The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  It was natural that De Guichard would join Champion, Lanky Elkes, and other pros for track workouts. De Guichard seemed a natural for pacing as he stood five feet five inches,137 and had developed superior handling expertise that enabled him to highball around turns and straights. He bought a pro license. The Orient Team roster was full, and with Metz gone, Champion lost influence with management to put his compatriot on the payroll. Instead, De Guichard opted to sign with one of the other top-tier pro squads,138 Rambler bicycles, made in Chicago. Joining this team signified an extraordinary coincidence. The bicycle company would later reorganize as the Rambler Motor Company. De Guichard was destined in his thirties to marry the daughter of that company’s president.

  Right away De Guichard garnered press attention. His name was touted in trade journal ads with Champion, Tommy Hall, and Bobby Walthour.

  Champion’s priming in Washington paid off. He set more than one hundred US records, which the Fourth Estate often proclaimed as world records. “Champion is following pace to-day faster than any other man in the game,” exclaimed the Washington Star.139

  The Washington Star, then the capital’s most influential paper, published the Chickering portrait of Champion in a story that said, “The Frenchman was never in better form than at present.”140 The Star added insightful commentary: “As Champion was somewhat nettled by the knowledge of Kennedy’s intention, he pitched in and worked like ten men. Soon he was able to laugh at Hall and eventually he turned the tables completely on the midget and his manager, and Champion himself became and remains the star of the Kennedy-Powers team.”141

  The article indicated that he played as hard as he raced.142 “On the other hand, the Frenchman exists upon admiration, and is what is called a ‘grandstand rider.’ Some of his rivals call him a ‘ladies’ man.’”143 “Nevertheless,” it continued, “he rides with terrible speed and dogged purpose to win. His pace following is simply beautiful to behold. He seems inseparable from the motor tandem pacing him.”144

  This reportage carried the understated reference to Champion’s promiscuity. The gentlemen sports writers avoided any direct references about the misbehavior of newsmakers as long as no arrest was made. Yet it was apparent that Albert was cutting a wide swath among the Potomac debutantes.

  On July 15, 1902, in Pittsburgh, Champion raced against Basil De Guichard and set forty-four national records en route to the US hour-paced record of 43 miles and 293 yards, obliterating all existing records at every mile along the way.145 De Guichard, trailing close behind, had beaten the prevailing times. Both men averaged a breakneck 43 mph. That afternoon cemented their friendship and began their intertwined careers, which would exceed what either could ever have imagined.

  Albert continued to set other motorpace records up to ten miles in Boston, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. He earned $500 for thirty-five minutes of riding in a twenty-five-mile challenge against a rookie pro, endowed with a farm boy’s muscle and much taller than Champion.146 His opponent, from New Hampshire and nicknamed the Manchester Giant, had lost to him in August in Charles River Park. Later, the Manchester Giant put up $500 for a winner-take-all match in Providence. At that match, Champion lapped him twelve times to win by two miles.

  Champion’s ride on September 1 in a twenty-five-mile race against Orient teammate Harry Elkes in Charles River Park earned him a shot at the US middle-distance title on September 6 at Charles River Park against Bobby Walthour. Their twenty-five-mile match would close the 1902 season. The contest set off debate about whether a foreigner could win the American championship—and the right to wear the stars and stripes around his waist for the next season.

  Walthour had remarked that his motor-tandem, which cost him $750, was so sweet he had named it Candy.147 He started behind Candy from the tape in front of the grandstand while Champion and his Orient team began on the back straight.

  At the beginning, the Georgian and the Frenchman reeled off laps without either making any appreciable gain. Twelve thousand fans were yelling for their favorites. After four miles, Walthour forged a margin, which he stretched to pass Champion at fifteen miles. Champion’s pacemakers even pedaled as hard as they could to supplement their tandem motor. In the closing miles, Candy’s engine skipped, putting Walthour’s one-lap advantage in jeopardy. Just in time, however, Walthour’s stoker on the back seat somehow fixed the engine. Walthour kept close to Champion to defeat him for the national title.148

  Champion wrapped up the 1902 season with forty-eight victories in the fifty-three events he had entered.149 His wins alone amounted to $12,000—a princely income compared with earnings of major league baseball players.

