Page:The fastest bicycle rider in the world - 1928 - Taylor.djvu/129

 Peoria track on that memorable occasion. I had sprinted home a winner in what I thought was the last lap of the five-mile race using everything I had at my command to defeat my worthy rival, Tom Butler, out by inches, when the bell sent us away on another heartbreaking trip around the track. On top of that I had to catch the field which had slipped by the two of us as we sat up following our crossing of the finishing line. It took a desperate effort to overtake the field and just as I had succeeded, the bunch rounded in to the home stretch, and I was forced to ride on the outside of the track from this point to the tape as the balance of the field had taken places on the pole where the track was hard, thus giving them a very good footing, while mine was exceptionally poor, since it was soft. However, I stuck to my task and fought for the finish line and won with Tom Butler trailing me.

Imagine my feelings when I was informed in my dressing room a few minutes after the finish of that wicked five-mile race that the manager of the track had disappeared, in the meantime, with the entire gate receipts. That meant I was to receive nothing for my efforts on that afternoon—the most trying of my career. It gave me little consolation to know that my fellow racers shared a similar fate, and we were a sorely disappointed lot as we made our way to the railroad station bound for home.

Incidentally, that was the last race held on that famous track in good old Peoria. It was known throughout the cycling world as one of the finest that ever staged a bicycle race. As a matter of fact the Peoria track, and those in Springfield, Massachusetts, Waltham, Massachusetts, and Asbury Park, New Jersey were four of the most famous bicycle tracks in the earlier days of cycle racing in this country.

From Peoria I made tracks for my old home in Indianapolis. A few days after I arrived there I received formal word of my having been declared champion of America by the L. A. W. for the second consecutive season.