Title: Muscle on Wheels - Louise Armaindo and the High-Wheel Racers of Nineteenth-Century America

Author: M Ann Hall

Publisher: McGill-University’s University Press

Year: 2018

Pages: 248

Order: McGill-University’s University Press

What it is: The story of la mère du cyclisme féminin, Louise Armaindo, cycling’s first female international star and arguably the mother of women’s racing

Strengths: As well as telling Armaindo’s story, Hall paints a broad picture of women’s bicycle racing in the US in the 1880s and into the 1890s

Weaknesses: Armaindo crossed the Atlantic toward the end of the 1880s to race in the UK and someone really needs to tell the story of what women there were doing on bikes in those years

The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory.

~ Laurent Binet, HHhH

The Once and Former Reine de la Pédale

In August of 1903, MB, of Redondo Beach, California, wrote to the ‘Information Bureau’ of the National Police Gazette (New York’s self-proclaimed “leading sporting journal in the world”) asking this question: “Can you please give me the address of Madam Louise Armaindo, ex-champion lady bicyclist.”

The Many Lives of Louise Armaindo

In March 1879, the French-speaking Canadian Louise Armaindo made her public début, as a pedestrian, a race walker, at an event in Chicago, finishing third of twelve entrants in a ten mile race. Before that Louise Armaindo had been Louise (or Louisa) Brisbois (or Brisebois), a daughter in the family home near Montreal, and then a performer in a Chicago circus, a trapeze artist and strongwoman.

In an 1883 interview, Armaindo’s date of birth was given as 1860. When she married in 1888 it was 1864. When she was injured as a result of a fire in 1896 it was 1869.

Six months after her presumed public début – no reference to her before March 1879 has been found – Armaindo was claiming to have been a veteran of the race-walking circuit for two years, was the champion of Canada, and had raced professionally fifteen times and only been beaten once.

Such fluidity in the facts is typical of Armaindo’s story, where biographical invention and exaggeration often obscure reality. Such fluidity in the facts is typical of much of the story of nineteenth century sport in America, where a certain amount of biographical invention and exaggeration was considered to be part of the game.

Armaindo’s chosen sport, pedestrianism, was at this stage at the height of its popularity in the US, easily competing with baseball, pool, rowing, and prizefighting for audiences. But as the 1870s rolled into the 1880s race-walking in the US was also competing with cycling. And cycling was quick to borrow many of pedestrianism’s clothes, not least among them the Six Day race. Cycling was also quick to borrow many of pedestrianism’s athletes: men and women who had achieved a modicum of fame for their ability to walk around and around a track for hour after hour, day after day, easily adapted to the demands of riding a bicycle around and around a track for hour after hour, day after day.

In 1881, Armaindo made the transition from the one sport to the other, trading in her walking shoes for a high-wheeled bicycle. She wasn’t the first woman to do so, nor was she the first woman to race a bike in the United States. But, over the course of the 1880s, it was Louise Armaindo who earned the right to be called la mère du cyclisme féminin, the mother of women’s cycling.

Rip It Up

Across her known published interviews, Louise Armaindo made clear that there were two things in her life she was most proud of: her mother, whose strength was such that, at the age of twenty-one, she could lift 900 pounds (400 kilos) dead weight; and her own victory over the Irishman William Woodside and the Welshman William ‘Senator’ Morgan in Chicago in 1883. This is how Ann Hall describes the race in Muscle on Wheels:

