Ride to Nowhere

Sometimes crawling at a walking pace along the narrow, level path past the cots, sometimes swooping at 30 m. p. h. around the steep sides of the great bowl built of spruce boards in Madison Square Garden, bicycle riders raced in the 40th International Six-Day Race. Old Reggie MacNamara, a champion twelve years ago and still strong though no longer fast, was entered; so was big, blond, popular Charles Winter; Gaetano Belloni's wild mane of crinkly hair pushed out above his handlebars. The crowds, always emphatically Italian in Manhattan, cheered Linari & Binda, billed as an imported road team, but they yelled loudest for their favorites, Franco Georgetti and Paul Brocardo. When the last hour began, Brocardo & Georgetti were riding desperately to keep a one-lap lead over two young Belgians, Adolph Charlier and Roger De Nef. Strong, ambitious, daring, Charlier & De Nef were in every jam, always dangerous, took three times as many points for sprints as anyone else. But in that last hour of a race in which there had been many accidents and in which all records since the Berlin system of point scoring was introduced in 1916 had been broken, Brocardo & Georgetti kept their lead, took first place, with De Nef & Charlier second, Belloni & Richili third. How far the results of a six-day race are determined in advance critics of sport have never agreed. At times John Chapman, impresario of U. S. six-day racing, promoter of races in Newark, Boston, Chicago, Providence, has been suspected of arranging an appeal to whatever foreign element is largest in the town where the race was being held. But recent races won by Frenchmen Letourner & Guinbretiere in Pole-filled Chicago have weakened such suspicion. In one way undoubtedly Tsar Chapman can shape his races--he teams the riders. Anyone who objects to being teamed the way he wants has no way of protesting, since Chapman controls the business. He rode races himself till 1903, then managed tracks in Butte and Salt Lake City, slowly expanding. Every year he goes to the Paris races, picks out European riders and persuades them to come to the U.S. by guaranteeing them $100 to $1,000 per day while racing. Prize money for last week's race was $10,000.

Though wily John Chapman is the only oldtime bicycle rider who has become important in promoting races, many other men now-famed in quieter trades were once pedalers. Some are: George Collett, father of National Woman's Golf Champion Glenna Collett; the late Albert Champion, A. C. Spark Plug man; Howard ("Poke") Freeman, cartoonist on the Newark Evening News; Worthington Longfellow Mitten, Davenport, Iowa, builder of bicycles. And many men still famed above everything else for their cycling days have done well in quieter trades. Frank Kramer, 18 times U. S. sprint champion, is police commissioner of East Orange, N. J. Maurice Brocco, for whom only two years ago the crowds were howling b-b-r-r-R-R-O-C-C-O. runs a sporting goods store in Paris. Oscar Egg makes bicycles there.

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