The Entry List

The machine that did it was the safety bicycle. Two wheels of the same size, a chain to the rear wheel, and after 1888 a pneumatic tire. It replaced the high wheeler, which had been dangerous and had required athleticism to mount, and it could be ridden by anyone.

What followed was a genuine mania. Hundreds of American firms went into bicycle manufacturing, output ran into the millions of machines across the decade, and prices fell as production scaled. Figures from the period vary widely by source and by year. The honest summary is that this was one of the largest consumer manufacturing booms of the century.

The social effects were immediate and were discussed constantly at the time. Young people could travel without a chaperone and without a horse. Women's clothing changed to make riding possible, and that change was argued about in newspapers across the country.

The League of American Wheelmen, founded in 1880, became the organizing body. It sanctioned racing, published a magazine, and from the early 1890s ran the Good Roads movement, lobbying state legislatures to pave roads for cyclists. The federal government created an Office of Road Inquiry in 1893 in response to that pressure. The roads the automobile would later inherit were argued for by people on bicycles.

The boom broke around the turn of the century. The market filled up, the industry merged, and the automobile arrived to take both the road and the attention.

Track racing in the 1890s ran on banked board ovals, many of them indoors, lit at night, with capacity crowds. Madison Square Garden held the biggest events in the country.

The six day race was the marquee event and it was exactly what it sounds like. Riders circled the track for six days, sleeping in short snatches or not at all, and the winner was whoever covered the most distance. Riders finished these races in states of collapse and hallucination. Public alarm about that eventually forced rule changes that limited daily hours and introduced two man teams.

Sprinting was the glamour event. A match sprint is short, tactical, and violent, and the sprinters were the names the public knew and the riders who commanded appearance money.

Money in the sport was real. Top sprinters earned purses and appearance fees that compared well with any professional athlete in America at the time. Manufacturers paid riders to appear on their machines, because a win on Saturday sold bicycles on Monday. Racing was advertising, which is why the manufacturers cared who was allowed to race.

The League of American Wheelmen was the governing body. It issued racing licenses, sanctioned meets, kept records, and ran the sport's calendar. At its national assembly in 1894 the League adopted a clause restricting membership to white riders, a change pushed hardest by southern delegates.

The clause governed membership. It did not, on its face, forbid a Black rider from entering a race.

What it did was hand every other actor in the sport a reason. A promoter could decline an entry and point at the sanctioning body. A regional association could decline to sanction a meet that admitted him. A group of riders could agree privately not to start against him, and no rule addressed private agreements. A southern track could refuse him outright and face no consequence, because the League had already said what it thought.

Taylor raced anyway, because promoters in the North wanted him. He drew crowds. A meet with the fastest sprinter in the country on the card sold more tickets than a meet without him, and money argued on his side in exactly the places where the League's clause had the least local support.

The result was a career in which the question of whether he could start was answered separately, race by race, by whoever happened to be deciding.

The world championships of 1899 were held at Queen's Park in Montreal. Taylor won the one mile sprint title and became world champion.

He was twenty years old. He had turned professional in December 1896, at a six day race at Madison Square Garden, and had come up under Louis Munger, a former racer and bicycle manufacturer who had employed him in Indianapolis and then moved him to Worcester, Massachusetts, in part because the racing climate in Indiana had become impossible.

In 1900 he won the American sprint championship.

He set records at several distances during these years, and by the plain measure of results he was the fastest sprinter in the world.

Taylor was a serious Baptist and he refused to compete on Sundays throughout his career. He held to it in the United States and he held to it in Europe, where Sunday racing was the norm and where promoters lost money on it.

The cost was measurable. American championship series awarded points across a calendar of meets, and Sunday cards were part of that calendar. A rider who sat out every Sunday started every season behind.

In 1900 he won the American sprint championship anyway.

In other seasons the arithmetic went against him, and accounts of the standings from the time often note that he had ridden fewer scoring events than his rivals.

He held to it and he paid for it, and he wrote about it later as a choice rather than as a grievance.

Taylor toured Europe repeatedly in the first years of the century, racing in France, Germany, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, and elsewhere, and meeting the reigning champions of those countries in match sprints. He won the large majority of them. He also raced in Australia across several seasons.

Promoters advertised him heavily and crowds were large. His own account of these years, written long afterward in his autobiography, describes public treatment noticeably different from what he met on American tracks.

Europe was not a place without racism. The point is narrower. The rider was the same and the result was different, which tells you the American result came from American decisions rather than from anything about him.

Sunday was the main race day in Europe, so his refusal cost promoters more there than at home. They worked around it, because a full house on Saturday was worth more than an empty argument about Sunday.

The American bicycle industry consolidated sharply at the end of the 1890s. A large combination formed in 1899 absorbed a great many independent manufacturers. Overproduction, falling prices, and a full market did the rest.

Public attention moved to the automobile, which used the paved roads the cycling lobby had spent a decade demanding, and which gave newspapers a better story.

Professional track racing did not vanish overnight. Six day racing survived into the middle of the twentieth century as a shrinking spectacle, and board tracks ran in some American cities for years. But the sport's place in American life in the 1890s, as a mass spectator sport tied to a mass consumer industry, did not return.

Taylor retired in 1910, at thirty two, after a career of roughly fourteen years.

The League's membership restriction was eventually removed. By then the League no longer governed American racing and the removal changed nothing about anyone's career.

Taylor published his autobiography in 1928 at his own expense, under the title The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World, and sold it himself. It did not earn back what it cost.

He lost the rest of his money in investments during the same years. His marriage ended. He moved to Chicago and lived at a YMCA.

He died on June 21, 1932, at the age of fifty three, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the welfare section of Mount Glenwood Cemetery outside Chicago.

In 1948 a group of former professional riders, with money from Frank Schwinn of the Schwinn Bicycle Company, had his remains moved to a marked grave in a more prominent part of the same cemetery, with a plaque.