Six-day racing
Six-day races started in Britain, spread to many regions of the world, were brought to their modern style in the United States and are now mainly a European event.
As well as the 'chase' to gain laps over competitors, a typical six-day programme will include time trials, motor-paced, intermediate sprint and elimination races.
Stanton started at 6am on 25 February and won the bet in 73 hours, riding on a high-wheeled machine at an average speed of 13.5 mph.
[1] Six-day cycle races involving more than one rider grew out of the 19th-century enthusiasm for endurance and other novelty competitions.
The Islington Gazette reported: "A bicycle contest was commenced at the Agricultural Hall, on Monday last, for which £150 is offered in prizes for a six days' competition, the money to be allocated thus: £100 for the first man, £25 for the second, £15 for the third, and £10 for the fourth.
Although it is often said that the first six-day was a non-stop, no-sleeping event that ran without pause for six days, in fact riders joined in when they chose and slept as they wished.
[3] In America, the first six-day bicycle race was held in Chicago’s Exposition Building in November 1879, a competition between Englishmen against Americans, won by the English, David Stanton and Bill Cann, who rode a combined distance of 1,665 miles.
Quickly, riders began competing 24 hours a day, limited only by their ability to stay awake.
The New York Times said in 1897: It is a fine thing that a man astride two wheels can, in a six-day race, distance a hound, horse, or a locomotive.
An athletic contest in which participants 'go queer' in their heads, and strain their powers until their faces become hideous with the tortures that rack them, is not sport.
Days and weeks of recuperation will be needed to put the Garden racers in condition, and it is likely that some of them will never recover from the strain.
In the main 'chase' or madison sessions, both riders may be on the track at the same time, taking it in turns to race, hand-slinging each other back into action.
The historian Raymond Dickow said of riders in the post-1898 races: The highest paid was Alfred Goullet of Australia.
Top riders like Bobby Walthour, US; Franco Giorgetti, Italy; Gérard Debaets, Belgium; and Alfred Letourneur, France, were making from $500 to $750 a day.
[8] Bing Crosby – whose presence at a track guaranteed he would be met by song-publishers' touts offering him music – was said to pay the hospital bills of riders who fell.
Riders took it easy when they were empty and circled the track reading newspapers, talking, even writing letters as they pedalled with one foot, the other steering the handlebars.
But in frustration and irritation over loss of sleep, the riders became angry at one another ... As for Reboli and his partner, the session of jamming set them 12 laps behind again.
Dickow said: "Attempts were made to revive the sport by several different promoters but none of them managed to restore bike racing to its former popularity.
Jerry Rodman, one of the American riders, said: "In previous years, six-day bicycle racing faded only as a result of war or depression.
Under the promotion of Harry Mendel, however, the sport, for the first time began to decline due to lack of spectator interest.
Sporting Cyclist published a picture of the last night of the Chicago six in 1957 being ridden with seven people in the quarter of the stands that the camera caught.
In 1923 the journalist Egon Erwin Kisch attended the tenth staging of the Berlin Six Day Race and wrote a celebrated piece "Elliptische Tretmuehle" (Elliptical Treadmill).
Races continued through the night, as they had in the US, but the costs of keeping open stadiums for partygoers who'd missed the bus and a small number of dedicated fans was too great.
Tom Simpson remembered: Our mechanic and general runner was David Nice, an Englishman from Colchester, who was not unlike me in a way, for his nose appeared to be, profile view anyway, very similar to mine (poor lad!)
[15] In 1986, German cycling manager Winfried Holtmann revived six-day races in Stuttgart, Münster and Leipzig.
[17] The series starts in London travelling across the world, where it touches down in Berlin, Copenhagen, Melbourne and Manchester, before concluding in Brisbane.
Sir Bradley Wiggins chose the 2016 London event as his last UK track appearance, and riders including the Australian Olympic gold medallists Cameron Meyer and Callum Scotson have also raced.
[19] The women's event has also grown with the opportunity to compete in the Madison, an added attraction for some of the world's best exponents of track racing.
Two-time world champion Kirsten Wild had attended in previous years, while in Six Day Manchester 2019 Britain's joint most-decorated female Olympic track cyclist at the time, Laura Kenny, competed, joined by Six Day London 2017 and Olympic team Pursuit champion Katie Archibald, and fellow British Cycling teammate Elinor Barker, an Olympic, two-time world and four-time European champion.
