The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  England’s governing body for cycling, the National Cycling Union, demanded Victorian primness in sports and sought to ban Warburton from all tracks in England. Though he intended Champion for paced racing in London, Warburton couldn’t resist matching the young Frenchman against Paris’s sprint queen to sell tickets.

  Warburton knew how to game the system on a grand scale; he rented the Royal Aquarium, a two-story entertainment complex in central London. Its spires and stone facing in Westminster stood directly across from the towers of Westminster Abbey, where for centuries English monarchs have been crowned. The Royal Aquarium’s main hall was built to hold thirteen large tanks intended to display exotic ocean creatures, but the water system was expensive and created such operating problems that the empty tanks languished. Displaying a dead whale had failed to impress the public. For years the building, known as “The Tank,” accommodated plays, art exhibitions, and performances by orchestras with up to four hundred performers. Warburton installed a board-cycling track and seating for some one thousand spectators. Natural light flowed from the roof made of glass and iron into the hall’s palm trees and statutes. The Royal Aquarium track was exempt from control of the National Cycling Union. Warburton was free to stage women’s racing and men racing against women as he pleased.

  He put Champion on a daily regime of jumping rope, riding a unicycle, and pedaling behind pacers around the Royal Aquarium’s board oval. One afternoon the Englishman, sensing that his protégé had a bright future, presented him with a leather-bound ledger to use as a scrapbook. Today these filled pages attest to Champion’s gloire!

  Champion took his scrapbook to a stationer, perhaps accompanied by Warburton. Albert Champion intended to grow up and become the next Adolphe Clément and had silver letters stamped on the cover: AC. The passing century has darkened the monogram, but it remains visible when the scrapbook is tilted at a certain angle and catches the light.

  Reporters insisted on interviewing Champion. Uncomfortable speaking English, he deferred to Warburton. “He takes matters easily, and works just as he feels he will, although, naturally, I see that he is well looked after,” the trainer said.124 “I am just now putting him through his pacings, so to speak, and haven’t really found out what are his best distances. Up to the present time, he has only ridden on cement and wood, but I shall have to try upon him other surfaces, just to see what he is made of.”

  In mid-January, Warburton issued a challenge through the press for any English pairs against Champion and Lisette on the Royal Aquarium track. He called for side bets of £100 for the winner, with the loser’s team to pay the cost of the winner’s pacers. No one responded, a sign that the murky drug allegations had tainted his reputation. Ever resourceful, he devised a special program of handicap races between his poulains. It drew spectators and the press.

  The first Champion-Lisette match was twenty miles. He toyed with her, leading so she could draft. That lasted till he grew impatient and upped his speed. Albert pulled ahead so Lisette lost the protection from his rear wheel. He lapped her time after time to trounce her.125 Warburton next devised a handicap twenty-miler. She had a head start of two miles and two laps. Champion, ferocious at heart, routed her. Proud, he clipped French newspapers and pasted accounts on the first page of his scrapbook, next to the Jules Beau photo of Warburton bracing him on his Clément Gladiator. Lisette managed to beat him in other handicap events, but he neglected to paste any of those clips in his scrapbook.

  Champion received an invitation to compete on the final Sunday evening in January 1897 in Les Gosses Blanc, the Paris junior city championship, in the Vel d’Hiv. Among hundreds of young hopefuls, he was selected as one of four contenders. The fifty-kilometer race (approximately 31.1 miles) offered a purse of 2,400 francs—the princely sum of 1,000 francs to the winner and a special white jersey, gosse blanc, designating Paris’s young city champion.126 The program matched Albert Champion against the promising Marius Lartigue, Edouard Taylor, and another named Collomb. The foursome made up France’s future cycling leaders and drew enormous publicity. Taylor had the most racing experience, beginning at age fifteen, and he’d come off a successful season in America. Warburton declared to the journalists he collected like lint that he had France’s next great talent: “Champion’s opponents might stick with him up through thirty-five kilometers, but after that Champion would leave them behind.”127

  The trainer’s spirits were buoyed by Michael recently admitting to reporters that Warburton had given him only water to drink rather than dope. Michael had agreed to ship across the Atlantic and meet Warburton in Paris to settle their legal differences amicably. And Warburton had successfully persuaded Champion’s mother to attend the Vel d’Hiver.

