The Fast Times of Albert Champion Page 7
“I thought his form was good, so I made inquiries about him, and found out where he was working,”69 Warburton explained in an interview. He saw young Champion as a complete package: an optimistic nature, sound teeth, and requisite square shoulders in a slight but sturdy build.70 He brought other assets. Affiliation with Clément meant unlimited bicycles, Dunlop tires, and, of major importance, advertising opportunities. “I went and saw him while in the workshop, had a chat with him and his employer, and offered to take him in hand and make a man of him,” Warburton said.71
Champion didn’t see a need for the services of the Englishman, in his fifties—old in Champion’s estimation. “I thought I had about accomplished all anybody ought to be expected to do,”72 Champion recalled. “Then along came ‘Choppy’ Warburton, who said he wanted to train me. I asked him, ‘What for?’ I thought I was pretty good just as I was. I remember Warburton smiled and then he said, ‘Well, you never can tell what for.’”
Warburton offered two axioms from his experience about competition that impressed Champion: No lead is too great to overcome, and you can’t win unless you think you can.73
“The lad put me into communication with his mother. I explained matters to the old lady,” said Warburton.74 He proposed to train and manage Champion for paced racing the next year. Warburton sought to flee London and Paris because of the vile drug gossip enveloping him.75 He had Germany in mind. Many cities touted large vélodromes with banking suited for demi-fonds—middle distances of twenty-five miles to one hundred kilometers (62.5 miles), pacing behind tandems, triplets, and quads.
Marie Champion, a widowed mother of forty-three, associated cycling with disaster. Her Albert sometimes came home with torn, dirt-smeared britches and jerseys from one fall or another on his courier runs. If streets were harsh, then tracks to her were clothes-tearing flesh-eaters. She had patched and mended his clothes. She had refused to visit a track to watch him race, fearful he would end at the bottom of a pileup with bones broken and blood spilled. Even so, she and his brothers had relied on his earnings.
In his best French, Warburton explained that he understood her concern.76 He said that Champion had what it took to make it as a vedette, a star, like Jimmy Michael, one of the best-paid sportsmen in the world. Albert could provide a generous living for her and his brothers. The concept of earning money from bicycle racing baffled Marie Champion, as it still unnerves parents of an aspiring cyclist today. The widow knew only frugality, life’s hard edges, no margin for protection.
Whether Warburton’s campaign was reinforced by the assurance of Clément, himself the father of a son, or the pleadings from Champion, she acquiesced. She did, however, lay down stipulations. As long as Warburton paid all expenses, she would allow him to train her son.77 He could take him out of Paris—but only for brief trips. This last caveat jeopardized his plan to take Champion on the German circuit.
“Of course, as he was under age, that was all I could do,” Warburton admitted.78 “I started work upon him at once.” He devised a two-fold strategy: first, to train Champion and make him a world-class cyclist, and, second, to win the trust of Marie Champion.
Albert Champion followed Warburton to his second residence, at 19 Avenue Le Boucher, in the tree-lined west Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, near the Bois de Boulogne. Warburton began by sizing up the Frenchman. In stocking feet, Champion measured 5 feet 7-1/2 inches.79 He weighed, according to the English system, 8 stone 10 pounds—122 pounds.80 Afterward, Warburton escorted him to a tailor for clothes suitable for a gentleman sportsman. The tailor needed a few days to make the garments. In the meantime, Warburton and Champion visited Jules Beau’s studio. This time, Beau himself, rather than an assistant, took the photo. Champion, in his cycling jersey and shorts, posed with Warburton, holding Champion on his Gladiator. With the a new publicity photo, Champion had embarked on stardom.
Champion credited James “Choppy” Warburton with broadening his horizons. Photo by Jules Beau. Courtesy of Cherie Champion.
James Edward Warburton earned his bona fides by grabbing each opportunity with both hands and exploiting all it could offer. He is remembered as a controversial figure, reviled by some historians but acknowledged for finding diamonds in the rough and polishing their talents to astound the world.