  Champion’s triumphs led to a full-page photograph on his aero bicycle in the Police Gazette, an influential national tabloid popular for its coverage of sports, murders, and racy pictures of scantily clad burlesque dancers: “Albert Champion—Speedy French Bicyclist Who Has Been Breaking Records in This Country.”

  From Police Gazette, no. 1313, October 18, 1902.

  With savings in the bank, his contract extended for 1903, and press attention going his way, Albert and Elise agreed it was time to marry. He was twenty-four, Elise twenty-five. A traditional wedding in Paris was out of the question. Under his exile, she could be with him only in America.

  October 31, 1902, was a sun-splashed Friday. Trees were shedding golden and crimson leaves along the sidewalk. The couple strolled after lunch from their residence on Highland Avenue to the marbled corridors and dark-wood trim of Cambridge City Hall, where they were married by a justice of the peace, Julius Meyers.150 They were the only couple married that day.

  In the Marriage Registration, Elise wrote her occupation: “at home.”151 Albert listed his as “automobile,”152 indicating the direction he saw his career going.

  Albert’s teenage sweetheart and first wife, Elise Delpuech Champion, on a chilly November day in 1920, sightseeing outside Dallas, Texas. Photo courtesy of Kerry Champion Williams.

  Despite Champion’s robust 1902 season, the craze for two-wheelers had fizzled. His employer planned to cease bicycle production in the summer of 1903 and terminate his contract. After a decade and more than one hundred thousand Orient bicycles,153 including their offspring tandems, triplets, quads, and the famous ten-seat Oriten, the Waltham Manufacturing Company set its future on small-engine motorcycles and four-cylinder cars.154

  Champion looked to 1903 and determined his new challenge would be racing cars, a career leap easier to discuss than to realize. Unlike France, where motorists like Henri Fournier competed on public roads between cities hundreds of kilometers apart in contests fraught with spectacular accidents and narrow escapes, auto racing in the United States was confined to horse tracks. Every city, town, and most backwater crossroad communities took pride in the local fairground ovals and permanent grandstands. Ambitious promoters put on programs for the thundering machines to churn up dust clouds thick as forest-fire smoke. Paying audiences filled the stadiums and marveled at the noise, the dirt flying, especially how fast the roaring dirt-track devils could go. To ensure that most drivers would finish before their cars crapped out, events were limited to five miles—often just one mile.

  Car racing was an exclusive gentleman’s game, like golf, but precipitously more expensive. However, a growing number of carmakers valued press coverage that winners generated, and the idea of driving a mile in a minute had captured the public imagination. Motoring a mile a minute was discussed around dinner tables and especially in saloons and barbershops. Mile-a-minute fever was in the air.

  Since Champion had introduced the Orient Motorcycle three years earlier, motorcycles were becoming fashionable in New York. Members of the New York Motorcycle Club would charter the Federation of American Motorcyclists in their Brooklyn clubhouse that autumn to assist the good-roads movement and regulate motorcycle racing.155 Members rode Orients from Waltham, Indian Motorcycles produced downstate in Springfield, and a model Charles Herman Metz introduced from his C. H. Met
z Company on Staten Island. They all had one- or two-cylinder engines generating up to 5-hp and weighed about one hundred pounds. Some cruised about 40 mph. That was good enough for the New York City Police Department to supply motorcycles to a squad that chased down speeding autos and issued traffic tickets.156

  Champion required a more powerful machine than anything made on these shores. He looked to Paris, to Adolphe Clément’s Gladiators, and obtained a brochure about the French machine. It weighed a muscular 350 pounds.157 The Gladiator packed a brawny four-cylinder engine,158 called a V-twin after the shape made by the double sets of compact cylinders joined at the base. The V-twin fastened in the triangle section of the steel diamond-shaped frame, near the ground for a low center of gravity. Its mighty 14-hp engine harnessed the power of a herd of fourteen horses. Champion could afford a Gladiator. With his Gaulic hubris, he naturally reckoned that he could pilot the motorcycle 60 mph around a velodrome. And, of course, he expected that the ensuing publicity would impress an auto company enough to hire him to race cars. It was a gamble. Because he could not afford to buy his own auto, this was his only chance. He sent Clément a bank draft for $1,500 to import a Gladiator.159

