Cycle Cycles

On the first day, Jerry Rodman's front wheel collapsed when he was pedaling at 25 miles an hour. On the second, the crowd watched a dentist line up his tools beside the track, extract a wisdom tooth from Heinz Vopel. On the third, sturdy-legged Franco Georgetti, trying to make a comeback before his retirement, withdrew from the event when he was 19 laps behind.

During a "hot jam," Frenchman Emile Ignat, who was being relieved by his partner, Frenchman Emile Diot, gave Diot such an enthusiastic starting push that Diot's wheel wobbled and Ignat ran into it, spilling them both. It was the six-day bicycle race at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan, around an O-shaped pine-board track, with 15 teams of two men each dressed in bright jerseys, pedaling in relays on bicycles that cost $100, weigh 19 Ib. After 146 hours, three teams had circled the track 24,997 times and the winners had to be decided on points awarded for the sprints--races within a race--that punctuate the six-day marathon in series of ten, five times each day. Winners were blond Jimmy Walthour and slick-haired Al Crossley, who had lapped the field in the last hour, held a point lead piled up earlier by winning the sprint that ended the race. While the crowd of 16,000 screamed themselves hoarse, Walthour & Crossley pedaled around the track once more, each balancing on his handlebars an enormous basket of yellow chrysanthemums.

To novice spectators, a six-day bicycle race appears to be a heroic feat of endurance. To an experienced six-day cyclist, each six-day race is merely a sprint in the endless marathon of his profession. Riding in a dozen or more six-day races in quick succession every season obliges him to become permanently adjusted to living conditions that include ten picnics a day, sleeping four hours out of 24, mostly in 15-minute catnaps, living, in full view and earshot of the crowds that come to watch the race, in a shelter that looks like a flag-draped motorcycle crate and contains one cot for both members of a team, one shelf for all personal belongings, including axle oil. Six-day bicycle riders find their Spartan circumstances beneficial. Many gain weight in races, reduce in the intervals between them. A cyclist's compensation is from $75 to $500 a day, based on his value as an attraction.

A proof of the longview value of a six-day rider's lot is the fact that in the professionsons often follow in their fathers' wheel-marks. Jimmy Walthour and his Cousin Bobby are sons of turn-of-the-Century bicycle racers. To Mr. & Mrs.

Bobby Walthour Sr., Songwriter Harry Dacre dedicated Daisy Bell ("A Bicycle Built for Two") at the time of their elope ment. Al Crossley is a stocky Bostonian chiefly famed as a sprinter. Walthour & Crossley finished second in last December's Manhattan six-day race, warmed up for last week's triumph by winning a race in Copenhagen last month. Hailed now as the most dangerous rivals to the German team of Heinz Vopel and Gustav Kilian, who recently passed a cycle of nine six-day races without losing one, Walthour & Crossley this week sail for a bicycle tour of Europe starting with a six-day stop at Antwerp.

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