Page:The fastest bicycle rider in the world - 1928 - Taylor.djvu/118



At the close of the world’s championship meet in Montreal, where the most colorful page was added to the history of bicycle racing, I competed at the A. C. C. in Boston, on August 16, 1899, four short days since I won the World’s One-mile Professional Championship honors, I received a most remarkable ovation as I made my first appearance on the Charles River Park track, under my newly acquired title, World’s Champion, and I was a mighty proud one too.

I tried in vain to qualify for the final, but the entire field violated every rule of the track at my expense as the fans howled their disapproval of the underhanded methods adopted by my rivals. The officials did not so much as reprimand those who had fouled me in such a daring manner.

Later in the day I tried to qualify for the final of the one-mile handicap event but I was so badly roughed by the field that I failed to win a place. I was a pretty sorely mussed up World’s Champion when my rivals had finished with me at the end of the first day’s racing.

One of the Boston dailies had the following to say about the meet: “Major Taylor is shut out of every heat. Riders pocket and otherwise prevent him from winning. In the expressive language of the training quarters, they hung it on to Major Taylor today in every race he started in. The first trick was turned in the five-mile professional championship.

“Two men in each of the fastest heats, and only the winner of the slowest heat, were to qualify for the final. In Major Taylor’s heat, owing to scratches, there were but five starters besides Major Taylor. In the other two heats there were eight and eleven respectively, and although the Major did his share of pacing in the fifteen laps of his heat, Watson Coleman beat him for first place by inches only. But in the other two heats the men rode like fiends in order to make their time faster than Taylor’s heat, and as they were successful, the Major could not start in the final of the championship event. But had he not been ‘pocketed’ in his heat until the tape was reached, Coleman’s win might not have been a fact.”

My troubles began in the first heat of the five-mile championship race and even before the pistol was fired I surmised what the frame-up was going to be. In vain I asked the referee to have pacemakers put in telling him that I felt certain there were some underhanded tactics planned for the race. My suspicions were aroused when half