Worcester Whirlwind
From The Boston Globe:
He was a fin-de-siècle Lance Armstrong, celebrated in the streets of Paris for his blinding speed and his unflinching endurance. He was a black world champion, a decade before legendary heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson. He was an athletic prodigy akin to Tiger Woods, a quietly defiant racial pacesetter almost a half-century before Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line.
His name was Major Taylor , one of the world’s greatest cyclists during the sport’s heyday at the beginning of the 20th century, when people would flock to velodromes by the thousands to see the “Worcester Whirlwind” outpedal white competitors for lucrative purses.