The Reign

Montreal, 1899. Two brothers ride as one machine to box him in for the world championship, a judge robs him of the half mile in broad daylight, and he takes the theft without a word of protest. Then the final goes off, and he unleashes the jump no rival has ever learned to answer, and crosses the line as the champion of the entire world. The band strikes up The Star Spangled Banner, his anthem, played for a Black man, for once, as though he actually belongs to the flag it honors. He will say for the rest of his life it is the proudest moment he ever knew, and the saddest, because it took a foreign track to give it to him.He comes home a hero and is immediately fined five hundred dollars by his own federation for the privilege of racing for the American title, which he has already proven he can win. He pays it. He wins the title anyway and wears both crowns, world and national, at once. When his sponsors hand him a fashionable chainless drive that quietly steals a fraction off his jump, he rides it, feels the theft in his own legs, and switches back to a chain the moment he can, vindicated by nothing but his own speed.Then he crosses an ocean. Paris empties its shopfronts just to watch him walk down a street. The great French idol Edmond Jacquelin beats him once before a stunned crowd, and Taylor comes back and beats him in the rematch before a hundred thousand people screaming his name in a language he does not speak. In Australia, he travels the continent in his own private railway car, and five hundred cyclists meet his train in Adelaide in a silence so total it is louder than any cheer. Thirty thousand pack a single afternoon in Sydney. His daughter was born there, and he named her for the city that gave him that welcome.But the same combine that fouled him at home crosses the ocean to sabotage him even in paradise, and six years of unrelenting racing at the highest pitch a human body can sustain finally collapse in on him. In 1904 he walked away from the sport, undefeated by any man who ever beat him honestly.He beat the whole world, twice over, on three continents. He never once beat the country he was riding for.THE FASTEST HUMAN ON EARTH follows Marshall 'Major' Taylor across three volumes and a lifetime, from an Indianapolis boyhood to the summit of the cycling world and the long reckoning that followed, each volume anchored to the documented record of a champion his country was so slow to remember.