Front Flap
Decades before Xtreme Sports, Six-Day bicycle racing—the
original multi-day physical contest—enjoyed phenomenal
popularity in cities around the United States and across Europe.
Fifteen teams of two riders each took turns pedaling around
steeply banked board tracks for six days and nights straight.
Teams went more than 2,500 miles—farther than the Tour de
France, which lasts three weeks and began in 1903 as a six-day
road race.
Sixes were riding high when the 1920s ushered in a new
emphasis on youth. Modern women called Flappers cut their hair
short, wore make-up, and exposed their legs from the knees down.
Flappers and their boyfriends—Sheiks—defied conventional
behavior. Novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald christened the decade the
Jazz Age.
New York City’s Madison Square Garden held the Super Bowl of
Sixes. Cyclists in vibrant-colored silk jerseys hunched over
steel frames and wooden-rimmed wheels. Each autumn and winter,
they thrilled Flappers, Sheiks, and everyone else. Riders in the
Garden—and similar buildings in Chicago, Los Angeles, and other
cities—tore around the pine saucers at breakneck speed.
Audiences responded by leaping to their feet in a riot of noise
and excitement.
Bicycle racers were America’s superstars of the Jazz Age.
Newspapers covered Six-Days and made riders heroes. Sixes were a
mix of competition, spectacle, and—above all—an American sports
tradition.
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