portraits of Arthur Zimmerman, deftly juggled his passions, drifting to and from the racetracks and his address of record: Le Chabanais. Many politicians and visiting royalty insisted that it be a part of any visit to Paris. At the 1900 Paris Universal Expo attended by Tom Cooper, Eddie Bald, and Floyd MacFarland, the visitors were so thrilled they gave the Japanese room, with its hanging rhino horns and exotic overtones, an award for, of all things, “best design.”

And the place swarmed with athletes. Given that the proprietress, a one Madame Kelly, was a member of the high society Jockey Club, her equestrian friends, including prominent Americans, wore out the winding path leading to its doors. And wherever horsemen went, wheelmen were not far behind. Endeavoring to make visiting wheelmen feel at home, the Madame and her wealthy partners, who used nom de plumes like Pointy Nose and George the Cavalryman, had rooms fitted with Eroto-cycles, a half-bicycle, half-sex toy—a bizarre-looking contraption that only a turn-of-the-century wheelmen and willing courtesans could possibly figure out. Some people came there or to neighboring establishments like the Moulin Rouge just for the musicals, while others indulged in carnal pleasures. The faded notation for just such an establishment found buried in Taylor’s vast scrapbooks reveals nothing about the reason for his visit.

The “storm” that commenced at six o’clock on the morning of March 12 would not subside until late June. The moment Taylor and Buckner stepped onto the streets of Paris for what they thought would be a peaceful early morning stroll down the Avenue de l’Opera, shopkeepers, fashion designers, photographers, and journalists were at the ready asking questions such as, “How did you sleep last night, Major? How will you fare against the Great Jacquelin? How was your trip over?” For hours, Taylor shook the hands of fan after fan as he and Buckner wound down the long avenue. “It had been three years that the cycling season has passed without having seen this transatlantic star whose name has crossed seas and continents,” raved one reporter. “But this time,” he continued, “we have him!”

Perhaps from years of watching Brady’s handling of Corbett and many theatrical stars, Taylor had learned how to handle the press. He also knew how to keep his name in their papers. “Major Taylor,” wrote one American journalist who was shocked he didn’t have a press agent, “has a happy facility of keeping in the public eye about as prominently as any theatrical star ever did.” But in France, the birthplace of world cycling, no effort would be needed. Everywhere he went he was mobbed, talked about, or written up.

The French press, convinced his seemingly innocent early morning walk was worthy of a breaking news story, retraced his movements in Talmudic detail in their papers. One writer even issued a special dispatch, informing his readers that Taylor had actually “crossed the street.” Another reporter came dangerously close to crossing that historic line in the sand. “Taylor’s arrival in France . . . the heroic guardian of the Sabbath,” he said, “can only be compared in importance to Zimmerman’s visit of eight years ago.” Up to that point, such talk among reporters was considered sacrilege, so he carried on gingerly. “Taylor arouses curiosity all the more, and is surrounded by mystery because of the color of his skin.”

Because he was being covered by some writers who knew nothing about bike racing, many reporters focused on him personally, delving deep into his childhood like inquisitive therapists. They also appeared to be competing for the preeminent physical description of him. In their unique 1901 French way, they described his flaring, v-shaped back muscles, broad shoulders, muscular legs, and washboard abdominals ad nauseam. But their greatest fixation seemed to gravitate toward his ankles and calves. If there were a hundred ways to describe calf muscles, the esteemed French writers coined them; they were feline-like, effeminate, powerful, shapely, and beautiful. “No man,” wrote one French journalist, “had ever been presented to the public in a more flattering fashion.”

While they certainly profited in a big way, the obsession wasn’t the exclusive purview of the reporters who massed at the Hotel Scribe seeking interviews: the nation’s cycling-crazed tifosi were insisting on it. So much fanmail poured in demanding to know everything about him, newsrooms became overwhelmed. What was he wearing? What does he look like? What did he eat? Where did he go? And surely the favorite of the ladies: Is he married? “Major Taylor,” one of them gushed, “is one of the most beautiful athletes you will ever meet.” When front page stories weren’t enough, they published a four-page excursus with photos of him flexing and Daisy, “La future Madame,” coiffed elegantly.

Taylor had grown accustomed to the singular life of fame, but this was a different strain. In America, it was less personal. In France, where Major Taylor posters were being hawked for five francs and countless people gathered at the Grand Palais to stare at his life-sized photograph, it was a penetrating, in-your-face infatuation. At first, he seemed to favor the American model. Preferring a fair amount of airspace around him, Taylor was, he said, a bit annoyed with all the people “who came to see me and looked at me right in the eyes.” “Are blacks not seen in Paris?” he asked a reporter, feeling as though he was the only black man in the country.