  The 1903 US motorpace season commenced on Memorial Day, May 30, a Saturday. Single-seat motorcycles took over from motor-tandems, ushering in a new era. After renovations, Charles River Park reopened for the holiday. Its track featured an enlarged grandstand to sit eight thousand viewers,160 cheap bleacher seats to accommodate six thousand folks, and an infield capable of accommodating two thousand standing spectators. The oval’s distance had been shortened to five laps for a mile from the old six-lap template,161 and it had steeper banks of thirty-eight degrees on the turns.162 The hardwood surface was twenty-five feet wide—five feet broader to give motorpace teams extra room to pass. State-of-the-art, the track was built for national-record speeds.

  As tempting as Charles River Park was to Champion, he climbed aboard a train bound for New York a couple weeks earlier with Elise. That was unthinkable to his motorpace confreres. More often than not, they persisted in entering every event they could reach out of gnawing insecurity that their capabilities would somehow diminish, or that they would be forgotten by promoters, the press, and fans. But Albert, with his unreserved faith in his abilities, pursued his new passion to drive racecars.

  At the US Customs warehouse on the harbor dock, he claimed his Clément Gladiator. Word about the machine and its innovative V-twin got out to connoisseurs who were intrigued to see it unpacked from its wooden crate A photographer came with tripod and set up his camera. Albert obliged by driving on the wooden floor around a vacant area, the engine making the brick walls and low ceiling vibrate.

  Champion test driving a new two-cylinder Clément Gladiator motorcycle inside the US Customs warehouse in New York after the machine arrived by ship from Paris. The square box on the motorcycle, between the front wheel and the engine, is the gas tank. Note the four-wheel horseless carriage parked in the background. Photo courtesy of Gary McCoy.

  Then he took his Gladiator to the Empire City Race Track in Yonkers. It was three laps to the mile, made for trotters pulling sulkies. The American Automobile Association, recently formed by auto associations in New York, Chicago, and eight other cities, leased it for a Memorial Day program of motor races. The AAA’s Racing Committee had copied rules from the Automobile Club of France, derived from the regulation of horseracing, and had created a comprehensive code for US autos.163 Several clubs had approved the new rulebook, from competitor weight divisions to rules governing leaders and challengers. The Memorial Day events marked the first program to be sanctioned by the AAA.164

  Champion registered to compete in one-mile time trials open to all gasoline, electric, and steam machines weighing less than a thousand pounds,165 whether they had two wheels, three, or four. The time trials made up one of six undercard events, with loving cups valued at $100 each to winners,166 culminating in a five-mile match between two big autos. He faced a daunting task to master the bulky Gladiator in time for his race.

  Daily trains delivered dozens of vehicles and drivers and crews. At the track Champion witnessed a beast of a machine with an engine roaring like Niagara Falls and veering through turns like it protested against going anywhere but straight ahead. In the practice laps, the first thing everyone took in was a driver, a tall, husky guy in a suit and tie and goggles. He crouched on the ungainly car, which had no transmission—a triumph of brute force over anything approaching finesse.167 The wind mussed his mat of dark hair. He steered with both hands wrapped around grips protruding from a straight steel rod resembling bicycle handlebars. He stared ahead in stolid concentration. His name was Barney Oldfield.

  Oldfield was promised 25 percent of the gate and a chance at the winner’s purse of $500 to drive in the main event, the best of three five-mile matches.168 His opponent was Charles G. Ridgeway, a New Yorker steering a Peerless Greyhound. Unlike the skeletal 999, the Greyhound had a hood of pressed steel, painted black. Ridgeway sat on an upholstered leather seat wide enough to accommodate a passenger. He had a few years of motor experience. Oldfield had been at it only since October and had already established himself in Detroit for defeating Alexander Winton, the pioneer auto manufacturer and racecar driver.

