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SHOWMAN
Booth's. Year before last's race in New York, these two-man teams hardly covered any more ground between them than Charley Miller covered all by his lonesome— with time off to get married— thirty-eight years ago. Just how much of a race it is comes out in the peculiar fact that all competing teams covered the same number of miles, with only a few laps to choose among them. It's just some hundred and forty-odd hours of stalling, interspersed by artificially staged sprints, and then a last half hour of furious pedaling to make it look like something at the end. Those may be harsh words, my masters, but nobody has a better right to run a thing down than the fellow who invented it.
These two-man team races didn't go at all well for a long while. It wasn't till they introduced the sprints that the public started flocking back. And the sprints started as the impromptu contribution of the drunks who used to go and spend whole days and nights at the six-day races, watching the boys spin round and round till they got dizzy and fell asleep, and waking up to have some more drinks to make sure they wouldn't sober up. When one of these saturated star-boarders would wake up between three and four in the morning, glance blearily at the track to make sure where he was and see the riders loafing round just to keep the ball rolling, he'd often stand up and holler:
"Hey! Fifty dollars fer a sprin'!" And immediately the riders would snap to and start pedaling like fury
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