Mustachioed photographers in frock coats tailed him like bear cubs, setting up their heavy tripods and capturing his every move, mood, and nuance. As he was without a doubt Europe’s most newsworthy subject, images of him in everything from his briefs to a tuxedo would appear in newspapers. Everybody wanted to be in the picture. The leaders of France’s expanding automobile industry, Henri Fournier and Count de Dion, made sure their faces were seen in papers all over Europe sitting proudly next to the visiting megastar in their early machines.

Because the number of automobiles in France outnumbered those back home, Taylor was slow to warm to them. He even told a reporter he couldn’t stop laughing when he saw those heavy cars Parisians called omnibuses “wandering pitifully on the Champs Elysees.” But later, after the two automotive magnates invited him to lunches and fought over the promotional currency his endorsement would bring, Taylor thrilled them by announcing his desire to buy an automobile and bring it home with him. “The people of Worcester,” he said in a mammoth understatement, “will be rather surprised to see me come back on a 16-horsepower.”

Trainer Buckner had seen great fame before but even he couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. He sat back and watched European nobility toss calling cards his way, inviting him to dinners and horse races. “The Europeans were absolutely crazy over him,” he would tell an American reporter. Only days off the der Grosse, before he had even stepped on a racetrack, France and Europe were full of Major Taylor. Had the girls of Les Chabanais modeled string bikinis on the Avenue de l'Opera during his stay, few would have taken notice.

On the Avenue de la Grande Armee, where the gates open to the fortifications into Neuilly, stood the trendiest resort for wheelmen and wheelwomen in the world. The café de l’Esperance, one of many Parisian cafés for ardent sportsmen, was a bicyclist oasis where riders sat around sharing big, fat lies about their storied racing days. The place was so thoroughly enjoyable, people practically lived there. One rider reportedly hadn’t missed a single day in nearly a decade, leading some to wonder if he really had that wife he said he had.

A predecessor to today’s sports bars, its attractions were numerous. On its walls were pictures and murals of all past French greats—Bourrillon, Huret, Cassignard, and others. Maps of all the best cycling routes were strewn about. On race days, after struggling just to get in the place, avid wheelmen gathered in the main room, sipping wine and staring at a large pillar on which were pinned telegrams announcing the results of races from across Europe. At all other times, people hovered either inside, in the midst of its Bohemian smoke and noisy poolrooms, or outside, where, like the rest of Paris, tables and chairs sat on a wide sidewalk.

On the happy occasion when elite riders happened through the place, a wide path cleared, and caps were doffed. When its most revered foreign guest Arthur Zimmerman first strolled through its doors eight years before, the encomiums and the flatteries that were heaped upon him scarcely knew a limit. In the colloquial of the Café de l’Esperance, wheelmen hadn’t stopped chatting about Zimmie since that first visit.

On a cloudy late March day in 1901, all such talk temporarily halted. In an unannounced visit, Major Taylor stopped by, nearly bringing the place to a standstill. Everyone gathered around, including former greats Bourrillon, Huret, and Morin, eyeing him up and down and asking for autographs. Newsmen, having already abandoned all their professional objectivity, joined in, giving the café the look, feel, and sound of a papal visit. Few men fit into such a place better than Taylor. Bring up gearing, tires, wheels, or that race he won back in ’97 and he could talk a person’s ear off.

While surrounded by that entourage, conducting interviews, and reminiscing about his early racing days, Taylor’s attention was suddenly diverted. In the distance, he spotted smoke billowing from an automobile as it puttered down the long cobblestoned road leading to the café. The car, a spanking new Fournier two-seater, sputtered to the curb. The hazy sketch of a man materialized out from its wind-whipped interior. Through the fog, Taylor saw a majestic man, heavily muscled, placing a white straw hat over his mussed hair.

It was Edmond Jacquelin, the Triple Crown winner and champion of the world. The gathering, unable to believe their good fortune, tossed confetti on the boulevard and quietly cleared a path. The two men—one black, one white, one from the New World, the other the Old World, one brash, the other reserved, both skilled boxers—circled each other like two heavyweight prizefighters. Jacquelin’s taller frame towered over Taylor, his steely eyes gazing down at him. Taylor looked up and offered his hand. There was a long pause. Finally, with a pained smile, Jacquelin shook Taylor’s hand. The world’s fittest men locked hands firmly together.

The crowd gasped.

“I did not expect to find a very large man,” Jacquelin then said, “but you are really smaller than I was led to believe.”

“I was led to understand that you were a very large man for a sprinter,” said Taylor, “but did not expect to find a giant as you are.”

Someone tossed a tape measure at them. They began to take measurements. Laughter interrupted the seriousness of the occasion.