  A week before Memorial Day, the New York Times assured readers, “Mile-a-minute automobile racing is anticipated at the Empire City track.”169

  Memorial Day brought six thousand spectators flocking to the grandstand,170 equal to the attendance of the eight-day First Annual Automobile Show in 1900 in Madison Square Garden. The unmuffled gas-combustion engines detonated such ear-splitting racket that track officials, in suit and ties and their heads topped with fresh straw boater for the summer season, communicated by waving handheld flags. Yonkers’s Mayor Walsh held a solid green flag overhead and made a downward chopping motion to begin the first race at 2:30 p.m.

  First was a three-miler with four cars that featured an assistant in each serving as postilion, harking back to horse-drawn mail coaches, when a coachman sat on one of the pairs pulling in the traces. Postilions were necessary on the Empire City Race Track for domestic cars with the steering wheel mounted on the right side, imitating the European style for driving on the left side of the road.171 Circling the turf track counterclockwise required a driver’s assistant to hold onto the opposite side of the car and lean as a counterweight through turns to prevent “capsizing.” The awkwardness hastened American car-makers to move the steering wheel to the left side.

  Then, in the one-mile speed trial, Champion hunkered down over his Gladiator like a jockey. He spun around a lap to hit the start line at full speed. The entire audience jumped to its feet in unison to cheer him on his three-lap mission. The tumult persisted as he leaned so far on turns that it looked like he might fall over. Somehow he shot through the turns and popped back upright down the straights. It kept up like that until he blazed over the finish line. An official on the line near the grandstand waved a checked flag.

  Three timers, required under AAA rules, squeezed their watches to click off. Silence fell on the stadium. The timers consulted with the announcer. When he grabbed his megaphone, it was to declare a new world record: 1 minute 4-1/5 seconds,172 an impressive 55 mph. The quiet in the grandstand split with everyone erupting into cheers and applause.

  A perfectionist, Champion made a second run and clocked 1:03 flat.173 He was knocking on the edge of the one-minute barrier. He was awarded a silver loving cup valued at $100.174 With a little more horsepower, he could hit 60 mph.

  The five-mile main event was a pursuit race—both drivers began on opposite sides of the track to chase one another, ensuring one of the wild chariots dashed past the grandstand about every twenty seconds. Oldfield started 999 in front of the grandstand while Ridgeway in his Peerless Greyhound began on the back straight.

  When Mayor Walsh waved the green flag, Oldfield depressed the gas pedal all the way down to the floor and held it there like
his life depended on it. Around every turn, 999 looked as though it would fly out of control, but somehow Old-field pulled it out in time to cut in again on the straights. Ridgeway piloted the Greyhound through the turns with more finesse, its chassis as high as a wagon, with him ensconced atop a cushy seat on an island of leather.

  Oldfield and 999 survived to win the first heat by a decisive ten seconds, in 7 minutes and 2/5 seconds, an average of 56 mph.

  In the next heat, Oldfield was timed through the second mile in 1 minute 1-3/5 seconds,175 59 mph. The announcer bellowed through a megaphone that Oldfield had set a world one-mile record around an elliptical track.176 He lapped Ridgeway twice and won with a new five-mile record: 5 minutes 31 seconds.177

  Two straight matches gave Oldfield victory. He collected $1,300 and received a silver trophy for scoring the meet’s fastest mile.178 He split his prize money with the owner of 999 and his manager-publicist.179 That left him with $650,180 a substantial payday compared with a factory laborer’s wage of $2 a day. Oldfield bought a train ticket home to Toledo. At the station, his father waited with a horse-drawn wagon as the younger Oldfield waved his wad of dollar bills in the air. He proclaimed that the money was to pay off the mortgage so his parents would not worry about losing their house.181 His father had tears in his eyes when he embraced his son.

  Special dispatches ran nationwide over newspaper syndicate wires. The Boston Herald reported, “World’s track records were broken by ‘Barney’ Oldfield in an automobile and Albert Champion on a motorcycle.”182