Major Taylor

by Conrad Kerber

  “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 hor
de, 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.”