The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  On the evening of December 2, 1899, Albert Champion strode along New York’s Madison Avenue with Elkes, Marks, Gately, and Metz. They trooped into Madison Square Garden—an oversized Moorish castle designed by the famous architect and leader of New York’s artistic renaissance Stanford White. Champion’s gang led porters pushing handcarts with motor-tricycles and bicycles packed in wooden crates into the main hall. Madison Square Garden’s length of 350 feet, width of 200 feet,10 and height soaring eighty feet led to the claim that it was the largest hall in the world. In the middle of the hall stood a new board velodrome ringed by seats filled with spectators.

  “The Garden seats 5,500 but more than 8,000 people were on hand to give a royal Yankee welcome to the best foreign aggregation that ever crossed the pond,” observed Cycle Age.11 “The Elkes-Champion match was billed as the feature of the card.”

  Their match race was part of a program that culminated one minute after midnight with the introduction of a new sports lollapalooza. The impresario behind the night was William A. Brady, who had strutted and grinned his way into the hearts of audiences from New York to San Francisco. Brady had managed world heavyweight boxing champion Jim Corbett,12 brought cyclist Jimmy Michael to America, and presented lion acts, marquee theater actors, cakewalkers,13 and even flooded the garden to fill it with miniature battleships to reenact the 1898 sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, which set off the Spanish-American War. “After all it was just showmanship in one form or another,” he said with typical bravado in his 1937 memoir Showman.

  Since 1895, Brady had presided over the garden’s annual six-day bicycle endurance challenges. Every December, cyclists had pedaled solo around the clock, beginning at 12:01 a.m. Monday to avoid competing on the Sabbath, circling the treadmill of a track for 142 hours to see who could put in the most miles. Cartoonists from the city’s fifteen newspapers sketched fans with necks wound up like rubber bands from head turning to count laps. Riders were on their own for eating, sleeping, and making any calls of nature. Charles Miller, a beefy twenty-three-year old grocer from Chicago, had won the 1898 event after riding 1,962 miles,14 a distance that would have taken him from the garden to Albuquerque, New Mexico. Miller even took a half-hour break to marry his fiancée on the track infield.15

  After the 1898 six-day, Governor Theodore Roosevelt had signed a law that barred anyone from competing more than twelve hours a day.16 To circumvent the law, Brady created two-rider teams. He put up $4,000 (worth $116,000 in 2014) for the winning two-rider team,17 and he signed up nineteen pairs from ten nations, in an appeal to sell tickets to the city’s diverse ethnic groups. The New York Times reported: “It is seldom that so many champions of international fame are assembled on the same track.”18

  Brady stocked early events with amateur racers and star pro sprinters from the United States and Europe. Metz took advantage of Brady’s perpetual quest for something exotic and proposed an exclusive motor-tricycle race of twenty-five miles between US national champion Elkes and French ace Champion. Brady seized Metz’s offer.

  Champion and his crew led porters to the track infield where they assembled their machines. As part of the entertainment, a band on another part of the infield performed jaunty show tunes. Swarms of cyclists careened around the boards in the preliminary events. Now and then a tire would explode after being jabbed by a splinter from the pine boards.

  The garden’s great hall had turned into a frenetic beehive. Brady stood with his chest out, thumbs hooked in his vest, preening by the start-finish line like a bantam rooster. Brady chatted with Corbett, who brandished a revolver as the celebrity starter. The promoter, in his late thirties and balding, reached only to Corbett’s shoulders, his head so full of hair that the press nicknamed him “Pompadour Jim.” Brady removed his cigar and exhaled a plume of smoke that disappeared into the garden’s general nicotine cloud.

  At eight o’clock sharp, Brady stepped onto the boards. He waved his hands and the cigar he was holding and ordered the track cleared. Champion’s manager, Marks, took to the track with his motor-tricycle, and Gately did as well on his machine. Marks and King Gately both wore suits and ties, Marks topped by a bowler while King Gately pulled his flat wool hat on tight. They lined up, side by side, on the banking behind Champion and Elkes, in their cycling black shorts and long-sleeved jerseys emblazoned with Orient across the front and back. Elkes wore an American flag tied around his waist as national champion, while Albert Champion wore the French tricolor. Metz stood on the inside lane holding the bicycle of Champion, who stared straight ahead, gripping the drops of his handlebars, back straight, feet jammed into steel toe clips, while Elkes was held by another man next to Champion.