“You have remarkably big legs,” said Taylor, in a relaxed jocularity.

“Yes, but yours are much prettier,” laughed Jacquelin.

“That’s not the point,” said Taylor. “I am afraid yours might be quicker.”

“But suppose yours prove quicker than mine. What then?” retorted Jacquelin.

As the two racers continued their exchange, the café owner brought out a bottle of vintage champagne and popped the cork. Jacquelin, born in Santenay, a well-known appellation of Burgundy wine, raised his glass and looked on in astonishment as Taylor sipped his glass of water. Flabbergasted at his ability to abstain, a reporter later asked him how he did it amid so much peer pressure.

“A man comes to me and says, ‘Have a glass of beer. Have a glass of wine. Have a cigar.’ I decline and I don’t feel anything. I don’t miss them,” Taylor said, “because I have never had them.”

The two men then clinked their glasses together while enjoying a few laughs inside the two-wheelers’ sanctum. With their match race—which was already selling for ten times normal cost—only a month and a half away, this Franco-American détente would be short-lived.

On another overcast morning in late March, Taylor and Buckner set off for the Parc des Princes Velodrome in the Parisian suburb of Auteuil to begin training. Buckner had been growing concerned; the abysmal spring weather had kept Taylor from his much-needed preparation and he suddenly found himself behind schedule. Somewhere along the line, someone tipped off the public; a steady stream of horse carriages, wheezing automobiles, and rolling bicycles followed them to the track.

Once there, Taylor and Buckner looked into the grandstand and saw half of the Gallic Empire staring back at them. Since it was just a light, early morning workout on an ugly spring day, Taylor was shocked at the large showing. “There was such a big crowd on hand,” one reporter overheard him say, “I thought there was a race meet on.” A thick phalanx of European correspondents, including those from political, general news, society, and sports publications, hovered around the track apron hounding him at every opportunity. Several reporters practically camped out there, not missing a single workout. To them and a plethora of European riders who peered on, Taylor’s riding style and his position on his bike seemed abnormal. In the insular world of European pro cycling, riders maintained a more upright position. So when they saw Taylor bent over in an aerodynamic crouch almost parallel to his top tube, some veteran riders told him his posture was not appropriate for sprinting.

Others didn’t know what to make of it. “On a bicycle, his position is not disgraceful,” stammered a writer for French newspaper La Vie au Grand Air. “He doesn’t arch his back like a donkey, leaning over his steering wheel, his posture is not exaggerated.” But the more they saw, the more they began warming up to it. “His style is supple, at ease, regular, mechanical, never jerky no matter with what speed he progresses and he has a perfectly harmonious strength. He becomes one with his bicycle better than any other compatriot.”

His unorthodox training regime also had them baffled. While Europeans trained plenty hard, many of them rolled through essentially the same routine day in and day out. Like Zimmerman, Taylor constantly varied his routine; one day short violent sprints, the next day longer, slower miles, the next behind motorpace. “I do whatever pleases me,” he told a surprised Frenchman.

The backstretch had long been a gathering ground for men with deep-rooted superstitions and rigid beliefs in old wives’ tales. The Europeans were perhaps the most superstitious of them all. Wearing jersey number thirteen ever since he obtained his professional license, Taylor was a sweeping departure from traditional riders in this regard as well. The European riders, who Taylor believed were inflicted with a silly case of triskaidekaphobia, stood perplexed while Taylor spoke of his contrarian ways. “I am not superstitious,” he told someone before relaying a story about how he once raced on September the thirteenth, stayed in hotel room number thirteen, then raced against a field of thirteen, wearing, of course, jersey number thirteen. “And I won it,” he said laughing, while everyone stared quizzically at him. His diametric ways irked some and mystified others. “Taylor,” one man wrote, “is said to attract the greatest delight from his association with the number thirteen and other uncanny things that tend to freeze the blood of his countrymen.”

So when he was given the keys to cabin number thirteen, one of the quaint buildings set aside for riders close to the track, he was unfazed. But the minute he opened the door, he was unceremoniously attacked by a smattering of brooms and wheelbarrows and old bicycles that had been stored there for the winter. The pile fell at his feet outside the door. He looked down, kicking the debris to the side. Someone then handed him the key to cabin 57. He took it. Buckner unloaded his bicycles and clothing, set up a massage bench, and installed a punching bag on the ceiling. Then they settled into the place they would call headquarters for portions of the next few months. Curious Europeans peered in, fixing their gaze on the strange punching-ball, wondering what in God’s name he was up to. “It strengthens the muscles and increases considerably the breathing,” he told them wryly.

