Chapter 16

THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Below a dull bank of clouds in the early morning hours of May 16, 1901, track director Henri Desgrange, co-creator of what is now the most heavily attended sporting event in the world—the Tour de France—sauntered onto the frigid Parc des Princes Velodrome. A brisk, cutting wind whipped across the track. Desgrange blew hot air into his chilled hands and gazed out at the swaying trees lined with spring foliage only grown to half-mast. Above him, black clouds bubbled over, threatening to unleash their liquid contents all over the city again. An army of concessionaires crisscrossed the grounds, stocking up on food, drinks, race programs, and souvenirs. A handful of amateur riders preparing for undercard races rolled past while an early crowd gathered outside the track.

Desgrange surely had mixed feelings about the threatening clouds and unseasonably cold weather. After months of intensive buildup and having already collected unprecedented gate receipts, part of him was no doubt deeply concerned that a heavy rain might cancel what the press was calling one of the most anticipated sporting events in history. But as long as it didn’t rain hard, he reasoned, the inclement weather may actually help keep the crowd at the eighteen-thousand-seat track within controllable levels.

As race director, the decision about whether to run the race rested squarely with him. Following an agonizing moment, he made his decision; barring a heavy rain, he announced, the race was a go. His words spread like wildfire. Back in the States, Taylor’s American challengers eagerly awaited cables with the results. “Major Taylor is having little trouble to trim the riders on the other side of the ocean,” wrote the Daily News, “and the sprinters on this side are beginning to wonder if the Major will return and sweep everybody.”

Already preparing for Taylor’s return, Brady’s newsroom friends down at the New York World set the stage for the grand match. “All interest in cycling awaits the result with the keenest interest. To both men the result means everything. It will be as if they are gambling with their last dollar. For the winner there will be worldwide renown, for the loser the reputation of being a defeated champion.”

Back in New Jersey, Arthur Zimmerman, the man whose insight and friendship had inspired Taylor to his current heights, surely read the frenzied overseas cables with a great big smile. Some writers had come close, but now, except for a few hardened traditionalists, most elevated Taylor to the top of the world’s most popular list. “Taylor is already more popular then Zimmerman was,” wrote one veteran racetracker. “Should he defeat Jacquelin, I cannot venture to predict to what length people will go.”

People began congregating around the entrance as early as six o’clock in the morning. All morning and early afternoon, bicycles, special trains, and elegant horse carriages disgorged thousands of passengers from every major city in Europe. On harrowing sojourns over dusty roads, enduring flat tires, clogged carburetors, and shotgun fire from angry farmers, primitive automotive caravans puttered in from the most remote provinces of France. A flotilla of boats drifted down the River Seine, dropping off thousands more at the track’s gates.

Just before noon, nearly four hours before the race, Desgrange flung open the ten access gates, loosing a cavalcade of humanity. People who didn’t know the difference between a bicycle and a horse cart—and normally didn’t care—waved one hundred francs in the air, pleading for tickets. In the boxes along the tape where tickets sold for $16, many times their normal cost, nearly every nation in Europe was represented by a baron, duke, duchess, prince, king, or prime minister.

The money being wagered was almost certainly a record. William K. Vanderbilt, owner of the first Madison Square Garden and an avid cycling fan who attended Taylor’s first race, dropped $3,000 on Taylor to win. Pennsylvania railroad tycoon Harry Thaw and gold rush millionaire William Moore bet $20,000. World famous artist William Dannat and the Countess Castellane, daughter of wealthy financier Jay Gould, sunk their thousands on Jacquelin. A supremely nervous Pennsylvania senator named Clark kept his monetary allegiances to himself. It was now any man’s race: of the twelve major Parisian dailies, six picked Taylor, six Jacquelin.

By one o’clock, the grandstand was jam-packed, so Desgrange opened portions of the infield, charging $20 for the privilege. The horde kept coming. By one forty-five, not knowing how far to push it, a nervous Desgrange began turning fans away. “No more,” he kept hollering to his attendants. “No more.” The track was bursting at the seams. On a threatening, bone-chilling Thursday, and at a time when the population was one-quarter its current size, twenty-eight thousand people—one of the largest crowds of any single day sporting event—wedged into the famous but somewhat neglected track. Five thousand fans stood along the rails.

Outside the track, thousands upon thousands more, including some of Paris’s elite, unable to get in, congregated in thick formations around the gates, fences, and neighboring areas hoping to catch a glimpse inside. A solid row of French gendarmeries fanned out around the infield, preparing to keep the throng off the track. Over in the press area, journalists from all over were penning their prerace reports.