  When Corbett fired his pistol, Champion and Elkes charged into the first turn as King Gately and Marks drove up the banking to overtake them. Unlike bicycles that lean with their riders into turns, tricycles follow different forces. The pull of gravity on the forty-five-degree banking forced King Gately’s machine to slip19 and bowl over Elkes, who knocked down Champion. Corbett fired his handgun, this time twice in quick succession—signaling a false start, which required the competitors to return to the start immediately.20

  After the restart, Champion could not pedal properly—the crash had bent the seat post of his bicycle.21 He lost several laps to Elkes before he stopped and exchanged it for a fresh bicycle. He chased to regain the laps until the engine of Marks’s motor-tricycle gave out at eleven miles. Marks had to pull off the track, stop, and snatch a replacement before continuing.

  Despite the disruptions, Champion put up a feisty chase. In the thirteenth mile, the crowd cheered as he overtook Elkes. The Yankee and Frenchman traded the lead until more mechanical difficulties again slowed both Marks and Champion at nineteen miles.

  In the end, Elkes won by seven laps. Champion and Elkes wheeled off the track to the band’s merry music as the six-day riders rolled onto the boards with their trainers for the 12:01 a.m. Monday start. Surprisingly, more than half of the audience stampeded out the exits, protesting the end of individual six-days.22 Only three thousand spectators stayed to watch the new event.

  Despite their inauspicious debut, Brady’s two-rider cycling track races worked their way into the language of cycling, and even today around the world these events are known as Madisons. In the Olympics and annual world championship track programs, Madisons are medal events. For his part in this new category, Champion had performed as the opening act.

  If he’d been interviewed about losing, Champion would have explained that he much preferred pacing on the track behind motor-tandems, which flowed better through the banked turns. Motor-trikes were best suited to roads. In fact, he’d propelled to trans-Atlantic fame after pacing behind a motor-trike in the only road race of his career, the grueling Paris-Roubaix classic. He would have shrugged his shoulders. He might have added that since Metz had already introduced motor-tandems, the motor-trikes were a novelty that the American audience would prefer. Then he would have shrugged once more in acknowledgment that he and Elkes, his professional teammate, had only been giving an exhibition. They’d had nothing at stake. He was aware of how sport approaches religion, as the devoted keep trying to do better. He still had ample opportunities to win races and thrill audiences.

  Following the Madison Square Garden excursion, Champion returned to Boston. He rode his bicycle with Elkes and other pros on the board velodrome of the Park Square Coliseum to practice for his first race in Waltham on Memorial Day, May 30.

  After morning training sessions and before his afternoon sessions, Champion worked in a corner of Metz’s Orient bicycle factory on Rumford Avenue, near Waltham Bicycle Park and close to the Charles River. Champion fitted horse buggies with the latest engines he had brought over from Paris. Some engines were one-cylinder De Dion-Boutons, which generated 2 hp, equivalent to eight cyclists pedaling together. Other engines were Asters, which were new water-cooled engines. Aster engines featured two forward speeds and an innovative option: reverse. All Fr
ench engines, batteries, and magnetos (metal coils around a magnet embedded in a flywheel) were mounted American-style under the chassis and steered with a tiller.

  That spring Metz, Champion, and Marks often drove these engine-powered buggies, dubbed Runabouts, over the dirt roads of Waltham and Cambridge. Sometimes they were joined by Metz’s general manager John C. Robbins. They careened along at 25 mph in defiance of 10 mph speed limits. Their Runabouts whipped up dirt clouds and frightened horses that ruled public roads. Boston’s newspapers reported that alarmed drivers of horse teams grumbled to police about wild troublemakers disturbing the peace.

