A Journey Through Cycling History with John Kennedy Howard

Olympic Cyclist John Kennedy Howard shares the impact cyclist Major Taylor has had on his life and what we can learn from John's fictionalized biography of The Black Cyclone.

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Valerie - Welcome to Book Worthy, where we talk about the heart behind the books your kids are reading. Today, we're talking with cycling legend John Kennedy Howard. John is a three-time Olympian, Pan Am gold medalist, and Ironman champion. If that wasn't enough, John has five book titles and hundreds of articles spanning every facet of cycling. His latest book is a middle-grade sports history piece called The Black Cyclone, a story of the first acclaimed African-American sports hero, Marshall Major Taylor, a hero the world forgot. Welcome to Bookworthy, John.

John -Thank you, Valerie. Great to be here.

Valerie - It's a pleasure to have you. I enjoyed reading through this book and learning something new, both about cycling and about history itself. What inspired you to write this book, The Black Cyclone?

John - Well, Major Taylor, I would have to say, was a boyhood hero. There were several cyclists that came to mind, but Major Taylor stood out because of what he endured in terms of his race. He was a real pioneer in the field of sports. Let's see, how would I describe Major Taylor? He was, well, yes, the first acclaimed African-American sports hero, but this was an era when cyclists were the top athletes of the day. They certainly outranked baseball players, and part of that was because it was an extraordinarily dangerous sport, and you could die racing bicycles. So Major Taylor was at one point the highest-paid athlete in the world, bar none. And he didn't just arrive at that. Was a childhood prodigy. He raced in Indianapolis, as a teenager, 13 years old when he won his first race. And he did it convincingly. It wasn't just a fluke. He actually beat the top riders of the day, or at least in the Midwest. The first race that he entered was a handicap, which means that he would have started first and all of the top riders he would have been following him, chasing him down and he actually crossed the finish line ahead of the Indiana state champion Walter Marmon who went on to great fame as the builder of the Marmon automobile which won the first Indy 500 in 1911. So Marmon was totally impressed with Major Taylor. He said, when the official said there's no way we can give this black kid a gold medal, but Marmon stood up for him. He said he beat me fair and square, him the damn thing. So that was sort of the way it unraveled for the sport in Indianapolis, which was sort of a, gosh, a manufacturing hub, post-revolution era. And many of the automobiles, the high-tech automobiles of the day, came out of Indianapolis, as did, of course, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. But that was, there are so many stories, the track was where Major Taylor did a lot of his racing, the Newby Loop. One of the founders of the Indy 500 motor speedway was Arthur Newby. And they tore that bicycle track down to build what is now the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Yeah, a lot of connections in motor racing because the bicycle was quite literally the platform for the motorcycle, and then the

automobile. And so many of the inventions, and most profoundly, the pneumatic tire came from the bicycle, the lowly bicycle. Yeah, my girlfriend, Jody, says I ramble a lot. So excuse me if I'm rambling, but all of this is historical fact, and I think it's important to bring it out because bicycles were, you know, very, very popular in their day. You have to remember the fastest vehicles on the planet at the time were express trains, and they were coal-driven. So that and racehorses. So when some of the first records were set, they were set behind railroad cars. And one of them achieved a speed of 60 miles an hour behind the Long Island Express train, where they had laid boards between the rails. And that was thought to be at the time, looking back at it historically, the equivalent of Lindbergh's crossing of the Atlantic. That's how popular that event was. And it was a railroad promotion, of course, but it just captured the attention of the world at the time. So when Major Taylor won a race, it was big news. And unfortunately, there would be a lot of resistance. It was a real dichotomy because they thought at the time that he should not be allowed to race because of his color.

