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, slink
ing 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.”
___________
* 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.
Chapter 17
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
May 27, 1901, rolled in under a haze. Eager to gauge the day’s weather, Buckner rose early and raised the shades in his room.
A thin trace of clouds impeded his full view of the early morning sun. He cinched open the window and put the flat of his hand against the screen. The air temperature was moderate, nondescript.
At the Parc des Princes Velodrome, a small crowd was already hovering around the outside perimeter of the track, chitchatting about their hero. The race they came to see almost didn’t happen. After Jacquelin’s victory over Taylor eleven days before, some had questioned the need for another match race. The Jacquelin crew remained tremendously confident, some would say chesty, and nobody more so then Jacquelin himself. “I thought I had beaten Taylor so convincingly,” he had boasted to a host of jolly reporters, “there would be no question of a revenge match.” Though Taylor had committed to a second match before the first, Jacquelin had apparently left his options open. But with everyone hounding him to commit, he finally agreed. “If he (Taylor) wants one,” said Jacquelin, his voice buoyant and cocksure, “I am at his disposal whenever and wherever he wishes.”
The French lionized Jacquelin to such an extreme that some quickly forgave him for his nose-thumbing incident. But others, probably the majority, were disgusted. “There was no more likable athlete than Taylor and he did not deserve that kind of treatment,” barked French journalist Maurice Martin.
Some people wondered whether anyone would even show up for a rematch. “The French promoters calculate,” wrote the New York Sun a day before the first race, “that if Jacquelin should defeat Taylor, as he has all others, it would be impossible to get a crowd of any size to a return match . . . what’s the use of going?” the paper asked. “It will be a walkover for Jacquelin.” Desgrange knew better. When he walked out on the track that Monday morning, there was already a sizable throng circling the place.
By noon, the number of amassed thousands was greater than at the same time of the first match. By one o’clock, the grandstand was bulging. By two o’clock, the seats, aisles, railings, and press area were so crammed with white boater hats and spring dresses, the stands were barely visible. Several scores of “pretty” French actresses, who had seemingly crawled out of the woodwork since Taylor’s arrival, occupied seats along the finish. The number of people inside and outside the track, many thousands more than the first race, may have been the largest throng ever to show up for a single day sporting event.* The overflow either waited outside the gates or thronged into myriad cafès throughout Paris.
At the famous Cafè l’Esperance waiting for the telegram to be pinned into the “pillar,” people were crammed in wall-to-wall. “Had they been around at the time,” remarked 104-year-old honorary hall-of-famer Jack Visceo, “the whole continent probably would have had their ears pressed against a noisy vacuum tube radio, listening to the race.” “Never,” wrote one European reporter, “had a sporting event provoked so much enthusiasm.”
Over three thousand miles to the west, a nervous stir was forming. In New England, where the first mention of a statue honoring Taylor began circulating, Daisy was fidgeting, eagerly awaiting an overseas cablegram. In Washington, DC, Teddy Roosevelt was “especially pleased” to have Taylor “carrying the stars and stripes” while racing abroad. In New York, Brady was preparing a new race with a $5,000 purse modeled after the Paris Grand Prix, and was sketching an offer to Jacquelin for its inaugural running.
The American press and most American riders had expressed surprise at Taylor’s defeat in the first race. But in a rare moment of patriotic harmony, even some who were normally out to get Taylor started predicting and pulling for him. Much national pride was on the line. This was war, America versus France, being fought on a bicycle track. One New York paper had apparently drawn this conclusion after polling several riders, probably including Zimmerman. “It is believed on this side of the Atlantic,” wrote one cycling scribe, “that he [Taylor] can ride the legs off of anyone who has ever sat on a bicycle saddle.” But they had a few caveats and one strong recommendation. First, it had to be over seventy degrees. The second one Taylor had a little more control over. “The cycling athletes of this country still have faith in the ability of Major Taylor to defeat Jacquelin if, instead of complying with the French sentiment,” the newsman continued, echoing the words of the riders, “‘he will get on a bicycle and ride the stomach out of the Frenchmen.’”
As Taylor and Jacquelin prepared in their locker rooms the heavens relented. At last the wind stilled, all clouds dissipated. A bright sun lit the trees and shrubs in a profusion of color. Buckner handed Taylor the Scriptures. Taylor thumbed through it while Buckner pressed his palms into his lower back, kneading out the tension. Taylor got up and walked toward the track, the pages left open.
Have I not commanded you?
Be strong and courageous.
Do not be afraid:
Do not be discouraged,
For God is with you wherever you go.
As if his mood was inextricably connected to the weather, Taylor bounded onto the track smiling and jovial. On his way in, lines of photographers clicked away, the light from their cameras dancing off his face. Buckner looked up at the clear sky and thanked the heavens.
The two goliaths cinched in at the line. Jacquelin’s upper body, in all its athletic symmetry, leaned over his bicycle. Surprisingly, given his previous defeat, Taylor was a lesson in quiet confidence. Several reporters looked at him in bewilderment, wondering if this was the same glum, shivering, wreck of a man who showed up at the previous match race.
Right before the startman drew his pistol, Taylor shocked everybody by suddenly leaping off his bike. Fashioning himself a skilled amateur photographer, he grabbed his Kodak “brownie” from Buckner and began snapping pictures of Jacquelin. At first puzzled, the crowd then chuckled. Jacq
uelin looked on with complete indifference. They lined up again. “The Frenchman,” recalled Taylor, “had the same arrogant smile as he mounted his wheel.” “For the first time in his life,” jibed one American, “someone had to wipe that big smirk off his Gallic face.”
In a show of confidence, Taylor leaned toward Jacquelin and extended his right arm in handshake without looking at him. Startled, Jacquelin raised his hand grudgingly, gazing at Taylor and mumbling something in French, perhaps details about how he was going to ride him into the ground again. Deep in thought, Taylor ignored him, setting his eyes on the track ahead. The crowd ground their teeth.
The Second World War was on.
Perhaps angered by Taylor’s curious start-line tactics, Jacquelin eschewed the traditional European loafing and moved out of the gate taking the early lead. Taylor tailed him closely, sucking along in his vacuum, keeping his front wheel fastened to the rear of Jacquelin like a horseshoe to a hoof. The pace remained steady through the first turn and into the backstretch. The crowd, surprised by the tactics, let out a steady yelp. Out of the backstretch, black and white forms dashed forward, their flowing cadence increasing, their speed slowly rising.
Jacquelin rode confidently over the track, his tires rolling over the same circular route as eleven days before, his legs spinning piston-like, drawing the backstretch under his wheels and forcing it back behind him. Taylor looked forward and saw the arched back of his rival—and his broad hamstrings and calves pumping aggressively up and down, sweeping him along in his mighty slipstream. With two furlongs to go, they both saw the outline of the wailing crowd pushing up against the rail. They ramped up the pace, preparing for a heightened dash to the far turn and the onrushing throng. Jacquelin angled his craft outward, making a vicious push up the steep banking. Taylor tracked him. The massive crowd, nearly close enough to touch, reached forward, their hands flailing, feet stomping, faces an image of mayhem. Taylor, still trailing, moved forward ever so slightly. Fans gasped. Some of them fainted, dropping limp into the aisles.
Major Taylor Page 29