After settling in, they stepped out their door on the way to the track where they planned to train at ten in the morning and three in the afternoon each day. They couldn’t help noticing a sign, embossed in gold trim, hanging on the door of cabin 56—right next to theirs. The words stood out like the Eiffel Tower: EDMOND JACQUELIN CHAMPION OF THE WORLD.

The trip to the track was as much about settling in to his new training digs as anything else, and with the weather growing nastier as the day progressed, Taylor wasn’t keen to do any more training. But with a large animated crowd leaning up against the track rail, he decided to entertain them instead. Harking back to his early days as a trick rider, he mounted his bike backward, then rolled across the track with his hands grasping the handlebars behind him, feet on pedals, pointing south. It was all that was needed for the crowd to rid themselves of their hats and handkerchiefs all the while hollering hysterically, “Vive Taylor!” “Vive Taylor!” The wild cheering carried on long after he walked off the track.

It started to snow. Taylor left the track to take in the sights, which included the Automobile Club of France, the luxurious Palace de le Concorde with famous sportsmen René Boureau, and a comedy. People tapped each other everywhere he went whispering “Look, it’s Major Taylor.” Reporters shadowed him, including one genealogical-minded Frenchman who made the preposterous claim that Taylor was one of them because his parents hailed from African countries under French control. He then met with a host of tire manufacturers who were jostling over his endorsement, eventually choosing the le Paris Tire Company. Buckner was stunned at the monetary rewards. “They were throwing all kinds of money at him,” he told an American reporter.

On the evening of April 6, 1901, the train carrying Taylor, Buckner, and Breyer pushed east from Paris’s Gar du Nord rail station. Looking out the window of lucky sleeper number thirteen, Taylor watched them roll past picturesque medieval castles before settling into downtown Berlin. When Taylor’s weary body stepped out into a waiting carriage, a reporter announced that “The earth under Germany shook.” They clopped off to the unfamiliar surroundings of the Friedenau Sportspark Velodrome to take part in his first European race. Taylor looked out at a field of European riders circling the damp, windy track as if it were a sunny summer afternoon. He was about to face several new challenges.

First, he had to deal with European cyclists, a very hardy bunch. For whatever reason, they and their fans seem to thrive on early spring races, both road and track, in some of the harshest conditions. Thousands gathered at famous races like Paris-Roubaix, set out over grimy, wet cobblestones, while Americans trained in the deep South. The American track-racing season, in fact, usually didn’t start until after Memorial Day. But since Taylor intended to defend his American championship title later in the season, he was obligated to begin outdoor racing much earlier than he was used to. An admitted fair-weather racer, he despised racing in the cold or even being out in it. The cold weather had reportedly been one of the factors keeping him from crossing continents.

Since he was scheduled to race in Europe for a few months, he also had to become intimately familiar with a different style of racing. American fans, being an impatient, high-strung lot, demanded knee-buckling speed from start to finish. Any deviation from this brought heckling from the stands. To mollify Yankee racing fans, American cyclists usually employed a put-your-head-down-and-ride-like-hell-from-beginning-to-end strategy. It was an unsophisticated game plan, but effective.

European fans, on the other hand, were in no hurry for anything and often showed up fashionably late. They fancied themselves a more cultured lot who preferred more strategizing. Supply followed demand: for the first three-quarters of a race, European pros crawled around the track, jockeying for the best position in a cat-and-mouse game before finally uncoiling in a vicious sprint down the homestretch.

Then there was the language barrier. European pros, because of their extensive travels throughout the continent, have always been remarkably multilingual. Other then stringing together a few words in butchered French, Taylor spoke only English. The politics within the international peloton were complex; riders who were bitter rivals one day would work in tandem to outmaneuver a favorite the next. No one had been the subject of more teamwork than Taylor, but in America, he could at least hear his rivals’ tactics and react to them. In Europe, he was stripped of one of his primary senses. “If Americans are to go to France in numbers,” Taylor would joke to Buckner, “they might petition the managers of the track meets there to demand silence at the races.” Finally, though the Europeans respected Taylor, some noted that he had done all his racing on the questionable terrain of the New World. “They are not of the same class as the top four or five French flyers,” boasted one returning European rider, summing up European opinion of most American riders. Having invented the sport, they wanted nothing more than to dethrone the much-ballyhooed black man from America. After scouring the continent for its best trainer, Willie Arend, the champion of Germany, had gone into virtual hiding in Hanover to exhaustively prepare for his race against Taylor.

Together these challenges—combined with unfamiliar racetracks and titillating nightlife—had spelled doom for nearly every American rider who had crossed the Atlantic, save Zimmerman. When the American “aces” got near Europe, wrote Coquelle, who had grown pessimistic over the years, “they vanished like smoke.” Going into his first European race in cruddy weather, Taylor was clearly up against it.

