Marshall W Howard, nicknamed the Major, was one of the first American superstar cyclists at the turn of 20th Century. Then, track cycling was one of the biggest sports in the US.
They rode at New York’s Madison Square Garden and other velodromes around the land. Tens of thousands would pack in to watch.
Howard won his first race at the age of 13. At 17, he broke world records. He turned professional when he was still a teenager. No one could touch him. In 1899, he won 29 from 49 races and became a world champion. The first thing people noticed about Major Howard when he lined up at a race, wrote Gilbert King for the smithsonian.com, was not his speed but the colour of his skin. Howard was black, born into poverty in Indianapolis in 1878, one of eight children. His father fought for the Union in the Civil War. His grandfather was a Kentucky slave.
“Nicknamed ‘the Black Cyclone’, he would explode into fame as the world champion of his sport almost a decade before the African-American heavyweight Jack Johnson won his world title,” wrote King.
“Taylor’s victory earned him tremendous fame, but he was barred from races in the South, and even when he was allowed to ride, plenty of white competitors either refused to ride with him or worked to jostle or shove him or box him in.
Spectators threw ice and nails at him. At the end of a one-miler in Massachusetts, WE Backer, who was upset at finishing behind Taylor, rode up behind him afterward and pulled him to the ground. “Becker choked him into a state of insensibility,” the New York Times reported, ‘and the police were obliged to interfere. It was fully fifteen minutes before Taylor recovered consciousness, and the crowd was very threatening toward Becker”. Becker would be fined $50 for the assault.
Last week, some 115 years after Becker was fined for choking a fellow black athlete, Branislau Samoilau, a Belarusian with the Polish CCC Sprandi Polkowice team, donated a month’s salary to apologise for calling MTN-Qhubeka’s Eritrean rider, Natnael Berhane, a “n*****” at the Tour of Austria. Samoilau has apologised to Berhane, who has accepted it and convinced the race organisers not to kick the Belarusian off the race.
Racism is a terrible and yet rare thing in professional cycling. This is because of the simple fact that there have been very few black riders in the history of professional cycling and the Tour de France. Tunisia’s Ali Neffati was the first, in 1913 and 1914, with a few others from Algeria and Morocco in the 30s and 40s, before a North Africa team, made up of riders from Morocco, a colony of France, and Algeria, which was regarded as a part of greater France, rode in the 1950 Tour.
The professional peloton remains mainly white. There are three black riders in the 2015 Tour de France, two of them riding for MTN-Qhubeka and the other for Europcar. Yohann Gène, the Europecar rider from Guadeloupe, first took part in the Tour in 2011 and his team manager, Jean-Rene Bernaudeau, admitted they had been “subject to racism”.
“I had to deal with a few problems and contact sponsors of two foreign teams about it. After the doping incidents, I couldn’t let racism be part of cycling,” he said.
Last week, Daniel Teklehaimanot of Eritrea and MTN-Qhubeka won the King of the Mountains jersey and has held on to it ever since. His compatriot and teammate, Merhawu Kudus, is the youngest rider at the Tour. They are being followed around by a group of Eritrean fans, whose joy is unbounded. Africa is at the Tour de France, and Africa is shining.
The Black Cyclone raced around the world and made good money, some $30000 a year, a fortune at the time. He retired in 1910 and his life changed for the worse. He lost all of his money in the Wall Street Crash, and then he lost his marriage and his health. He wrote his autobiography, The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World, and, wrote King, “spent the last years of his life selling the book door-to-door in Chicago. I felt I had my day,’ he wrote, ‘and a wonderful day it was too.”
He was in a pauper’s grave until some former professionals organised for his remains to be laid to a final rest in a “more fitting location”. He was one of the greats, but he died unknown and alone, the first superstar black cyclist. There are more black cycling superstars on their way. Professional cycling had best get used to it.