At three-thirty, the two men emerged onto the track to an eruption of noise normally reserved for opposing battleships, all but drowning out the wailing band. Like a prizefighter, Jacquelin had a superstition about entering the stage first. So Taylor, cold and frowning, walked ahead of him in a full-length African cloak, hood over his head, hands in his pockets, head down. Right behind Taylor, with his perpetual grin and bulging muscles, waltzed the supremely confident Jacquelin. Amid a gripping tension that enveloped everyone at the Parc des Princes, the Triple Crown winner exuded utter insouciance, strutting in with a look of a proud prince, eyes glaring down, but chin up.

They rolled up to the starting line of the one-kilometer, or five-furlong, race. Taylor took off his white cloak, handed it to Buckner, and rubbed his shivering body up and down, number thirteen visible on his purple and black silk racing togs. Seemingly oblivious to the crowd and the cold, Jacquelin, hot-blooded like most European riders, looked over at Taylor with clinical coldness. “I do remember getting a kick out of seeing my adversary buried in his long coat, looking miserable under a cold sky,” he would remark in true Jacquelin style.

Each man raised one leg over his bike frame and cinched his feet into his toe straps. Buckner held Taylor up at the line, Jacquelin’s brother doing the same for him. A tall man with a handlebar mustache slowly raised a pistol toward the sky, his fingers clasping around the trigger. The vast crowd drew its breath. All over the stands, reported Breyer, men and women were gritting their teeth, turning pale, biting their tongues and lips, and clutching themselves in unbearable suspense. An eerie stillness filled the air. It was so quiet, said one witness, “one would have thought that only a single man was the spectator—the silence was sublime.”

After years of intensive negotiations and unprecedented international buildup, a loud crack finally rang over the heads of Major Taylor and Edmond Jacquelin at Paris’s Parc des Princes Track.

In line with the European style of racing, the fastest men in the world rolled across the tape at a snail’s pace. Craving the prized rear position for drafting and strategic purposes, Jacquelin, thriving on this style of racing, crept forward so slowly it appeared as if he were stationary. With his experience as a trick rider, Taylor matched him snail’s pace for snail’s pace. The European crowd, loving this cat-and-mouse game, stood up and erupted. The battle over who could go slowest was joined, each man struggling for balance, teetering on the brink of falling over. Someone had to give. Someone did.

In the biggest race of his life, before the largest and loudest crowd of his life, Jacquelin teetered and tottered and fell flat on his side! The fans, who had been biting their tongues and clenching their fists seconds before, buckled over into hysterical laughter.

As if nothing had happened, Jacquelin remounted his bike and the race quickly restarted. The crowd gathered themselves. Not wanting a repeat of this embarrassing scene, the pace of the restart increased slightly. With the first turn in front of them, Jacquelin rolled up the bank and surveyed his American rival below, dangling the lead position in front of him, tempting Taylor to seize it. Taylor wouldn’t bite. Instead he steered his bike up the bank, settling in right behind the burly Frenchman. The crowd roared.

They hovered along the upper rail rimmed in faces, waiting for the other to drop down and make a move. Neither did. Instead, they reached out, grabbed the top rail, and glared at each other. As they dangled motionless, the crowd again erupted in a combination of pensive laughter and outright hysteria. They pushed off simultaneously and slow danced into the backstretch, their measured pace only deepening the agonies of anticipation and the decibel level of the crowd. They continued rolling side by side out of the backstretch, the haze of bodies along the barrier diluting then disappearing altogether, the commotion from the throng becoming a faraway roar. Jacquelin and Taylor were alone eyeing each other, scanning for signs of weakness.

They tiptoed out of the backstretch and pedaled together into the last turn, their strokes still rising and falling in unison, their eyes trained on the track ahead. The three remaining furlongs became two, one and three-quarters, then one and a half. The lead seesawed back and forth. No one knew what to expect.

With just three hundred yards remaining, Jacquelin stood on his machine and pounced. Energized by the sight and sound of twenty-eight thousand screaming fans, he vaulted forward at an infernal pace, the sinuous muscle on his calves, hamstrings, and quadriceps protruding under the strain. Underneath him, the metal on his monster gear (104) began bending, the violence from his frantic surge pressing his tires deep down into the concrete oval. Slowly losing ground to his side and spinning a much smaller gear (92), Taylor was astonished by the Frenchman’s pace.

Like a gladiator, Jacquelin had muscled into a slight lead, seemingly trumping Taylor’s much-celebrated late sprint. Taylor, who had been in this position before but never alongside a reigning world champion, must have thought Jacquelin would eventually crack. But he was showing no such signs. Taylor was getting nervous.

On the sideline, trainer Buckner, knowing Taylor’s fickleness in the cold, gnawed on his nails and knelt down as if deep in prayer. Waves of amazement pressed through the crowd. Straining with all he had, Taylor began losing more ground. Jacquelin’s front wheel forged past, then his crank, then half of his rear wheel. With only a half furlong remaining, France went shrill. Taylor’s graceful form remained steady and poised, but the cold breeze shivered through him and in him, engulfing his entire body.