As the pistol cracked before a large and cold German crowd, which included the German chancellor and high military personnel, the cunning field of riders, employing the European method of racing, crawled out of the gate. Taylor watched and listened as the riders, knowing he couldn’t understand them, began openly strategizing with each other in their native tongues. Suddenly Willie Arend, a former world champion, emerging from out of nowhere, swooped around Taylor and stormed for the line. Laboring coldly along the pole in a full-length cotton sweater, Taylor paused slightly before he realized what had happened. He eventually reacted, lunging forward, trying to catch Arend’s rear wheel. It was too late. In the best shape of his life, Arend crossed the line ahead of Taylor.

Taylor wasn’t altogether prepared for what happened next.

In a jubilant celebration probably not seen since winning the Franco-German War, an animated throng of Arend supporters practically tripped over one another as they trampled out of their seats. They scaled the fences and charged onto the track, waving their handkerchiefs, tossing their hats into the air, and roaring in an animated and sustained bellow. Every bleacher, grandstand seat, and booth had been vacated. Even racing officials found themselves caught up in the excitement. Like a heat-seeking missile, the crowd sought out Arend, hoisting him on their shoulders, and carrying him around the track. The entire crowd then joined the band in singing “Watch on the Rhine,” while their short-sleeved national hero, wreathed in a jumbo-sized horseshoe of roses, wheeled around the track in triumph.

Facing enormous pressure to succeed against the men Jacquelin had already bludgeoned, Taylor tried to wriggle his way through the noisy labyrinth to shake Arend’s hand. It was no easy task: the sheer size of the celebration overwhelmed him. “That’s one of the greatest demonstrations I have ever seen on a bicycle track . . .” he would say. Before long, posters of Willie Arend, Champion of the World, were being pinned up in bike shops around Berlin.

Having his money and his reputation on the line, and fearing any loss may take the zeal out of the Jacquelin match race, Breyer removed his straw boater hat, wiped the sweat from his brow, and fretted. “The sky seemed to be against our shivering son,” wrote one of his nervous Le Velo journalists. Knowing Taylor well, Buckner slipped through the crowd unmoved.

Being an intensely competitive man, losing never sat well with the Major. It gave him an unsettling feeling in the pit of his stomach. Three days later, deciding he loathed losing more than he despised the cold, Taylor made mincemeat out of a stunned Arend, winning by a length—the length of several attached railcars that is. Breyer and Buckner smiled. Believing they had the man who would unseat the much-heralded American, Germany had been silenced. “Jacquelin,” someone muttered, “is the only man who can even pretend to defeat the man.”

In the dark of the Teutonic night, more than five hundred star-struck fans, many of them Americans, followed Taylor, Buckner, and Breyer back to the train station. The whistle blew, his admirers yelled their approval, and the train lurched onward. In the coming weeks, the train would scatter across the continent, passing a sea of followers and reporters en route. With each visit, word that the great black man was coming hummed through the telegraph wires. Somewhere along the way, darkness would turn into light. One of the most remarkable followings in sports history had begun.

Their train twisted through the Black Forest and on to Paris for a week’s worth of legging up at the Parc des Princes. Stopping in Paris was of little use; the weather was cold and dreary again. Buckner, worried because Taylor’s training was still behind schedule, poked and picked at him. Watching the rain turn to sleet and then snow, Taylor brooded.

One week later on a red-eye coach, they shoved off from Paris in the darkness, rolled out over the vineyards of Northern France, still cold and dormant, and into the town of Roubaix in the early morning hours of April 22, 1901. This being Taylor’s first race in France, the town was waiting for him. The minute he sprang out of the railcar doors, he was mobbed by fans. Flowers were tossed at him and endless praise heaped upon him. “Nothing,” Taylor later told a reporter, “was missing to make me happy.” An elegant black carriage picked them up and whisked them off. Along the dirt road winding into town, thousands tossed their hats, hollering “Taylor! Taylor!” as they rolled by.

At the Hotel Moderne, Taylor asked for and received room thirteen. At the track, every seat, press box, private booth, and close-by tree limb was filled with humanity. Among others, Louis Grognia, the talented Belgian who had twice won the prestigious Grand Prix of Roubaix, awaited him. Taylor scorched out of the gate, leaving everyone in his wake. When he reached the exceptionally steep final turn, blazing along at a murderous pace, his heart nearly jumped out of his chest. Unfamiliar with the angles and flow of the track, he had cut it too sharply, causing his left pedal to scrape the concrete surface. The brief brush with the track threw him off-kilter, sending him scurrying catawampus to the outside. Grognia and a rider named Dangla clawed by him on the inside. But in a remarkable display of wheelmanship that brought gasps from the crowd, Taylor somehow righted himself, then scorched rubber to the finish line just in time to win by a whisker.

