The Fast Times of Albert Champion

by Peter Joffre Nye

  “Who’s talking about banks? I’m going to earn some cash on the track.”

  “With your leg?”

  “Yes, with my leg! I’ll just use one crank shorter than the other, that’s all.”59

  Whatever others thought, Champion remained undeterred. He and Marius Thé practiced at race pace, cruising at 40 mph around the reconstituted Buffalo Vélodrome, three laps for one kilometer, or nearly 350 yards around. The track in Neuilly was a worthy homage to legendary American frontier showman Buffalo Bill Cody, remembered for his Wild West show at the 1889 world’s fair. The facility accommodated fifteen thousand spectators seated in comfort behind the cream-colored railing or standing on the infield’s manicured lawn. Painted in tall letters across the top of the grandstand, visible everywhere on the grounds, was: Clément Cycles.60

  Marius Thé had a dark swarthy mustache and a characteristic Parisian’s debonair manner. He sat upright on the Gladiator motorcycle and held handle-bars sweeping the length of the machine all the way back to his seat, over the edge of the rear wheel. He was Champion’s size and served as a windscreen. The smooth way Marius steered in and out of the banked curves and down the straights kept his friend sheltered at speed.

  Rival papers L’Auto and Le Vélo both promoted the Champion-versus-Contenet match. The Sunday afternoon card also featured a pride of headliner pro sprinters from France, Germany, and Italy to dazzle the audience with tactics, drama, and speed. In addition, the program offered a ten-kilometer motorcycle race with four entrants.

  “We applaud Albert Champion who, after five years in America, is making his return to paced racing in Paris after only eight days of training since he crossed the Atlantic,” wrote L’Auto’s Géorge Lefèvre.61 “We have seen with our own eyes he has excellent style and is in form.”

  Lefèvre, a year older than Champion,62 was short and slight. On his own time, he played soccer and enjoyed cycling with his brother, Victor. Desgrange referred to them as Petit Géo and Petit Victor. Desgrange was forever indebted to Géo, whom he’d hired away, along with Victor, from the rival paper. At L’Auto’s darkest moment,63 in October 1902, when it was circling the drain financially and Des-grange assembled the staff in a meeting to plead for someone to come up with a scheme to rescue the paper from having to surrender the circulation fight to Le Vélo, Petit Géo had suggested the idea of the Tour de France. He recommended a format of six days of racing an average of 253 miles per stage (some 130 miles farther than contemporary tour stages), based on existing classic races that tested character, fortitude, and physical strength. Each day’s stage of racing would be augmented by two or three rest days, over three weeks. Now Lefèvre ran the entire show. He started every stage by firing his revolver, judged the finish, and tallied elapsed times for every rider counting toward overall standing. Motor transport still being unreliable, he traveled to the designated cities by express trains. Then he wrote dispatches for each stage and telegraphed his copy to Desgrange in Paris. His coverage pumped up the images of cyclists as national heroes. Lefèvre’s Tour de France, free to the public, introduced a new paradigm into the sport.

  A committed journalist, Lefèvre praised Contenet for courage and pacing expertise. Contenet, though dutifully neat and sporting a business-like haircut, had a dogged career, which had fallen short of landing him a nickname from the press. Even so, one journalist praised his form as so smooth, with shoulders steady, that he made his racing look effortless. He had attained his first big success at twenty-seven, scoring second in the 1902 national motorpace championship. The next year he had his best season. He had set three world paced records at the Parc des Princes,64 stretching the celebrated hour record to 48 miles and 1,222 yards. In Germany had he won eight grand-prix events. He capped the 1903 season by capturing the French title. However, in a match in early spring 1904 against Bobby Walthour, Contenet was lapped twice.65 He had pulled to the side and quit, blaming a cold. Otherwise, he had posted strong results. On the Sunday before his match against Champion, he had triumphed in a three-corner match against two tough opponents at the Parc des Princes.

  “All these qualities will make this match a true test as long as the motors don’t behave capriciously,” Lefèvre forecast.66

  The Buffalo Vélodrome matinee on Sunday, July 10, began punctually at three o’clock. Women holding parasols and men swinging silver-topped swagger sticks sauntered in their finery to fill the grandstand and surrounding cheap seats. Excited chattering voices punctuated by peals of laughter created a wall of bubbly anticipation—the same liveliness actors hear backstage before the curtain goes up on a show that everyone looks forward to seeing.

