Tenth International Conference on Sport & Society

Abstract

In 1899, African American cyclist Marshall “Major” Taylor was crowned the World Champion in the one-mile track sprint in Montreal, Canada. Two-years later, Taylor would leave the United States, largely on an account of American racism, to race in Europe and Australia. Taylor’s success made him one of the few truly global sporting superstars of the period, and while Taylor’s story has been well told, he was not the only African American or American to make their way abroad on a bicycle between 1890 and 1914. At the end of the nineteenth century, African Americans were viewed by white racial scientists as a race that was unfit for industrial labor. African Americans’ ability to excel on the bicycle, a quintessential technology of industrial modernity, challenged prevailing conceptions of the capabilities of black bodies in the industrial world. This paper, then, examines the ways in which questions of race, empire, and ability shaped the social and cultural meanings of technologically-facilitated sport at the turn-of-the-century. Although Taylor is the most well-known African American cyclist of the period to travel abroad, he was not the only one. This paper brings to light the lesser known, Woody Headspeth, who raced across Europe from 1903 until his retirement in 1913 and who would remain in Europe until his death in Lisbon in 1941. Cyclists are often overlooked in scholarship but the bicycle’s intersection of human and machine makes it an essential object to understand the global politics of ability, sport, and society.