With evening falling over Roubaix, their train skimmed along the River Meuse before cutting through the Ardennes Forrest and into Verviers, Belgium, perhaps the most bike-crazed nation on earth. “Room thirteen, please,” Taylor asked at the front desk of his hotel. Though room thirteen was normally used for first aid, he was told they would make it available for him—an extraordinary response for a black man accustomed to being turned away by hotel owners.

Morning, noon, and night, crowds would gather outside his hotel hoping to catch a glimpse of the visiting dignitary. When one race had to be postponed because of rain, thousands charged out of the track—forgetting their refunds—and swarmed his hotel like locusts. They stayed there, refusing to leave until he poked his head out his window King Leopold–style.

Living vicariously through Taylor, Buckner adjusted his Texas-sized cowboy hat, stared out his hotel window at the waiting horde, and shook his head. He was loving every minute of it. Most people, including Buckner, were at least as impressed with Taylor’s warm, genial character as they were his athletic skills. “I have never before met such a gentleman in every respect of the word,” beamed a Dutch track owner. With few exceptions, he referred to his rivals as “my friends.” He treated people the same whether they were valets or famous dignitaries, an admirable trait he learned from Zimmerman and from the lessons in the Bible, which he passed through as often as other men imbibed. He made a point of introducing Buckner to people, making him feel, perhaps for the first time in his life, special—someone more than a black servant. “I have the greatest confidence in him,” he often told journalists.

Verviers was also the hometown of Grognia, the Belgium national champion who enjoyed godlike status among Belgians. Beating him on his home track, a veritable graveyard for visiting riders, was as easy as squeezing water out of a rock. Because he was undefeated there, a lot of local fans were predicting another Grognia win.

To their dismay, they would have to watch Taylor beat the pulp out of the peloton again. “Alas,” exulted Cycle Age, “America has found the new Zimmerman for whom we have awaited.” One prominent European track owner said that people had never seen anyone like Taylor. “They gazed at the little Major and seemed not to understand whether he was an ordinary human being or a man having some kind of 45-horsepower motor in his body.”

From Verviers, their train snaked toward Antwerp, passing by sixteenth-century castles not yet scarred by war. Thousands amassed in the rain. “That part of the world hadn’t seen such fanaticism since the tulip craze,” one man later cracked. Coquelle surely looked at the wet crowd and began questioning the long-held belief about weekday races not drawing well in Europe. Taylor put on another show for the crowd, mowing down Momo, champion of Italy, and Protin, champion of Austria, before pipping champion Grognia at the finish line again. The crowd, drenched to the bone, roared. Recognizing his manifest superiority, Taylor had eased up down the stretch. “He didn’t care to make his defeats too apparent,” giggled one reporter. Grognia, whom the Referee was now wittily referring to as “GROGGY,” threw in the towel. “He’s the most marvelous racing man I have ever seen,” declared Grognia. “If he wanted he could have won by as many lengths as he desired.”

But as they had in every town, people asked the same question. Do you really think you can beat the Great Jacquelin? A skeptical reporter for the Boston Globe, who had just written a gushing article about the Triple Crown winner, went right ahead and answered the question for him. “Major Taylor will have to ride faster than he ever did in his life. Taylor can sprint, but the Frenchmen, when he turns loose on the last eighth of a mile, he whizzes around a track like a meteor dropping from the skies.”

The train backtracked, pausing in Verviers, Roubaix, and countless small European towns before arriving in Paris in the still of the cool April night.

Upon his return, it became clear that Major Taylor had really arrived in life. He began opening letters from home addressed to: Major Taylor Paris France. Since nearly everybody knew who he was and where he was at every waking moment, no address was necessary. The young black man had his own zip code! “Major Taylor,” gushed Victor Breyer, echoing the sentiment of others, “was awaited like the Messiah.”

On May 2, the train carrying Taylor, Breyer, and Buckner pushed out of Paris’s Gare de Lareze rail station. It cut through the emerald vineyards leading into Bordeaux. Next to Paris, Bordeaux was France’s most cycling-crazed city. Fans stood around the rail station waiting in lively clusters for the coming hero. The trio pressed out into a flock of fans that had been sipping the local flavor and nattering at length of his pending visit.

The three were immediately whisked into a waiting Dorsey automobile by local track owner Henri Barbareu-Bergeon and his personal chauffer. Taylor stared in amazement as the open-air six-seater passed the marble monument of the revered French cycling hero Georges Cassignard, who died young after being thrown off his horse. They continued rolling by a picturesque string of grapevines along the Gironde estuary before wheeling into the dish-shaped Velodrome du Parc. It was all quite a sight for the twenty-two-year-old from Indiana. “Neither the living nor the dead,” wrote his friend Arthur Zimmerman, “could take exception to taking residence in Bordeaux.”