He had very dark skin, and of course, in the day, you were judged by the color of your skin. Because of that, he was just, at least in the United States, treated very, very badly. There were several attempts on his life. One that occurred back in, I believe it was Pennsylvania, where a rider strangled him from behind. He was not a big man. He was 5'6", 5'7". And another rider grabbed him from behind and wrestled him off the bicycle and proceeded to strangle him. And it hadn't been for the constable with the billy club, he may very well have killed Major Taylor right there on the spot, on the track. So this is sort of what he had to endure in order to win first the national championship in 1898 and then the world championship in Montreal, Canada, in 1899.

Valerie - Wow, what kind of research did you have to do to learn more about this man?

John -Lots. I spent many, many hours in the microfiche labs at what I call the RUM Library in Sydney, Australia, to get that portion of the story. And then the same thing with the Bibliothèque in Paris, tons of information on that era of sports. And I actually have some of the original press clippings from the day. The paper was of better quality than it is today in newsprint. So I have some of that stuff, and I followed; there are four, actually five biographies on Major Taylor. I used all of the available information because it all revealed something new about the man. And in addition, I had one huge advantage. I started in the 80s. It's embarrassing how long it took me to write this book. But my co-author, Renee Maurer, and I began really hammering it out and putting the pieces together after my interviews with Major Taylor's daughter, Sydney Taylor Brown, whom I just called up. I said,

I introduced myself and told her I wanted to write a book about her father. And this was before any of the biographies were out. And she was very receptive and invited me to come back to Pittsburgh and interview her, which I did several times. And I got, as Paul Harvey would say, the rest of the story. There was so much material there that was not contained and had never been revealed. And I'm sure I spent more time with Sydney than anybody, any other reporter. She died at 102, and she lived a very healthy life. When I met her in her 80s, she was still extremely lucid and told me things about her father, some of which ended in tears because she just couldn't go there. But it was not so much the period when he was at his prime. It was later, after his retirement. What I wrote was a biographical novel. And I gave voice to Major Taylor because I believed wholeheartedly that I had enough information that I could really flush out the character and his tone of voice and what pissed him off and what he had to endure and all of those various ingredients blended into this book and the value of that is that, you know, it's a version of history that needed to be told.

Valerie - Very exciting. Now, how has Major Taylor's story affected you and your passion for cycling?

John - Well, first of all, I was inducted into the United States Cycling Hall of Fame the same year as my boyhood hero in 1989. I can't tell you what a huge honor that was because I revere him more than any other athlete in the world. And so what followed was a completely different set of styles. Major Taylor was a sprinter who also had the capacity, and they proved that in the New York six-day race. When he was 18 years old, they entered him in a six-day race, and he actually finished seventh, which was remarkable considering what he was up against and the distance covered, which I think was over 3,000 miles on a 250-meter board track with banking, which would have won the event the previous year. Back to what I was saying earlier, he was still a pure sprinter. I am not a sprinter. I am a slow-twitch Anglo-American and an African American.

The red fibers are so, so important. And this is one of the reasons that black athletes today are such incredible sprinters and excel in all the ball sports because of that fast-twitch muscle fiber. I'm more endurance-oriented. When I won sprints, it took a lot of finesse in order to do it.

With Major Taylor, what he had to endure, there would be times when a third of the field in a final heat race of the night would be riding not to win, but to make sure he didn't win. Tremendous odds. And yet, because of his skill set, he was trained as a bicycle acrobat,

He trained himself, actually. Nobody else helped him with that one, but he was so adept and so well coordinated that he could do things on a bike that nobody in that era could do. So he had that ability to stand on the saddle and steer the bike with his feet and do things that today are somewhat common in bicycle acrobatics. The Germans have really perfected that art, but nothing that Major Taylor didn't do 140 years ago. So the fact of the matter is, he was so well coordinated and so well balanced that he could slip through holes. Again, he was not a tall man.

Valerie - Wow.