  When he wasn’t terrorizing the locals, Champion took advantage of the milder weather to train in Cambridge’s Charles River Park to take advantage of its wooden oval, which ran six laps to the mile with banked turns. He preferred it to Waltham’s concrete velodrome, which was only three laps to the mile, and where he had to ease off before each tight turn before picking up speed on the next straightaway. Before motorpacing came along, the Waltham track’s longer straights had helped riders build speed. But cyclists pacing behind quicker motor-tricycles and motor-tandems complained that Waltham’s velodrome, eight years old, was out of date.

  On sunny days, a thousand spectators showed up to watch and yell encouragement to Champion and others working out behind motor-tandems. After Elkes shipped out for Paris, King Gately took over steering the motor-tandems for Champion while Marks would sit on the motor-tandem’s rear seat over the engine as the “stoker,” continually reaching down to manipulate the throttle lever that fed or reduced the flow of gasoline. Marks also doubled as a windscreen for Champion. Wearing a jacket gave Marks extra bulk to provide Champion added wind protection. Champion would bark commands to speed up, hold steady, or slow down. When the three men and their engine synchronized, Champion would jab his front wheel within inches of the tandem’s rear and they would click off laps for mile times well inside of two minutes—often topping 30 mph.

  They were prepping for Champion’s racing premier in Waltham on Memorial Day, a twenty-mile motor-tandem paced event. Motor-pace races paid top dollar: $250 to win ($7,150 in 2014), $125 to place, and $100 to show.23 That exceeded the $100 first prize for the marquee sprinters—or the $6 that textile workers earned for toiling fifty-six hours a week in noisy brick factories.

  They practiced at race pace, ten to twenty brisk miles every morning, sixteen to twenty miles in the afternoon. Boston Globe reporter John J. Donovan often mingled with spectators and wrote of Champion:

  At times he would lose his pace, as did all paced followers, but the comparison stopped there. Opponents losing their pace carefully controlled their bicycles at the high speed until they slowed down. The Frenchman, however, gave American spectators “heart failure,” for he would be whipped from behind his motorcycle and in his anger would not be content to shout at his pace-makers but would take his hands off the handlebars and gesticulate, and it would seem as if he must be thrown, but he rarely fell, though others did.24

  In the boarding house where Champion and Marks lived, Eliza Holaway and Mary E. Watling were employed as servants.25 Both twenty-five and from French-speaking Canada, they were obvious targets for the men to ply their continental charm, kissing the backs of the women’s hands, murmuring en Français. The four soon formed pairs, even though Champion’s intended was still back home in Paris.

  One afternoon in late April, Champion encountered Jimmy Michael on the Charles River Track. Michael pedaled onto the velodrome and received a welcome as warm as the sunshine from fans who recognized the former star. Since the Welshman’s retirement at age twenty-two to a gentleman’s life of leisure, Champion had heard and read accounts about Michael’s purchase of a stable of horses in New Orleans.26 Michael had decamped to London and bankrolled American ex-pat Ted Sloan, the jockey who had led a revolution in horse racing with short stirrups that had the riders hunkering low on the horse’s neck—the “monkey crouch.”27 Sloan had run into trouble for betting on his own mounts. Michael had flunked as a jockey and chucked it as hopeless.28 In 1900, twenty-four and broke, he accepted a hefty contract from a US tire company and a smaller one from Metz to ride Orient Cycles.

  On May 13, at the Charles River Track, Champion was practicing behind King Gately and Marks while Michael spun onto the track behind a motor-tandem. Champion lapped the Welshman and taunted him.29 To Champion, Michael had slandered Warburton with false accusations and abused his own talent. Champion kept taunting Michael until the engine on the motor-tandem Champion paced behind faltered and he almost ran into the rear wheel. The team pulled into the infield to fix the problem. Meanwhile, Eliza Holaway, who frequently came to watch the practices, left the bleachers to see what had happened.

  Upon inspection, the problem lay with the spark plug. Champion had become well versed in De Dion-Bouton spark plugs and their loosening from engine vibrations,30 which in turn caused misfires. The De Dion-Bouton spark plug’s center pole was cemented in place.31 Other brands had an outer locking ring that screwed into the outer conductor pole for better stability.