The eldest of thirteen children, he was born in the Lancashire village of Haslingden, thirty miles from the Irish Sea.81 One day a boyhood companion had inquired about his father’s business. Warburton replied that he captained a ship cruising the sea—a fanciful scenario based on his friend’s awareness of how far they lived from the coast. The elder Warburton worked his whole adult life in the village. He managed a local beerhouse, the Wagon & Horses, favored by workers from a local wool mill.82 Next young Warburton’s gullible chum asked how his father’s passage had been. Warburton played along and said, “Rather choppy.” The story gained currency around the village. Thereafter he was nicknamed “Choppy.”83
Locals agreed he was an inveterate joker. “Many of his funny stories were told in so serious a manner that one could hardly tell whether he was joking or not,” one friend remarked.84 Haslingden residents knew the Warburton family as members of the local regimental brass band—young Warburton played the trombone. “Every year on the first Sunday in May, starting about 4:30 in the morning,” recalled an account in the Haslingden Observer, “we were awakened by the strains of ‘Hail, Smiling Morn,’ followed by hymns played by the whole family from the heights above their home.”85
In 1860, at seventeen, he was a runner competing for the Haslingden Athletic Club.86 Period accounts describe him as 5 feet 10 inches and whippet thin at just 110 pounds.87 “Tall and lithe, with scarcely an ounce of a superfluous flesh upon him, but with a remarkably broad chest, indicative of plenty of lung power, he had a long steady stride,” a neighbor remembered.88
He competed on cinder tracks, grass cricket grounds, and dirt paths of villages, towns, and cities up and down the length of England. His results led to invitations, a quarter-century before the modern Olympics were established (in 1896), to America for footraces up to twenty-five miles. He returned to England with tales of having toed start lines in venues from Buffalo to New York City and Newark, New Jersey, with red-skinned Indians, brown-skinned Africans, and pale faces from America and Canada—all of whom he outran.89 Altogether, he was credited with an excess of astounding six hundred wins.90 He collected 150 engraved cups of silver or tin and dozens of gold medals—some worth extra with a diamond chip. His 1870 national record for thirty miles in 2 hours, 58 minutes, 43 seconds91 bettered the 2:58:50 of Greece’s Spiridon Louis, winner of the 1896 Athens Olympics marathon of forty kilometers, or twenty-five miles.92 (London’s 1908 Olympics marathon introduced the standard distance: 26 miles and 385 yards.93) Other records included two miles in 9 minutes 49 seconds, and ten miles in 54 minutes 6-1/2 seconds.94
After Warburton had retired from competition in the 1880s, he worked as a full-time trainer at the Manchester Athletic Club before going to the London Athletic Club.95 He had acquired the bartender’s expertise of listening and holding someone’s attention with facial expressions, gestures, and modulating his voice in a manner that put his athletes in the right frame of mind. He also picked up an athletic trainer’s stock in trade of how to stimulate muscles. He concocted a mixture containing pungent witch hazel liniment, poured it on his hands, and gave his harriers’ leg and torso muscles a light massage to get the blood circulating to perform at their utmost. After a competition, Warburton administered a deeper recovery massage. As he had done with hundreds of young athletes, Warburton, thirty-five years older than Champion, turned into his best friend.
Warburton also instructed Champion to jump rope to strengthen his calf muscles—and burn off teenage excess energy. Next, Warburton deployed pacers to lead Champion around the Vélodrome de la Seine and timed him with a stopwatch. Warburton fancied four-rider quads for pacing. They hugged turns tightly and went faster than triplets. When he
observed that Champion lacked the power and endurance to keep up behind quads, Warburton put him on a strict regimen.
Champion was awakened at 8:30 a.m. He began with twenty minutes of jumping rope that left him panting with a light sweat.96 Then he received a vigorous massage, followed by a light breakfast with café au lait. His morning workout consisted of pedaling nineteen to twenty-five miles in the Bois de Boulogne, or out on a country road, concluding by 11:30. Another massage followed. At one o’clock, he and Warburton lunched together.
Two hours later, Warburton directed him to the Velodrome d’Hiver, the Winter Track, referred to in the French penchant for contractions as Vel d’Hiv. The indoor track was identified for a half-century with bicycle racing in Paris as Fenway Park is to the Boston Red Sox. A few blocks from the Eiffel Tower on the Left Bank, it sat solid and square with a huge glass roof. There Champion pedaled fifteen brisk miles pacing behind triplets and quads.