  Marie Champion may have been inclined to scoff at having to go out on a freezing winter night. But the attention Warburton had lavished on her son, the money they had brought back from Berlin and London, and publicity surrounding the evening’s event had softened her resistance. Even if she were illiterate and unable to read accounts, she recognized photos of her son. And the evening presented Champion with the opportunity to invite Elise to accompany his mother, her future mother-in-law, and brothers to watch him in action.

  “In spite of a cold, biting wind and the snow which covered the approaches, an enormous crowd wended its way to the Winter Track,” reported Chicago’s Bearings, publishing a dispatch from a Paris correspondent.128

  Electric lights hanging from the ceiling revealed to Marie Champion and her sons and Elise an indoor board oval with banked turns as steep as cliffs. The track looked to her more like a squirrel cage than something for cyclists to ride. Leading Louis, Prosper, Henri, and Elise to their seats in a tier of the grandstand over the start/finish line, Marie saw the infield, dense with men in top hats, women in elaborate broad-brimmed ones, everyone in overcoats, most flaunting fur. She and her boys and future daughter-in-law would have caught pungent whiffs of rubbing liniment and a mélange of perfume competing with the smell of damp wool, tobacco, and food seasoned with garlic. Customers filled chairs around tables covered with white linen; everyone else stood chatting with cigarettes and drinks at the long bar, or milled wherever they could wedge into a niche. Musicians in the bandbox played popular tunes. Riders flew around the vélodrome with apparent ease. Pacer teams with riders on triplets and quads, pedaling in perfect unison, must have appeared to Blanche like a scene from another world.

  The evening program opened with a 920-meter handicap race. It drew a field of pros whose battles got the audience aroused. Next up, a one-lap race against the clock—the test of truth. Five riders went off, one at a time, for a solo lap at top speed. A former Warburton protégé, Edouard Nieuport, destined to be Champion’s first business partner and to set three world aviation speed records, grimaced under his dandy’s upturned mustache. Nieuport scored the fastest lap: 23-2/5 seconds.129

  The audience was in full cry by the main event, Les Gosses Blanc. “A few minutes before the race, the track was taken possession of by a perfect army of pacemakers, each boy having five or six triplets and quads,” Bearings told readers.130 “‘Choppy’ busied himself with his young ward’s pacing teams, and kept the spectators amused by his comical gestures and gesticulations.”

  An official in top hat and tails tossed a coin to determine the inside position—auspiciously, to Champion. Warburton steadied Champion’s bicycle for him to sit on the saddle and grip his handlebars for the start. Lartigue, Taylor, and Collomb took their places up the banking with their trainers. Behind ranged their triplets. At the pop of the starter’s pistol, Warburton put his upper body into shoving Champion away. The triplets chased and came around their charges. Champion was quickest to catch his. “After a few laps had been negotiated, it was clearly seen that the race would be a grand struggle between Champion and Lartigue,” reported Bearings.131

  Taylor, nicknamed le gosse rouge, the red kid, for his red silk jersey, was small and thin with a narrow chest and sharply cut
facial features. He surprised the audience, as the fast pace forced him several times to sit upright and catch his breath in the first six miles.

  Champion chatted and laughed with his pacers. Lartigue, five months older, kept trying to pass. But Champion each time counterattacked. He owned the night. “For the first half of the race, the fight between Lartigue and Champion was a sight worth witnessing,” reported Bearings.132 “The ease with which Champion followed his pacemakers was really remarkable.” He kept lapping Collomb—ultimately ten times.

