The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-age Sport
by Peter Nye
List Price:
Our Price: $25.71
You Save: $14.24 (36%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $23.35 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions
Book Summary Information
Author: Peter NyeEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2006-05-30
ISBN: 189249549X
Number of pages: 240
Publisher: Cycle Publishing
Book Reviews of The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-age Sport
Book Review: The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-Age Sport.
Summary: 5 Stars
There was a time, not really long ago, when American bicycle racers were the most highly paid athletes in the country. In the 1980's we dropped our jaws when Greg Lemond signed a contract that paid him a million dollars over 3 years. Yet even today, the total price of a Pro Tour team won't get you a major-league pitcher with a good fastball.
Back in the early 1920's things were very different. Babe Ruth was paid the then princely sum of $20,000 a year but six-day bicycle racer Frank Kramer made more. Movie stars would crowd into smokey indoor tracks and offer primes as high a $1,000 to goad racers into driving themselves ever harder as sold-out bleachers screamed with excitement. The great boxer Jack Dempsey's promoter was stunned to learn that the attendance of six-day races averaged 100,000 paying customers. At least one successful six-day racer paid cash for a house.
Now largely forgotten, there was a circuit of velodromes that went across America, stretching from Los Angeles and Salt Lake City to Newark and New York City. The racers who competed on the wooden boards of the era were an elite, highly paid group of athletes who could take on the best in the world and beat them. Among the Europeans who traveled to the U.S. to race on our tracks were Tour de France winners Petit-Breton and Octave Lapize and Italian greats Giuseppe Olmo, Alfredo Binda and Costante Girardengo. As with road racing today, Australians seemed to be natural six-day racers and the list of Aussies who did well is long, including one of the greatest of all, Alf Goullet.
A modern Tour de France rider covers about 3,500 kilometers (2,200 miles) over 3 weeks. In 1914 the six-day team of Alf Goullet and Alfred Grenda raced the Madison Square Garden Six-Day and set a record that still stands, 2,759.2 miles in 142 hours. These men were magnificent sportsmen and their accomplishments were prodigious.
Great writers, including Ernest Hemingway, James Thurber and Damon Runyon, were drawn to the 1920s track scene and wrote about it. In 1925 President Calvin Coolidge invited the team of Jimmy Walthour, Jr and Freddie Spencer to the White House because he wanted to meet the two cyclists whom he said competed with him for newspaper headlines.
I ask the reader to stop for a minute. Have you ever heard of these men, the Armstrongs and Lemonds of our grandfather's time? Like so much of early and mid-twentieth century Americana, this spectacular part of our past is slowly getting wiped out of our collective memory. It shouldn't be so.
Nye's visually stunning book, The Six Day Races: America's Jazz-Age Sport is an irresistible scrapbook of those exciting years when bicycle racing had a firm grip on the American imagination. Pictures of dapper men in bowler hats and starched collars watching speeding racers steam around banked velodromes instantly conjure up another time. There's Petit-Breton, winner of the Tour de France, who competed at Madison Square Garden in 1903 and 1904. Another turn of the century picture shows a young man proudly standing with a bike that rather resembles one of Graeme Obree's record machines. Is there anything new in the world? Eddie Cantor, May Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, George Burns, Gracie Allen and Jimmy Durante went to the races and Nye has pictures of them that capture the mixture of sport and glamour that the Sixes represented.
Perhaps the image that most powerfully conveys bicycle racing's place in the 1920s is one photograph from 1925 showing eight athletes, called the "Kings of Sport", who were invited to a banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York. Most of the names will be familiar: Babe Ruth, boxer Gene Tunney, swimmer and future movie star Johnny Weissmuller, hockey star Bill Cook, Wimbledon champion Bill Tilden and golfing great Bobby Jones. Sitting with the other sporting giants, as equals, are cyclists Freddie Spencer and Charlie Winter.
Accompanying the hundreds of photographs is an excellent text. Perhaps no man knows more about American cycling than Mr. Nye. An earlier book of his, Hearts of Lions was more than the best history of American cycling ever written, Nye performed an important service by interviewing many of the great legends of America's golden age of racing, several just before they passed away. In The Six Day Bicycle Races Nye puts that knowledge to good use, guiding the reader from American track racing's origins in the late 19th century through its bloom of prosperity and its slow decline with the onset of the depression.
After reading the book, I still like to go back and thumb through a few pages here and there, imagining a band playing in the infield while the racers zoom around a short (10 laps to the mile) indoor track doing their flashy, dangerous work. Reggie McNamara crashed more than 1,500 times in a career of 108 six-days that covered about 135,000 miles. I wish I could have seen that brave, strong man race. Nye's book brings me as close as I can come to that dream.