Like most of his races in Europe, people arrived from all corners of the continent and wedged themselves into every available square inch of the track. It was the largest crowd ever seen in Bordeaux. Fans in a medley of shades pushed up against the rail, waving the tricolors of the republic. Busy concessionaires crisscrossed the velodrome, making sure the dense pack was sufficiently topped-off with their favorite beverage. “The French,” Zimmerman told the New York Times, “enjoy themselves at the races in grand style. People sit around the grounds drinking, smoking, and discussing the races.” They resembled picnics, he continued. “Everyone is in good humor.”

As the sun fell over the city, Barbareu-Bergeon flipped the switch on the newly installed night lights; unfortunately, the only thing staring back was the moonlight. Unable to safely see the track, the riders waited for the lights to be repaired. After a half hour under the moonlight, some of the fans in the one-franc or “democratic” upper-section—who may have been sousing themselves throughout the day—started to stir. Forty-five minutes in the stir turned into a steady stream of profanities, their anger building and building.

The humiliated track owner, working frantically to repair the track lights, started getting a bit panicky. After an hour, flying objects appeared. Riders scattered. Bergeon’s voice wafted out over the packed grandstand. “Due to a problem with the lights,” he announced, “the race is off.” The crowd was irate. They stood and hollered their disapproval in every conceivable language. Bergeon tried pacifying them, saying he would kindly issue a full refund and that he would simply reschedule for the next day.

Now, the good cycling fans of Bordeaux, having waited patiently for years and having paid a generous premium to see the “Flying Negro” had reached a boiling point. In an act of destruction that would have been the envy of the most unruly Wild West American crowd, the frenzied Frenchmen tore the track asunder—mowing over and breaking up the track railing, tearing lights down from poles, busting tables and chairs, and setting the place ablaze.

As a plume of smoke blew across the track, a ripple of horror spread through the peloton. Riders ran out into the street and bolted for cover. They glared out in astonishment as the anarchic crowd took out their anger with fire glinting in their eyes. With portions of the edifice crackling in the night, the fire brigade and local gendarmeries appeared out from under the smoke. With guns and sabers at the ready, they hauled the perpetrators off to jail and hosed down the inferno until midnight. Taylor could not have said he hadn’t been forewarned. “A French crowd is the most amiable thing, extant” his mentor Arthur Zimmerman wrote in his 1895 autobiography, “up to the point where it becomes convinced that an imposition is being practiced. Then, of course, quite Jacobin-like, it pulls up the stakes and makes a bonfire on the spot.”

A local reporter, who had probably been planning a literary tour de force for months, had few words the next day. “Utterly deplorable,” he reported, pithily.

The following afternoon, Taylor reappeared amid the remaining ruins before what must have been a hungover crowd. He proceeded to ride the legs out from under an Italian cyclist named Ferrari, then immediately retreated to his quarters. The sellout crowd would have none of it. They cheered continuously, waiting and waiting for him to make a curtain call. When he didn’t reappear, Bergeon, frantically trying to avoid another pyrogenic incident, hustled into his locker room and talked him into a solo exhibition ride. Taylor mollified the crowd by riding one lap around the track, 333 meters in 20: 1/5 seconds, a new world record. Later that day, after being mobbed as a spectator at the famous Paris-Bordeaux road race where even more alcohol was served, Taylor quickly hotfooted out of the city.

It was wet and miserable again. Through much of the weeks before the 1901 International Match Race, the air sang with the pattering sound of rain. Paris, enduring one of the wettest and coldest seasons in years, seemed like an endless string of wide open silk parasols. At Parc des Princes, a dark cloud hovered around cabin 57. At times, Taylor had been visibly despondent. “Besides five or six days that were passable,” he had moaned, “it rained constantly.”

Buckner had watched as a shivering Taylor looked sullenly out at the moist cabins and soggy racetrack. Having trained six-day race winners, Buckner knew a thing or two about keeping exhausted men motivated, but he had his hands full with the warm-weather Taylor. At first he tried humoring him. Then he poked and prodded and cajoled. Some days his persistence worked and Taylor either mashed a punching ball hanging from the ceiling or made a cameo appearance before a crowd of hardy Europeans burrowed under umbrellas. On other days when he couldn’t get Taylor to budge, he lit a fire and the two men wrote home, took photographs, strummed the mandolin, or read the Scriptures in silence. On one particularly gloomy day, Breyer looked at Taylor’s sad disposition and droopy eyes and said he’d never seen anyone so morose. In ninety-degree heat, Taylor was spry, smiley, and alert. But since the only thing April showers brought were May showers, he just couldn’t get used to the cold, damp Parisian spring. “I’m an African, not a European” he snapped, as the rain continued dancing off cabin 57.