Jacquelin was a contrast in form and function. He lunged forward so rapidly, his hips swung wildly side to side, his knees thumped upward toward his chest, and his eyes stared forward demonically. But could he possibly maintain such a pace? An original thought surely pressed into Taylor’s mind: Maybe this Frenchman is faster than me, as many said he was. In the French quarters of the press area, men roared.

With the finish line rushing at them, the 1900 and 1899 world champions stretched out over their machines. Their raw speed reached historic proportions*, their hips and legs cranked up and down in unison, and their heads and necks stretched and bobbed from the exertion. Along the rail, screaming masses waving hats, handkerchiefs, canes, and umbrellas clipped by them, blurring in their side view. Taylor looked forward and tried to answer Jacquelin’s surge, but for the first time in an eternity, a competitor was actually outgunning him—a wheel, a wheel and a half, two wheels, a full length. The crowd was levitating!

Jacquelin looked back: he saw Taylor uncoiling nearly five feet behind, still laboring toward him. He knew he had him. The Great Frenchmen sat up as he rolled over the tape, crossing the line at his hometown track a little more than a length in front, riding strong.

What followed, one British reporter wrote, was “a scene which beggars description.” After a brief pause while they recovered from shock, the crowd erupted into a titanic pulse of prolonged applause. They knocked over railings and barricades and tore after their “prince of sprinters” with all the force of a tidal wave. Some of them, one eyewitness remembered, “acted as though crazy.” Others were so stunned, they couldn’t move, yell, or utter a single word. Concerned over Jacquelin’s safety, a posse of police and dragoons tried forming a human chain around him, but were no match for the onrushing mob. Behind him, Jacquelin’s rolling wake sucked in thousands of men, women, and children. Hand in hand with common folks, normally staid dukes, barons, and duchesses in their finest attire went ballistic. “There is no way to describe it,” said one witness. “It was as if some strong electric battery was being pressed in the feet and hands of these thousands of people who yelled in every possible manner.”

France carried its megastar triumphantly around the track like Napoleon at Austerlitz. Jacquelin’s eyes shone with the joy of it all, the band blaring with the sweet sound of “La Marseillaise.” Lost in the flock of revelers, Taylor and Buckner stood near the finish line bewildered and crestfallen. Trying to console him, Buckner handed Taylor his cloak. Taylor bathed himself in it.

Jacquelin’s glorious moment in the international spotlight may have remained unbroken if not for what happened next. When the celebration rolled near him, Taylor inched toward his victorious rival to extend a handshake. The right thumb of the man known for his brash, sometimes vulgar disposition rose to his nose in a crude and arrogant gesture, staying there as he continued his whirl around the track with a “villainous grimace.”

Hearing a chant of “Down with Taylor! Down with Taylor!” Taylor boiled over. His black face turned crimson red, his eyes widened, and his nostrils flared. He was so shaken, he quickly retreated to his cabin, slinking by a sea of strangers. Flashbulbs popped all around, showing him in a state of abject dejection, his head down, body slumped, the ugly moment seemingly multiplied by his shadow visible in the picture. He hunkered down on his sofa and sobbed. “In all my experience on the tracks of this country [the United States] and Europe,” he remembered later, “I have never before suffered such humiliation . . .”

Buckner, failing to console him, joined him in his glumness. Jacquelin eventually swaggered to his cabin, his footprints surely audible inside Taylor’s cabin next-door. The photos of him exiting the track were a study in contrast. His broad chest was pushed out, his face was all smiles, and his hands were pressed into his sides. His brother stood next to him, laughing and smiling and bubbling over. They were wallowing in it.

Track director Desgrange, along with Breyer and Coquelle, agreed to hold a revenge match on Monday, May 27.

In the intervening days, France would hang in suspense again.

That evening, Parisians danced and sang and drank with happy abandon, their world supremacy assured for a fortnight. “The Flying Negro Beaten” boasted one paper. The race, said another, “was the most perfect speed event in the history of cycle racing.” All over town, wine and champagne went in through racegoers’ lips and the name Edmond Jacquelin poured back out, their satiety spilling out of the racetrack into the cafès and onto the streets.

As darkness fell over the Arc de Triumph one evening shortly after the match race, a chilly spring breeze whipping across the hushed oval, a solitary figure was dashing around the track. He was black, lean, and mad as hell. “Listen carefully,” Taylor muttered to a reporter while pointing to the sky, “Jacquelin thumbed his nose at me and he will be punished up there for it. I will be very surprised if I don’t beat him the next time we meet.”

All he wanted, he would say, “was a warm day.”

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* Jacquelin’s pace at the end of the first race was indeed historic. He covered the last 100 meters (109 yards) in five seconds flat, beating the previous competition record by a full second.