From the Xtracycle Website [picked up from an Xtracycle tweet on twitter]. Visit the Major Taylor Association & Major Taylor Society websites.
It’s hard to imagine in our car cluttered culture of today, but before the turn of the (20th) century, bicycles ruled the day. Bikes were, with the exception of locomotives, the fastest vehicles on earth. Among the fastest riders was one of the first black athletes to go head to head with the white athletic establishment. Major Taylor.
The fever around bicycle racing in the late 1800’s can probably only be compared to modern day pro-sports like Football, Baseball, Basketball. Congregations of tens of thousands of people would amass to cheer on racers as they spun around the velodrome night after night, in every major city in the US. A grueling race called the Garden 6-Day happened each year in New York. Lapping the velodrome hour after hour, day after day, the top riders covered nearly 2000 miles in 6 days, and by the end of the race were in varying states of hallucination and fatigue. Something of a mix of the horrors of the Roman Coliseum and Olympics drew massive crowds and honed the finest athletes.