The weather was having such an effect on his mood, even photographers and the press, who couldn’t find enough good things to say about him, occasionally set him off. The atmosphere alternated between being mildly amusing and openly truculent. One day, when yet another photographer wanted to take yet another picture alongside yet another fan, an angered Buckner shooed them all away so Taylor could brood in private.

It was of little use. Mystified by the black Horatio Alger who had turned away so much money to avoid Sunday racing, fans continued showing up. Railroad companies even began organizing special “spectator” trains to haul in carloads of people wanting to view him as if he was a rare panda at a zoo. Reporters continued pecking away. They really had no choice in the matter. “He is,” one of them wrote, “as much talked about as the premiere.”

Jacquelin was also growing agitated with the press. Like most superstar athletes, superhuman feats were expected—and reporters had a love-hate relationship with him. When he won, they practically prostituted themselves to get an interview with him, always following it up with gushing praise. When on the rare occasion he actually lost, no matter the circumstances, he was but a washed-up has-been. “What would I have to do to convince these half-dozen stubborn journalists who enjoy doubting me every year, always looking for someone better than I?” he barked to a reporter. “Now they were going to unearth a Negro?”

After losing a few races to a couple of middling riders at Turin, Italy, in mid-April, some reporters all but wrote him off. “He will have to undergo a miraculous change in form,” wrote Cycle Age, “if he expects to defeat Major Taylor.” There was even talk of plucking the Great Bourrillon, a former French rider who had become an opera star, out of mothballs to take on Taylor in his place. For a flicker in time, Jacquelin’s subpar showings made Taylor a 5 to 1 favorite.

But it was all just Jacquelin being Jacquelin. In early May, shortly before the International Match Race, Jacquelin strapped his feet into his toe-clips, bound his hands in tire tape, and utterly incinerated Louis Grognia at the prestigious Grand Prix of Nantes in Nantes, France, winning by an embarrassing number of lengths. In a move that completely silenced even his most hardened critics, he then crushed Danish strongman Thor Ellegaard in the International Sprint Race one day later. Ten thousand mouths gaped in the grandstand. No one was more impressed than Major Taylor, who had wriggled into the stands after being enveloped by a swirling horde of spectators. Ellegaard, one of the fastest men in the world, leaned against his bike and marveled at the Frenchman. He walked over and shook Jacquelin’s hand. “You will eat that American up next week,” he said humbly. The crowd yelled, “Yes! Yes!”

After the race Cycle Age backpedaled; Jacquelin “could not be had at even money.” “If you think this Darkey scares me with his airs of wanting to swallow everything winner-take-all,” Jacquelin told track director Henri Desgrange, “you can tell him I accept what he proposes [Taylor, as always, had demanded that the winner receive the entire purse]. We’ll see who is the chocolate guy.”

As race day neared, a gripping tension swept across the backstretch. The race was becoming a global fixation, sucking up all the media oxygen. “Interminable calculations” were being made in editing rooms across Europe. The cablegrams and papers reaching the States were thick with notices and photos of Taylor. The muscles of Jacquelin and Taylor had been studied by doctors and reporters in astonishing detail. The French populace, one American paper decreed, “has gone practically crazy over the coming meets.”

Regardless of the weather, hundreds if not thousands amassed around the track daily. Next door in cabin 56, the Jacquelin camp was outwardly confident. Jacquelin and his brother, who was also his trainer, looked out at the inclement weather and sneered.

Underneath the certitude, an enormous amount of pressure was being placed on him by the vast number of adoring French racing fans. “Those who are familiar with Jacquelin and understand the pedestal pose in which he has been placed by the enthusiastic French,” proclaimed the New York Sun on race eve, “say that it will about break his heart and nearly be his ruin if he loses.”

Taylor seemed to be aware of his place in history, an awareness that began early on. Before bedding down, as he had done since his first races, he cut out newspaper articles about himself and his races, had some translated, and then glued them into a large book that he carried with him always.

Parked inside his cottage on May 15, an apprehensive Buckner surely looked at the forecast: cloudy and cold again.

He kept his mouth shut.

Paris didn’t care. All across town, lively race-eve gatherings sprang up. The Moulin Rouge, Le Chabanais, and the Café de l’Esperance entertained an unprecedented number of visiting racegoers throughout the night. Race tickets selling at twenty times face value changed hands. Press coverage reached astronomical levels.