This is a wonderful book written by the man who knows American racing best, filled with pictures that have the power to get any sports fan's heart thumping.
-Bill McGann, author of "The Story of the Tour de France"
Summary of The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-age Sport
Six-Day bicycle racing was once the biggest spectator sport in America: In the 1920s and 1930s, those envents held at indoor tracks around the country attracted bigger crowds and paid bigger purses than baseball, football, or hockey. This highly pictorial books tells the story of six-day racing in America from its beginning in the last decase of the 19th century up to attempts at revival in the 1970s. A lively text by Peter Joffre Nye and an amazing collection of duotone photographs allows the reader to relive this exciting period, this almost forgotten era of American sports history.Cycling Books
Book Subjects
- Arts & Photography
- Biographies & Memoirs
- Business & Investing
- Children's Books
- Comics & Graphic Novels
- Computers & Internet
- Cooking, Food & Wine
- Entertainment
- Gay & Lesbian
- Health, Mind & Body
- History
- Home & Garden
- Horror
- Law
- Literature & Fiction
- Mystery & Thrillers
- Nonfiction
- Outdoors & Nature
- Parenting & Families
- Professional & Technical
- Reference
- Religion & Spirituality
- Romance
- Science
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Sports
- Teens
- Travel
Most talked about in Cycling Books
Arkansas Valley Mountain Bikingby Mark S Wolff
Barking Dog Guides Press; Published: 2010-12-15; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.38
Price in other shops:
All About Bikes and Bicycling: Care, Repair and Safetyby MAX ALTH
BAILEY BROS.& SWINFEN LTD; Published: 1974; Hardcover; Book
The Tour de France: A Cultural History, Updated with a New Prefaceby Christopher S. Thompson
University of California Press; Published: 2008-04-07; Paperback; Book
Best price: $17.88
Price in other shops:
Cycling Home from Siberiaby Rob Lilwall
Hodder Pb; Published: 2009-08-20; Paperback; Book
Best price: $48.44
Wheels!: The kids' bike bookby Megan Stine
Little, Brown; Published: 1990; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $15.89
Lance Armstrong: A Biography (Greenwood Biographies)by Paula Marie Johanson
Greenwood; Published: 2011-04-07; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $22.65
Price in other shops:
Across America by Bicycle: Alice and Bobbi's Summer on Wheelsby Alice Honeywell, Bobbi Montgomery
University of Wisconsin Press; Published: 2010-10-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $9.38
Price in other shops:
Fallen Angel: The Passion of Fausto Coppiby William Fotheringham
Random House UK; Published: 2010-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $8.53
Price in other shops:
Cycling in the South West of Ireland (Cycling Guide)Harper Collins; Published: 2002-08-05; Paperback; Book
Best price: $59.57
Cycling in the South East of Ireland (Cycling Guide) Collinsby Collins
Collins; Published: 2001-05-08; Spiral-bound; Book
Best price: $9.95
Similar Books and other products
Tomorrow, We Rideby Jean Bobet
Cordee; Published: 2008-09-03; Paperback; Book
Best price: $15.60
Boy Racer: My Journey to Tour de France Record-Breakerby Mark Cavendish
Velo Press; Published: 2010-06-01; Paperback; Book
Best price: $13.37
Price in other shops:
The Noblest Invention: An Illustrated History of the Bicycleby Editors of Bicycling Magazine
Rodale Books; Published: 2003-11-15; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $14.95
Price in other shops:
Breaking Away (Widescreen Edition)Fox; Release date: 2002-01-29; DVD
Best price: $4.21
Price in other shops:
Team 7-Eleven: How an Unsung Band of American Cyclists Took on the World - and Wonby Geoff Drake
VELO; Velo Press; Published: 2011-09-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $17.07
Price in other shops:
The Spring Classics: Cycling's Greatest One-Day Racesby Philippe Bouvet, Phillipe Brunel, Pierre Callewaert, Jean-Luc Gatellier, Serge Laget
VELO; Velo Press; Published: 2010-09-01; Hardcover; Book
Best price: $26.36
Price in other shops:
The Golden Age of Bicycle Racing in New Jerseyby Michael C. Gabriele
The History Press; Published: 2011-03-11; Paperback; Book
Best price: $13.85
Price in other shops:
The Riderby Tim Krabbe
Bloomsbury USA; Published: 2003-06-12; Paperback; Book
Best price: $7.20
Price in other shops:
Major Taylor: The Extraordinary Career of a Champion Bicycle Racerby Andrew Ritchie
The Johns Hopkins University Press; Published: 1996-05-09; Paperback; Book
Best price: $13.92
Price in other shops:
The Six-Day Bicycle RacesRelease date: 2006-12-15; DVD
Best price: $29.95