The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-age Sport [Hardcover]

Peter Nye (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 30, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

As cycling reaches new heights of popu-larity in America, Peter Joffre Nye contin-ues to remind us that this era is but a renais-sance. For the charity rider enamored with the novelty of the sport, this book will be pulling back leaf after leaf as you enter a lush garden of the Halcyon days of American cycling. At the turn of the 19th Century, cycling enjoyed a popularity few realize in the smothering pop kitsch that is baseball. The center of that popularity was the Six-Day races held on tracks throughout the U.S. This pictorial history is great to leave around your house or office, because it has just enough layover to an earlier generation of household names known only to Baby Boomers. Jimmy Durante, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Rudy Vallee, and Jackie Cooper were all fans of the races held at Madison Square Garden. Damon Runyan, perhaps the great-est sports writer of the 20th Century, heralded the sport. And the year Ty Cobb earned $5,000 playing baseball, Bobby Walthour Sr., made $20,000 racing bikes on the board tracks. This book also drills home some beauti-ful bits that given the tech-nology of the time drops the jaw of today s hard-core cyclist. For example, the original six-day races were solo marathons in which rid-ers often crashed heavily after falling asleep at the wheel. Charles Miller of Chicago, the king of the one-man sixes, would put Chris Eatough to shame, riding 2,105 miles in the first Madison Square Garden event. The concern for those racers wellbeing sparked such a protest the two-man six-day race was developed. Peter Nye s research and writing sparlde, but just enough to keep astride the photos collected by Jeff Groman for this book. Nicely done are the touches to include Jackie Simes and Marty Nothtstein, which leaves the rider a sense of optimism going forward. This is a splendid book and a great gift. No, we won t give back our promotional copy. Richard Fries, in Bike Culture East --Bike Culture East, No. 138, Summer 2007

Press Review: Bicycling Magazine January 2009 On the dedication page of The Six-Day Bicycles Races, America's Jazz-Age Sport, the authors of this homage to velodrome bicycle racing in the United States thank their families for "giving them the blue-sky to rescue the history of this once robust sport." The 225 pages that follow are hardly a rescue mission; more a labor of love by three men who invested their time, care and enduring passion to bring a period when cycling was king to life. Peter Joffre Nye takes the lead on Six-Day Bicycle Races, backed by the contributions of cycling historians Jeff Groman and Mark Tyson. The result is a meticulously researched and elaborate coffee table book featuring stories, photographs, news clippings and memorabilia from an era when bike racing captivated our collective conscious and cyclists were the major league sports heroes of the time. Six-Day Bicycle Races begins with high wheel bicycles in the 1870's and ends with Americans Marty Nothstein and Ryan Oelkers claiming victory at the Moscow Six-Day in 2002. It was the first US Madison team claimed victory since Charlie Bergna and Cecil Yates won Cleveland in 1949; and one that was built on the blood, sweat and guts of the legends found on the pages in between. Six-day racing is one of the most grueling, physically demanding sports of all time. This book captures its birth and will be cherished by anyone who loves riding or racing bikes, sports history, or has ever been mesmerized by the fast-paced, adrenaline rush of velodrome track racing. Liz Reap Carlson, Bicycling Magazine --Bicycling Magazine, January 2009

About the Author

Peter Joffre Nye is a Washington DC journalist and editor and former amateur bicycle racer who has written extensively about the sport. His earlier books include Hearts of Lions: the History of Bicycle Racing in America and The Lance Armstrong Performance Program.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Cycle Publishing (May 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 189249549X
• ISBN-13: 978-1892495495
• Product Dimensions: 11.3 x 8.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #981,375 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Long Over Due Effort - Thanks!, November 4, 2006

By 

Kim Bottles "cyclist/sailor" (Bainbridge Island, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-age Sport (Hardcover)

Jeff, Peter and Mark have done a fine job of bring this almost forgotten part of American Sports history back to life with their very nicely done effort. Great pictures and great stories. Thank goodness Jeff saved all of those items, bikes and stories so they could be enjoyed by all. If you ever get to Bainbridge Island, WA visit Jeff's shop Classic Cycle on the main street of town and view his wonderful cycling museum. Thanks Jeff for a job very well done!

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-Age Sport., January 16, 2008

By 

Bill McGann "Author of The Story of the Tour ... (Cherokee Village, AR, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-age Sport (Hardcover)

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"

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Words, Photos Work Hand-in-Glove, November 3, 2006

By 

R. J. Czajkowski "U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame" (Somerville, NJ, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America's Jazz-age Sport (Hardcover)

An outstanding reotrospective of a not-so-long-ago sport now lost to time. The packaging and photos work hand-in-glove with the words to make the reader feel as if he were a part of the cycling frenzy of this era. In today's pop-culture mindeset where things are forgotten and discarded in a flash, this book does justice to a unique aspect of "Americana" that should be, and now is preserved.