  At nineteen miles, Choppy tipped his top hat to his protégé, signaling time to make a move. Champion shot ahead and gained ten lengths on Lartigue, who fought back gallantly, but the effort knocked him to pieces. Lartigue dropped back and caught his breath at twenty-two miles. His pause signaled Champion as nonpareil. Warburton let out a whoop, threw his hat in the air, and ran up and down the inside track apron, all the while yelling encouragement to Champion. Warburton gave the impression of a windmill with his long arms waving in the air.133

  Taylor, profiting by Lartigue’s pumped-out condition, regained a lap on him. Champion lapped them both twice more. In the first hour, Champion had pedaled 29.6 miles—a new national hour record.134 He won Paris’s city championship and set a new national record of 1:03:11-3/5—an average of nearly 30 mph.135 He received a bouquet of flowers for his lap of honor to a rousing ovation. He was awarded the Gosse Blanc jersey to wear in future races. Champion and Warburton left the track to roaring applause.136

  Reporters praised Champion for performing in a style that promised to make him the French Michael. Press accounts credited Warburton for accomplishing marvels with those he had trained. Michael was in the audience. That evening Warburton and Michael reconciled. Champion made a quick change of clothes to pull on a suit and overcoat while Jules Beau set up his camera. Warburton stood tall between Champion and Michael for the photo.137

  Marie Champion, as every mother must, realized that her son had slayed his own dragons. He had earned 1,000 francs. Nearly half went to Warburton and the pacers. That still left Champion with a bounteous payday, a fortune in her estimation, and in just an evening’s effort. She had a frisson that with her son as the family breadwinner she could retire from washing laundry. She had heard everyone in the audience yelling for him. The evening swayed her. She relented and put her faith in Warburton, granting him permission to take her son to race in Germany.

  AUTOMOBILES ARE SOMEWHAT OF A NOVELTY JUST AT PRESENT, BUT IN A HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW THEY WILL BE PART OF EVERYBODY’S HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY, OR AT LEAST SO IT IS SAID.

  —MONTREAL DAILY STAR, AUGUST 5, 18991

  Drafting behind human pacers prepared Champion for switching to following tandems powered by the latest internal-combustion gas engines, which would change his life. A recent technology leap in aluminum processing led to smaller and lighter engines than those made of iron parts. Aluminum is an abundant metal but lies underground combined with other minerals. A process to extract aluminum from surrounding minerals had been introduced at the 1855 Paris Exposition.2 Yet the pure metal was costly to produce and available in such scant supply that aluminum was more expensive than gold, which made it prized in fine jewelry. With the advent of electricity, Frenchman Paul-Louis-Toussaint Héroult and American Charles Martin Hall had simultaneously invented a method to produce the metal in bulk for little cost.3 Around 1890 the value of aluminum jewelry plummeted. Yet other applications came to light.

  Paris engineer Georges Bouton enjoyed boating on the Seine with one-cylinder, gas-combustion engines. He replaced the cast-iron crankcase—housing the crankshaft, connecting rods, and related parts—with aluminum.4 That reduced engine weight and size. Jules-Félix-Philippe-Albert De Dion, a marquis in Montmartre, was awestruck with the magic of internal-combustion engines.5 Friends dubbed him Count Mechanic. He saw that Bouton’s lighter crankcase improved the ratio of weight to speed. With his progressive attitude toward technology he took to internal-combustion engines with his heart, soul, and check book.

  The count and the engineer formed the De Dion-Bouton Motorette Company to produce small autos—for driver and a passenger—and engines.6 The engine piston chuffed and delivered two-horsepower—the muscle of eight competitive cyclists. De Dion-Bouton engines fit onto the back of tri-cycle frames, between the rear wheels. De Dion and Bouton then allied with Clément to manufacture motor-tricycles. De Dion modeled in jacket and tie, relaxing with a cigarette on a new motor-tricycle, marking him as a trendsetter. An advertisement for a De Dion-Bouton motor-tricycle asserted an antiestablishment attitude, depicting a smiling coquette, in a frilly nightgown revealing cleavage, driving her boyfriend, in a harlequin costume standing behind on the rear-wheel axle and thumbing his nose to mock a pursuing gendarme pedaling a bicycle and a military officer chasing on horseback. In 1895 Clément, De Dion, Bouton, and other devotees of engines cofounded L’Automobile-Club de France to spread information about the proper care for gas-combustion vehicles and encourage auto racing.7 De Dion was elected its first president.