On the Vel d’Hiver Champion practiced race starts. He did drills of jack-rabbiting off the line, as if he had stolen a loaf of bread and had to flee from the police. His pacers then would swing around from behind and he would chase to catch the slipstream of the rear wheel and the game was on. In open racing, trailing to let others lead and offer shelter is a reasoned tactic. But paced racing differs. The cyclist at all times follows a fresh team, and the lead team controls the inside lane—prime real estate. Warburton trained Champion to explode from the starter’s gun and take possession of the rail.
Following his afternoon workout, Champion returned on foot to Warburton’s residence by around 5:30. He washed up for dinner at six o’clock.97 The Englishman paid attention to diet. “Good meat, well cooked, keeps up the heat of the body,” he said to a journalist.98 He served Champion—accustomed to horsemeat—beef, veal, and lamb. “And a man may drink ales and light wines in moderation.” Warburton and Champion usually took an after-dinner stroll around the Bois de Boulogne. Sometimes they ran short bursts against each other. They returned to Warburton’s digs by nine o’clock for another meal of cold meat and vegetables, this time with pale ale and stout beer. At ten, Champion read a newspaper or cycling journal for twenty minutes. Warburton gave him a deep massage. Then it was lights out.
On Sunday mornings, rain or shine, Champion attacked the foundation of his regime, one that he talked about with pride for the rest of his life. After a full English breakfast to fortify a farmer for a long and arduous day, Warburton gave his charge a bottle of tea and a couple of sandwiches and said, “Meet me in Orléans at one o’clock.”99
He told Champion that Orléans was 101 miles away,100 and Champion accepted the distance as gospel, although the cities are about seventy-five miles apart.101 After he saw Champion leave, Warburton took the train to Orléans, the historical town on the Loire River where Joan of Arc had led French troops that fended off English invaders.102 Failing to make the distance in the prescribed time would mean getting scolded, and Champion wanted to please Choppy. But the older man already had a good gauge of Champion’s abilities and gave him a challenge he was capable of doing. The distance took a mail coach drawn by four horses some eight hours.103 Champion pedaled it in under six hours.
“I wasn’t permitted to have even a sou on the trips and I could buy nothing—not even food or transportation—so I simply had to pedal to reach my destination,” Champion related.104
Warburton was waiting at the prescribed time at the Orléans train station with a luncheon of a baguette bulging with ham and cheese, some fruit, and plenty of milk to wash down all the food.105 Champion devoured his lunch while they chatted. When the meal was over, Warburton would say, “Meet me back in Paris at eight o’clock.”106 Champion rode home—a round trip of 150 miles, most of it over France’s best maintained roads, and he thought he had covered 200 miles.
“But Choppy was doing something—he was educating me to take punishment, and whenever I began to tire in a race, the grueling training I had would permit me to overcome the fatigue and come out victorious time and time again,” Champion recounted.107 “No matter what game a man is in, he is only as big as the amount of punishment he is able to take, so I feel today that Choppy did a lot for me, not only in that respect, but in educating me on the importance of physical training, for as the old saying goes, you cannot be mentally fit unless you are physically fit.”108
Two months of the dedicated regimen of track workouts and the Sunday endurance jaunts—without cheering spectators, no bands performing music, and no letup from physical exertion—changed Champion physically and mentally. He had faster leg spin and greater stamina. He and his teams synchronized smooth transitions from a tired team to a fresh one. Never one for doubt, he had more confidence.
Champion’s mother allowed him one overnight sortie with Warburton in mid-December, to Berlin for the Prussian capital’s indoor track championships. Berlin was an important market for Clément. His Gladiators had won a gold medal there at the 1896 International Exhibition trade show.109 Warburton took three triplet teams for Champion, who would be competing against the best German youths who showed promise to become future stars. Bicycles, triplets, and extra wheels were packed into wooden boxes for the train trip.110
In Berlin for the Sunday afternoon event of fifty kilometers around an indoor track similar to the Vel d’Hiv, Champion took command behind his pacers from the firing of the starter’s gun. Surrounding the vélodrome were seats filled with men and women puffing tobacco, eating fried food, guzzling beer—and cheering at the top of their lungs. Champion spun behind his pacers, cutting through the overhanging nicotine haze, to victory. Warburton perceived in Champion’s debut under his direction something unanticipated. Each time the triplet Champion paced behind swept up the banking and the new team dove down to take over, their finesse drew applause. Champion gained a kilometer or two per hour in extra speed just from audience reaction. He possessed Jimmy Michael’s qualities, with something extra from the crowd. He lapped young local heroes, risky for a Frenchman in front of proud Prussians. Yet everyone loved him for his panache.