  The Champion-Contenet matches followed Breyer’s format: a ten-kilometer contest followed by another of thirty kilometers, with a runoff of thirty kilometers, if necessary. Champion wore a fresh white jersey in tribute to his days as Paris city champion. Contenet donned the tricolor of France’s top motorpacer.

  When Champion spun onto the track for his welcome-home introduction, the audience burst into clapping and cheering. His warm reception erased the stigma of his draft evasion and gave him a clean slate.67 Contenet received a hardy greeting. After their introductory laps, they stopped at the start-finish line across from the grandstand. Officials stepped onto the track to hold the men on their cycles. The motorcycles waited behind in silence for the race commissar to give last-minute instructions to the riders and check with the timers.

  At a nod from the official starter on the line, the motorcycle engines combusted to life and the starter shot his pistol.68 Contenet blasted away.69 His motorcycle hastened past Champion, pulled in front of Contenet, and the pair soon opened a fifty-meter lead. It stretched to one hundred meters. Champion prudently rallied with Marius Thé to reduce the gap until only ten meters separated the two teams. They whirled off laps regular as a metronome.

  Spectators sat hushed on the edge of their seats to see if Contenet could control the race from start to finish. He and Champion bent low behind their motors, skimming over the boards. On the home straight heading into three laps to go for the final kilometer, two-thirds of a mile, Champion with Marius Thé caught his opponent on the outside lane and leapfrogged ahead to take possession of the inside rail. Team Champion leaned through the turn and shot down the straight then into the next turn, all so fast they lapped team Contenet. Champion charged around and was about to lap Contenet again when the finish line came up.

  Champion averaged better than a kilometer per minute, a rapid 41 mph. “The winner, very satisfied, received hardy acclaim,” reported Lefèvre.

  Then the motor-pacers cleared the track to make way for the sprinters, the sport’s aristocracy, in elimination heats. While the sprinters monopolized the track, Champion and Contenet repaired to the infield for a light massage from their trainers to speed up recovery. Drinking water to replace the fluids they’d lost to sweating, however, was avoided, as period wisdom held that drinking anything filled the stomach and interfered with food digestion.

  In the second match, Champion high-tailed it off the line and put on a display of drafting skill behind Marius Thé that Lefèvre called remarkable. To the surprise of the audience, he lapped Contenet early.70 He poured it on and lapped the national title holder again and again. Spectators watched him leaning over through the turns and popping upright on the straights, like a fish flicking its body in the current. He piled up a lead of ten laps—a distance of three miles—by the time he won.71 He averaged 42 mph. He had ridden the legs off Contenet.

  Champion, center, with his head swathed in gauze after a recent fall on the Buffalo Vélodrome, was celebrated on the cover of the magazine La Vie Au Grand Air for his return to Paris after four years of self-imposed exile in America. Looking at him on the right is French national champion Henri Contenet. From La Vie Au Grand Air, July 14, 1904.

  Le Vélo correspondent Charles Ravaud remarked, “The former Little Wonder clearly dominated our champion of France.”72

  Contenet apo
logized out loud for having been trounced so badly. He had to choke back his frustration. “He failed so badly yesterday that he has decided to take a few days off to rest until he’s recovered to get back to the unbeatable Contenet of 1903,” Ravaud wrote in Le Vélo.73

  Champion was awarded a bouquet of flowers for his lap of honor.74 While the infield band beat out a performance of “La Marseillaise” to accompany him, he waved flowers and smiled to the applauding audience. He could take time to pause and present his flowers to Elise in the grandstand with his mother and three younger brothers.

  Victory made Champion a contender among the elite motorpacers for the national middle-distance championship coming up September 18 at Parc des Princes. Champion informed officials of the sport’s governing body, L’Union Vélocipedique de France, which sanctioned the program, that they should select him to wear the country’s colors for the world’s championships in London,75 in early September, on the grounds of Crystal Palace, a modern spectacle of glass and steel. Bobby Walthour was going to compete for America. And Champion certainly wanted to race him for the world title.