  When Champion investigated the motor-tricycles Clément made at the Levallois factory he discovered the engines had a life of their own, a unique smell, a distinct sound. He saw how the engines operated. Gasoline mixed with air in the combustion chamber enclosing the piston. A magneto coil, consisting of a magnet embedded in a flywheel, generated electric current. The current fired the spark plug end, which screwed into the combustion chamber and ignited the mixture of gasoline and air, driving the piston down to convert chemical energy into mechanical energy. That turned the crankshaft, which propelled the rear wheels to drive the vehicle. These were the basics.

  Champion was taught to jump start the engine by pedaling (like a latter-day moped) until he heard its put-put-put, steady as a metronome as the engine took over; then he rested his feet on the pedals. When the air-cooled engine had burned all its oil,8 it ran irregularly until the cast-iron parts heated, expanded, and locked up. Overheated parts had to cool and return to normal size, which took about twenty minutes. Then insertion of an oil-soaked cloth allowed the ride to resume. He inspected the cylindrical brass gas tank, twenty inches wide and five inches deep, fitted on the rear seat stays of the two back wheels, dripping gas by gravity to the engine. He measured the amount of gas in the tank by unscrewing the cap and dipping a stick inside. Motor-tricycles could go more than a hundred miles on a gallon of gas. A brass cup two inches in diameter held an oil-soaked cloth that dribbled oil down into the crankcase. He received instructions to experiment with the oil-gas mixture to make the exhaust burn clear. Dark blue smoke meant too much oil; light blue smoke was acceptable, as it would soon burn clearly.

  It wasn’t long before Champion examined spark plugs stamped with the De Dion-Bouton trademark, fundamentally the same construction as spark plugs today. The De Dion-Bouton Company was the first to use spark plugs successfully. Champion scrutinized the electrode on the center top of the plug that ran the length of it and carried the electric current. The spark plug bottom held a small J-shaped piece of metal, and the gap at the end determined the size of the spark that fired in the chamber. The gap had to be the proper size—too wide and the spark could not leap to ignite the fuel-air mix; too narrow and the spark was so weakened that it would not ignite the mixture. Analyzing how the spark plug worked gave Champion entry into the world of internal-combustion gas engines.

  One wintry day he pulled on leather gloves, stuffed newspaper broadsheets under layers of clothes over the front of his chest to ward off the wind’s chill, and drove a motor-tricycle out of the Levallois factory to the Bois de Boulogne to test the novel machine. Next he persuaded one of Clément’s mechanics, called Broc, to motorpace him around the Vélodrome de la Seine. Now, instead of collecting four riders pedaling a quad to pace him, Champion needed only Broc on a motor-tricycle. Broc took pride in driving. He wore the motor fraternity’s special regalia—a long duster coat to shield him from dirt roads, leather gauntlets extending halfway
up his forearm, a big cap, and enormous spectacles to protect his eyes. The outfit made Broc resemble a deep-sea diver.9 Pedaling behind Broc, Champion inserted his front wheel between the tricycle’s rear wheels to follow, protected in the sweet spot. The youths exuberantly slalomed through horse-drawn traffic across Paris to the Bois de Boulogne. There they made the dirt fly.

  When Champion and Broc felt like getting a special thirst quencher, they dropped in on the Brasserie de l’Espérance, Bar of Good Hope, on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne at Porte Maillot. The brasserie was a hangout for cyclists, bookies, betting coves, reporters, fans, groupie jeune filles, and riffraff prowling for the latest hearsay. The brasserie was well known for an annual spring professional road race that started outside its front door. Pros ventured north 170 miles to Roubaix. Champion heard incredible stories about the Paris-Roubaix race, but he did not care about racing through the countryside on rough roads.

  Champion’s accomplishments in early 1897 under Warburton’s tutelage generated coverage beyond France. Chicago was home to the cycling weekly Bearings, as smart a title as Wired is today for the tech savvy. Bearings hawked “Champion Rides Like a Demon.”10 He had no way of knowing about his press attention in America.

  In England, however, Warburton’s prominence had thrust him under the glare of the National Cycling Union, the governing body adamant in opposing professional cycling. The NCU believed that competing for money sullied the sport of gentlemen amateurs. His biggest offense, according to the judgment of NCU officers, was coaching pros, including Lisette—an especially outrageous breach because, like men, she wore leg tights.