Desire Discrimination Determination: Black Champions in Cycling

"It’s undeniable that when you look at the history of cycling, there have been a number of amazing Afro-Caribbean athletes in the UK and African American athletes in the United States who have faced an uphill battle in terms of accessibility and outright discrimination in the sport. What Desire, Discrimination, Determination seeks to accomplish is to tell us some of the stories of black athletes that have been under-regarded in the past. There are a number of American riders, stretching back to probably most famously, Major Taylor (1878-1932), who was the first African American world cycling champion. He was physically talented, exceptionally famous, and, interestingly, speaks to an era in the United States when not so much road cycling, but the sport of track cycling—indoor racing on velodromes—eclipsed even baseball and American football as the most watched spectator sport. Madison Square Garden in New York City was actually built for the sport of track cycling. So there’s a whole history that Major Taylor embodies—not just his success as an African American and what he faced to accomplish that, but also an entire era of the sport that’s been largely forgotten. “Madison Square Garden in New York City was actually built for the sport of track cycling” There are some interesting historical reasons for that. First of all, the roads and the derailleurs necessary to race road bikes had not really been invented. Secondly, from the turn of the century running through to the 1930s, there was an obsession with indoor marathon events. There’s a cultural aspect to it. They’ve morphed into what are now called six-day bicycle races, but they were conceived in the same spirit as dancing for six days or any other of these feats of endurance from that era, including riding your bike for six days on velodromes. Major Taylor, although himself a sprinter, was certainly involved in the spectacle of the sport during that period of time. It’s a history book, but it very much runs to the present, even including currently active African American and Afro-British riders. It’s very, very interesting on what has been done in terms of discrimination and how to redress it to make cycling more accessible socio-economically and culturally. What prompted him to write this book was the promise of the 2012 Velodrome being built in East London, ostensibly hoping for more access for historically underprivileged communities in the sport of cycling, and some frustration with how that failed to fully manifest in the years after the 2012 Olympic Games . It’s not even so much the equipment. This opens the door to larger cultural conversations about meritocracy in some very interesting ways. Essentially, what has to happen, what’s necessary to develop an elite cyclist, is a relationship with a club, starting when you’re 12 or 13 years old, and growing out of a number of now very, very costly bicycles. These are road and track bicycles, perhaps a separate time trial bicycle too. This development curve has to start when one is 12 to maybe 16 years old at the oldest in order to produce an elite cyclist. It’s very community-involved and very cost-heavy. There’s a tradition of this happening in continental Europe: clubs have loan bikes in Belgium, in France, and these will be doled out. That does not happen in the UK or the US to the same extent. I think there’s a very different class connotation around cycling in the Low Countries as opposed to the US or the UK where cycling has, especially in recent years with the cost of bicycles, become more of an upper-middle-class sport. In Flanders, it’s looked at as a working-class sport, and often the riders who are successful are trying to flee working-class backgrounds—a life of manual labor working in a factory or something similar. It’s culturally very different there. A used road bicycle worthy of racing would probably cost at least 2000 pounds/dollars but this is the absolute lowest cost of entry and the vast majority of new top-end road bikes are between 9 and 12,000 pounds/dollars—some even a bit more. It’s very difficult. More recently, there have been a fair number of riders from the country of Eritrea. They’ve become successful World Tour-level road riders. A little bit further back, there was an American track sprinter named Nelson Vail at the 1984 Olympics. More recently, there’s a rider with whom I competed, Rahsaan Bahati from LA, and two brothers, Justin and Cory Williams, who are also quite successful at the US national criterium circuit. But really for international European cycling, the big success has been Eritrea because there are effective development pipelines which have slowly begun to manifest."