  Later that afternoon, when the sprinters had finished and the motorcycles had their race, Champion was riding cool-down laps and chatting with Contenet when he fell. Champion struck his head on the cement. Cuts to his scalp and left ear required wrapping his head in yards of gauze down to his eyebrows like a pirate.76 A photographer for La Vie Au Grand Air posed him standing alongside Contenet at the mouth of the stadium tunnel. Champion radiates swagger, arms akimbo, grinning. Contenet only gazes at him.

  The photo ran on the cover of the July 14, Bastille Day, issue: “The Return of Champion.” The photo depicts his right leg straight, the left bent, foot splayed. Editor Victor Breyer ran a two-page photo essay depicting the legs of sixteen marquee stars, all clean-shaven for masseurs to knead muscles. Champion’s photo has the caption, “Deformed after an accident, but working well all the same.”77 Adjacent is a comparable image of Contenet’s gams: “Not elegant but solid.”

  Success led to another contract the following Sunday for a fifty-kilometer race at the Buffalo Vélodrome against his compatriot César Simar, a protégé of Constant Huret, and two others—George Leander and Welshman Jimmy Michael.78 Then fate intervened. Champion faced a crisis. The strain of his performance aggravated the deep thigh-muscle tissue of his injured leg. Infection set in.79 By the middle of the week, he came down with a fever and checked into the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital. Doctor Lucas Championniere drained the abscess.80 His incision caused Champion to lose an enormous quantity of blood. In the absence of antibiotics, the infected wound required frequent irrigation. The physician considered operating on the leg. He ordered an X-ray of the bone and confined Champion to a hospital bed for lavage treatment and complete rest.81

  “Poor Champion!” decreed Victor Lefèvre in L’Auto. “Yes, poor Champion, because he was looking for an encore, but now is sentenced to rest for long days on a bed in a hospital.”

  The destiny of his summer was hanging in mid-air, yet he was in no state to protest. He already had gone through four operations in New York.82 Doctor Championniere considered a possible fifth. If the infection worsened, his leg would be amputated to save his life. The longer he stayed in the hospital bed, the more competitive edge he would lose.

  Elise came to his side to take care of him. George Leander, Marius Thé, Champion’s mother, his three brothers, and a platoon of friends paraded in to visit. After a week, he pulled through. “Champion won’t be operated on,” reported L’Auto. “All is well, according to his latest appraisal. After a serious examination, probing the abscess at the break, and an X-ray, the general idea is that the fears were unjustified that he would need to be operated on for the fifth time. All’s well that ends well. Champion is radiant today. We will see him figure brilliantly on our tracks. He will be a big attraction because he has proved he ranks among the best.”83

  Champion walked out of the hospital revved up to make the most of what he had left of the summer. He resumed light workouts to test his leg, then he progressed to hard sessions twice daily.84 He dedicated himself to a Spartan regime.

  L’Auto journalist Edouard de Perrodil had been paying attention to Champion going back to Champion’s childhood performing unicycle exhibitions.85 De Perrodil, a recreational cyclist renowned for pedaling 930 miles in 1895 from Paris to Milan, Italy, in six days,86 found Champion a rare combination of name and achievements. He wrote a feature describing with rare insight the arc of Champion’s meteoric rise: “Champion! Has there ever been in the world of sports a name so predestined?”

  The feature turned into a brochure, which L’Auto published and sold separately, Albert Champion: His Victories, His Adventures, His Voyage to America. De Perrodil declared, “Champion is his name and a champion he has been in every sense of the word, for his series of victories is unheard of and unique, including every kind of genre: unicycle, bicycle, tricycle, motorcycle, and even automobile.”

  At the end of July Champion returned to the Buffalo Vélodrome for an evening program.87 In a fifty-kilometer event counting in the Grand Prix of Summer series, he lined up against César Simar, a pro with ten years’ experience, and Paul Guignard, the Frenchman who had challenged Walthour. Simar took an early lead, followed by Guignard. A hundred meters behind lagged Champion. After a few kilometers, Champion found his rhythm. He caught Guignard, who put up a magnificent defense for several laps before Champion dropped him. Champion caught Simar by ten kilometers. After that, he surged ahead and owned the race. Guignard’s motorcycle problems cost him fourteen laps. Simar’s pacer developed mechanical difficulties that required changing his motorcycle. He lost twenty-one laps. “Champion was all alone,” reported Géorge Lefèvre.88

  Champion was awarded another bouquet of flowers for his lap of honor to the accompaniment of the infield band playing “La Marseillaise.” And he basked in la gloire!