John - And because of that, he rode through holes that were in the pack that weren't intended to; nobody else could get through there, but he did. He wove his way through and by no means did he win all the races, but he certainly won his share against incredible odds. So I give him credit for that. Eventually, he realized that the racism that he was enduring in the US was not to be the case in Europe. He negotiated a contract, took him two years to negotiate a contract with, let's see, who would that have been? The French promoter, Victor Brieire. And that was important because when the first contract was spelled out, it required him to race on Sundays. Now, Major Taylor was a Christian. He didn't believe in that. He promised his mother on her deathbed, literally, that he would never race on the Sabbath. And he didn't until the very end of his career when they finally held his feet to the fire and said, You don't race on Sunday, you won't race, period. But before that, it is important to note that cycling was big in Europe. I mean, it was as big in Europe throughout Europe as it was in America, actually bigger than in America. And they changed the entire structure of bicycle racing to accommodate him. And that meant, you know, I think there's a fair amount of truth to this.

They loved their opera on Saturdays, and they went to bicycle races on Sunday. And that's how it went. That's how it's the preferred method. Well, they had to change that to accommodate the champion of the world. And they did. Yeah. And that lasted. I'm really getting ahead of myself here and I probably shouldn't do this, but at the end of his career he had been beaten up and his career was very long, almost 10 years he stayed at the top of the sport, but it eventually got to him and when the announcement was made, well you're not winning as many races as you used to so we're going to just tell you straight away you've got to change your pattern at which point his career went downhill abysmal. He couldn't conceive of what it was like to race on a day that he'd always spent time reading his Bible and being a pious

young man. Well, he wasn't young anymore. He was older. And 10 years, you know, I have some. I commissioned several portraits of Major Taylor. One in his Ivor Johnson-sponsored track suit as an 18-year-old and 10 years later, and you can see the difference is just amazing. He was no longer young. So in spite of that, he maintained his speed, and I will tell you a little bit of a story about the interview here. At the end of his career, after all three tours, no, four tours of Europe, he finally realized that it was time to come home. So one of the last things that he did was race in the world championship. Well, he didn't even make it to the quarter.

He didn't get there, and again it was on Sunday. So finally, his sponsor, Alcyon Cycles they was well known in the era because they featured women in very sparsely clad bicycle outfits. And so, a very popular European brand, Alcyon directors told him, ask him, would you please go to Roane and battle the recent French world champion. And this young man was, you know, in the era that 10 years was a big, big jump. He was at least 10 to 12 years younger than Major Taylor. He was the French and world cycling sprint champion. And nobody gave Major Taylor any chance at all of winning against this guy. So he went to Roane because it was a Saturday event, and that was the clause that he finally got across. Said, I will race him on Saturday. Well, against all odds, the sprint races are three up. So you have three events, three sprints.

And the first one, he actually beat the young rider by, you know, Alcyon tire width. It was so close. He just nosed him out. The second heat was taken by the Frenchman. And the third heat, he used every resource, everything he understood about racing bicycles, and he walloped the young guy by almost a length and a half. So that tells you he still had it. And his last event was in, I believe the Newark, yeah, I believe it was the Newark track where this was in 1917 and he had been out of retirement or he he was he jumped back into retirement and from retirement to race in this event and he his the bicycle that he actually used was loaned to him by let's see how quickly we forget these names. I'll think of it, I'm sure. But anyway, I interviewed this guy for a long time, and he had loaned Major Taylor his best bike. And I caught him in literally the closing months of his life. And that was the case with several of his contemporaries who were much younger than Taylor. But he loaned him the bike, and Taylor dominated it. He just ate it up, and you know he wasn't going to live that much longer after that. I think he was probably about 50 years old at the time. So he came back, he did what he needed to do, he walloped all of the riders, the old timers of that era, and that was, of course, the last time he ever sat on a bicycle, I think. Yeah, and you know, I won't reveal what happened because I think readers need to find that out for themselves.

Valerie - Well, what do you hope kids walk away from when they read the Black Cyclone?