Defeating Berlin’s stars of the future entitled Champion to wear the city flag around his waist.111 He also took home a purse heavy with gold coins. He returned to Paris triumphant. The Englishman delivered Champion to his mother and brothers. The trainer, having showed himself worthy enough of Marie Blanche Champion’s trust, invited her son to join him with his wife and son in London during the first week of January 1897. A new racing season beckoned.
In December, Clément came back from America with souvenirs: two large industrial Pratt and Whitney Company lathes, purchased from Colonel Pope.112 Clément found Pope, a veteran Union Army officer who had fought in the Civil War, to be a progressive leader. Pope had directed a national movement to improve roads.113 He also had founded a pair of successful magazines to advocate the pleasures of outdoor leisure, recreation, and cycling. One of the editors was S. S. McClure,114 remembered for early investigative journalism into social and business misconduct. A young commercial artist Pope hired to design Columbia Bicycles posters was Maxfield Parrish,115 on his way to shaping the course of early American visual arts. Pope planned to manufacture autos that ran on electric batteries. He forecast that there would be charging stations established from the Atlantic to the Pacific for drivers to pull in, power up batteries, and return to driving.116
Pope introduced Clément to the mass-production method perfected by New England arms manufacturers,117 such as Samuel Colt in Hartford, inventor of the revolver handgun. Mass production relied on assembly lines manufacturing every part to specific, high-quality standards for interchangeable parts.118 By contrast, Clément, like other French manufacturers, prided himself on craftsmanship. French artisans built bicycles one at a time, starting with the frame and then the wheels, before assembling the handlebars, chain, and other components.
After studying Pope’s Boston business office and Hartford factory, Clément visited some of the three hundred other US bicycle compa
nies. In Cleveland and Chicago, he came upon the innovation of machines stamping sheets of steel to produce crank arms, sprockets, and other parts.119 Stamping turned out parts faster, and of higher quality, than parts made by hand. Under the influence of Americans and their creative methods, Clément returned to Paris and reorganized his factory in Levallois-Perret with production lines. He impressed upon Champion the need to keep abreast of the competition and never hesitate to innovate.
Warburton’s managing of Champion was chronicled throughout the continent and across the Atlantic. In Chicago’s weekly Bearings, an article with Champion in Bauenne’s photo heralded: “Champion, ‘Choppy’ Warburton’s Latest Find.”120
In January 1897 Champion, as instructed, boarded a train from Paris to Boulogne-sur-Mer, embarked on a boat across the English Channel, and climbed into a train to London’s Charring Cross. Warburton met him and took him to Wood Green in north London to meet his wife and son, James. Warburton took a sophisticated approach to managing Champion as a brand. He arranged for a portrait photographer on Chancery Lane to take a photo of Champion on his Clément Gladiator.121 Warburton distributed fresh, glossy prints to the London press corps up and down Fleet Street. Clément bought ads in publications around Great Britain promoting Champion riding on Dunlops. Word of Warburton’s new poulain, or pony, circulated around London.
Another poulain under Warburton’s management was Amélie le Gall, a Parisienne who rode with the nom de vélodrome “Lisette.” Attractive, with dark curly hair, Lisette had fast legs on the bicycle. Women’s racing attracted high-spirited ingénues and bolstered ticket sales. Lisette won in Paris and other cities around Europe, and she toured the United States, from New York to Chicago, racing on velodromes against American and Canadian women.122 Under Warburton’s tutelage, she reigned as Paris’s sprint queen. The Englishman’s coaching her and other women drew notice on both sides of the channel. A Paris journal caricatured him on the cover: in his bowler and loud plaid jacket he pulled a cart overflowing with women dressed in bonnets and finery in a jumble of spare wheels, valises, and a big marching drum.123 The cart was labeled “Rumpus Army.”