  July segued into August. Champion kept busy racing and training, alternating between the Buffalo Vélodrome and Parc des Princes. He won more bouquets and rode more laps of honor to “La Marseillaise.” He was raking in money and fattening his bank account. The press kept his name circulating. Reporters referred to him as the ex-pony of the trainer Choppy Warburton,89 the former Paris city champion,90 and one of the heroes of the Vélodrome d’Hiver.91 He continued mentoring Leander in racing tactics.92 On the track, the American stood out in a sleeveless black jersey, the stars and stripes tied around his waist. Leander and Champion had become nearly inseparable.93

  Stress from pushing the limits of men on machines caused breakdowns and kept drivers and cyclists always wary. In one race, the chain on Champion’s aero bicycle broke in the closing miles, too late for him to fetch his replacement bike.94 This deprived him of a chance for victory. He and cohorts paced behind ever more powerful, bulkier motorcycles. The engines throbbed with the might of a team of twenty-six horses. Windscreens over the rear wheel of pacing motorcycles upped the speed on the 666-meter Parc des Princes track—with its long straights and wide, sweeping turns—to an astounding 60 mph. The loud-firing engines, cyclists doubled over behind pacers, and the swiftness of it all dazzled audiences. At all times, disaster lurked. Champion said he had to stay alert at all times not only for where his adversaries were in the prize-money chase but also for the sounds of combusting engines: “The slightest miss not only made the motor very unsteady but consequently was very hard on the bicycle rider to follow, and it was dangerous.”95

  Like all pro athletes, he had to go to work despite feeling pain. In early August, he finished last in a three-up ninety-kilometer race (fifty-six miles) at the Parc des Princes.96 Leander won, ahead of France’s rising star Eugenio Bruni. Yet, as journalists Géorge Lefèvre in L’Auto and Franz Reichel in the weekly La Vie Illustrée saw it, Champion was the moral winner.97 He had competed with a boil on his butt and finished despite a tire blowout, which required him to stop, change bikes, and get back in the action. “Champion, as
usual, shows implausible courage. In spite of enduring an abscessed leg and now suffering a boil, he put up a good fight,” wrote Lefèvre. “Champion is faster than ever.”98

  Leander had scored six victories to establish himself in major-league motor-pacing.99 One win had come at the expense of Bobby Walthour, fresh off the ship for another campaign on the continent. Leander wrote a friend back home that he had banked $2,000 and had contracts to ride in Germany and Belgium.100 After he fulfilled his obligations by the end of the summer, he planned to go home to Chicago and prepare for the six-day in Madison Square Garden.

  Champion recovered from his boil, but the left leg became infected again, even as he accepted an invitation to compete in the Berlin Grand Prix at the Friedenau Sportpark. It drew stars from around the continent and America. He checked into the Potsdamer Platz Hotel and befriended a young German professional sprinter, Walter Rutt, staying in the next room.101

  “I knew Champion already had a good reputation because he had won the Paris-Roubaix road race,” recalled Rutt, a future world pro sprint champion, in his unpublished memoir. “One evening he asked me to provide him with the latest sports newspapers from Berlin. When I came back, he sat on his bed and showed me a deep wound on his left thigh. He complained that the wound was festering and not healing. I saw pieces of cloth from his racing trousers in the wound and thought of acetate of aluminia [a topical medication for temporary relief of skin irritations]. I went out to a nearby drugstore and bought a bottle for twenty pennies and went back to his room. Champion was wondering about the low price. He said, ‘If this stuff does not help, the werewolf shall get you.’”102

  Young Rutt followed directions on the bottle to water down the solution. He helped Champion apply a bandage. “When I entered his room the next morning, Champion received me with a cry of joy. He showed me the pieces of cloth from his racing trousers that had come out of the wound. ‘What is this stuff called?’ I could only answer with the name written on the bottle. He pleaded [with] me to provide him with a big bottle of this wound water.”103