John -An appreciation for what it took to excel under extremely harsh conditions. Think Major Taylor really was a pioneer in the very early civil rights movement, way before that term ever came to fruition. Let's see, Booker T. Washington was a friend, and he really enjoyed going back and forth with Booker T. Washington and trying to get across. Mean, Booker T., is

somewhat of a staunch believer in paying your dues, taking your time, and accepting white men's version of where you're supposed to be in your life. And they argued about that. But there were other associates who, including Jack Johnson, the boxer, didn't believe that at all.

Du Bois, William Du Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois, who was the complete opposite of Washington, believed that it was time to take what's yours. You know, some of his writings were, you know, he was the founder of the NAACP. He was the editor of Crisis Magazine, and the most popular black literature of the day was published in Crisis Magazine. So Major Taylor and W.E.B. Du Bois were friends. They, and I'll tell you one quick story that is in the book about Jack Johnson, but I think that tells you that he was very, very concerned about the future of black athletes and where they needed to be in their lives, and until probably his dying day, he believed that it was important to give them their best shot. Keep in mind that in the 1890s, blacks were banned from many sports. They were simply not allowed to play. So, of course, that'd be a joke today, but you can see what it was like to endure, especially in America.

Valerie - I think it's really important for kids growing up right now in a world where we're still talking about civil rights. We're still talking about how we're treated by race and gender and all that. And I think that kids need to see the kind of where our culture has come from, which it's amazing to see from 1900 to today, there has been an amazing steps forward, but there's still a lot of room to continue to bridge that gap and to heal from just those past atrocities and hard things that have happened in just so many different people's lives. And I love that this story kind of gives light to that for young kids to kind of explore what it was like to be a young African-American athlete and what that was truly like, because it's a different world now, but there are lots of similarities.

John - Yes, indeed.

Valerie - Well, John, what is your favorite book?

John - I like William Styron's book.  Real inspiration for me, the story of, I know I've got it here somewhere, Sophie's Choice was one of my favorite books, certainly, but the story that I'm

searching for, forgive me, it must be here, I know it's here somewhere, the story about the first real open rebellion against slavery, and the leader of that was Matt Turner. The story, The Confessions of Matt Turner, was the book that really gave me true inspiration about writing this one, and I wanted to approach it the same way. So it was really powerful, I just ate it up, and it was published in 1957. didn't discover it until probably the late 60s, but it became a best seller.

Valerie - Well, John, what can we expect next from you?

John - Well, I'm working on my own autobiographical piece that will include some of the most amazing stories, tracing it back to a goblin era when things were not right with me. I felt like I needed to, without going into some of the lugubrious details, some things happened to me in my youth that I feel like it's time to tell what happened. And so, yeah, I'm going to do that. And there'll be uplifting pieces of it, too, but it'll be short stories. And I'm working on that one. Yeah, that's coming. But I'm in no rush to finish. The books that I've written in the past, all five of them, five of the six, have all been under deadline, and I cannot write that way. It just doesn't flow. One of my books, which I did for human kinetics, called Mastering Cycling, was written under a deadline. It was just laborious trying to do a book like that. I got exactly what I needed, but it wasn't fun. Think as an author, if you don't enjoy the process, what's the point? Know because ultimately, it'll come back to the reader.

Valerie - They'll feel it through the words, won't they, if their author doesn't really enjoy what they're doing for certain. Well, where can people find out more about you and your books?

John - We're revising our entire website, but www.MajorTaylorStory.com should be up. I know we're working on that one, too, but I think it should be there. www.MajorTaylorStory.com, you can purchase the book there, and you can get it at Barnes & Noble, and certainly at Amazon. And you should be able to get an autograph copy from the website.

Valerie - Very exciting. We'll make sure to have those links in the show notes so people can find them easily. Thank you so much for joining me today, John.

John - Thank you so much, Valerie.

Valerie- And thank you for joining John and me on this episode of the Bookworthy Podcast. Check the show notes for any books or links that we discussed, and let us know in the comments what your favorite way to eat potatoes is. Be sure to like and subscribe to discover more great books together.

Happy reading.