  Marks needed time to find a replacement plug and adjust the spark. Champion, ever impatient, did not want to stand around, sweating. He instructed Marks to give Eliza the stopwatch so she could call out his times from trackside as he clicked off laps.32 He pedaled so fast for ten miles that many riders tacked onto his rear wheel to draft, like a locomotive pulling train cars.

  Donovan, under the spell of his recent honeymoon and confused about Champion’s relationship with Eliza, reported: “An interested spectator was his wife, a handsome and vivacious French woman, who scored his laps and told him at intervals the distance he had traveled.”33 When Champion rode cool-down laps, he berated Michael. Donovan saw the kerfuffle and tactfully said Michael “will train at Waltham for the season as he thinks the air is better there.”

  Memorial Day 1900 fell on a Wednesday. As the holiday approached, veterans from around the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and adjacent states converged on Boston. Generals delivered speeches in theaters filled with cheering audiences waving hand-held flags,34 and citizens upheld the tradition, established in 1868 as Decoration Day,35 of putting flowers on the graves of Civil War dead. Champion’s arrival coincided with the national holiday extending to those who had fallen in the Spanish-American War in Cuba.

  Newspapers, which Champion read to improve his English, recounted the historic Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had suffered the loss of 1,537 men in the three-day fight—some under the command of Colonel Pope.36 Boston broadsheets published old lists of casualties from the two-dozen Union infantry, light artillery, and cavalry regiments—killed, wounded, and missing.37 Drawings depicted stone monuments in Gettysburg commemorating regiments from Massachusetts. The bloodiest battle of the four-year Civil War marked the war’s turning point and the rise of the Union. Champion would have noted that Bostonians remembered Gettysburg with the fervor of Parisians commemorating the Franco-Prussian War.

  Waltham’s business community regarded the Memorial Day cycling program as the city’s signature event, like Boston’s annual marathon the previous month on Patriot’s Day. It was the rare occasion when the Waltham Watch Company and a cotton mill nearby shut their doors. Storefronts and residential porches showed off red-white-and-blue bunting. Flags, numerous as flowers, flew everywhere.

  At ten o’clock, the League of American Wheelmen paraded down Main Street in military-style wool uniforms on bicycles. The parade concluded with a picnic on the Charles River bank and music by the Waltham Watch Company brass band. Then everyone sauntered to the bicycle park for the race program, which commenced at 2:30 p.m.

  The Globe predicted, “Memorial Day Races Promise to Play Havoc with Records.” It published a woodcut of Champion, favored among four contestants to win the twenty-mile motor-pace competition.38 He clipped out the article with his image and pasted it in his scrapbook. Michael, embarking on his comeback in a five
-mile paced demonstration, rated sentimental press but a smaller woodcut. Champion ignored it.

  Racers came from far and wide for the event. When Oscar Hedstrom and Charles Henshaw from Brooklyn arrived in Waltham with their team, their pacing machine attracted considerable attention. Hedstrom, a Swedish immigrant, had built his own engine and carburetor for the motor-tandem. It was so powerful, he claimed, that he named it Typhoon.39

  Hedstrom, and his business partner Henshaw, who came from a wealthy merchant family in Brooklyn, had arrived to pace Everett Ryan, Waltham’s native son. Ryan was a spindly twenty-year-old with coat-hanger shoulders. He had a devoted following among the Irish, who turned out in big numbers to cheer. “Those who have been watching the lean Waltham ex-amateur, Ryan, in training say he will have a fighting chance,” noted the Globe.40

  Another racer was Canadian national champion Archie MacEachern, who came to Waltham after a victory that Saturday in Philadelphia. Reporters called him Champion’s strongest challenger.41 MacEachern, a well-built six feet tall and 185 pounds, was quick to smile. He had devotees among the mill girls and nurses, although he had a wife and baby son home in Toronto.42 Joining him was the New York City motor-pace team of Fred Kent and John Ruel.