“For six days in May 1883, William M Woodside, William J Morgan, and Louise Armaindo took part in the first real long-distance race for the US championship. On a makeshift track laid out in the Battery D Armory on Chicago’s lakefront, with thirteen laps to the mile, they raced twelve hours a day, beginning at eleven in the morning and ending at eleven at night. They took breaks whenever they wished, but to do so meant that someone else would move ahead. At the end of the first day, there was little separating the three riders. After the fourth day Armaindo had moved ahead slightly after completing 561 miles to Morgan’s 559 and Woodside’s 558. ‘For persistent attention to the business and continuous staying qualities,’ wrote an awed reporter, ‘Louise Armaindo, the French girl, takes the souvenir.’ Louise increased her lead over the last two days and closed the seventy-two-hour race at 843 miles. Morgan came second after 820 miles, whereas Woodside had seriously fallen back, finishing at only 723 miles. Her post-race commentary was interesting: ‘No one can have any idea how I had to punish myself to hold to the end; but I had determined to beat those two men, and I did it.’ She also commented on the presence of a great many women in the audience, who encouraged her with kind words and rapt attention. For Louise, that was one of the best things about the race.”

Two thousand people a night filled the Armory to watch the racing.

Me Too

When Louise Armaindo married in 1888 it wasn’t to the man most often described as having been her husband, Tom Eck. The exact nature of the relationship between Armaindo and Eck is not clear. Largely it was business. But it may have been more. While he was often described in the press as having been Armaindo’s husband, that seems to have been just a convenient lie to explain a man and a woman travelling from town to town together.

Eck was another Canadian and the two seem to have met in Chicago shortly before Armaindo launched herself into the world of pedestrianism. Eck himself was also an athlete. But his real skills were as coach and promoter. From 1879 onwards he served both roles for Armaindo.

Eck was, in many ways, an American Choppy Warburton: part genius, part huckster. In the summer of 1883 the darker side of his character was laid bare, in a report in the Peoria Journal:

“Mlle Armaindo and TW Eck, who claims to be her husband, have separated. While giving exhibition riding on the bicycle here last week they had several quarrels, and on Monday evening Eck pounded his wife at the room in the Merchants’ Hotel here so that it was necessary to call in a doctor. Eck has gone to Chicago and Armaindo went to Jacksonville to give some more exhibition bicycle riding.”

That the two were back together again shortly after should not be taken as a sign that Armaindo was in any way weak. Another tale, told by Tom Eck, suggests that Armaindo was well able to look after herself.

“The last time that I broke the wrist was in a match race in the east. I had backed myself heavily against a well-known professional for the best two out of three. I felt sure of winning. On the eventful night I was in fine form and at the pistol shot started out at a hot clip. My opponent trailed me, but I could see that he was getting weary and it looked like my race. But some one had monkeyed with my machine and I got a terrible fall, breaking my wrist again, which rendered me senseless. The next heat, however, again saw me on my wheel but I was at a disadvantage, as I only had the use of one arm. I made a plucky ride, but did not have any sprint left. The other fellow again won and this gave him the race. Louise Armaindo had put up about $300 of the stake money and she was furious. The winner of the race met her at the hotel next morning and the sight of him so infuriated Louise that she drew a revolver and forced him to disgorge her money. She then let him go. Louise was always good to the boys; when any of them was busted she would willingly divide her last cent with him. And another good trait of hers was that when she borrowed any money she always returned it.”

Eck left an important part out of that story: the race was a set-up from get-go. He was riding under a pseudonym, as was his rival, the two hiding their pedigree from unsuspecting punters betting on them. As well as the purse of $1,000, bets of $2,500 had been made. Such was the murky world of bike racing back then.

In the Garden

At the start, and for several years after, Armaindo had no real competition from other women. In 1885 she was able to make this claim in an interview in the San Antonio Light:

“Have I any rivals in my sex? Well, yes; Elsa von Blumen used to race against me, and Miss Sylvester, of Chicago, was lately brought out and many thought she was to be my conqueror on the wheel. But pshaw, I beat her easily.”

Toward the end of 1888 a promoter, William B Troy, saw an opportunity in women’s racing and put together a troupe of riders:

“Somehow he found nine willing young women, all from Pittsburgh, though most had never seen a high-wheel bicycle before, let alone ridden one. For five weeks before the race, he taught them how to ride, worked them until they were fit, and had them practice racing against each other. The women put in at least four to six hours of training a day.”

Troy put on his first race in November, in Pittsburgh, an eight-hour-a-day Six Day race. In December he had another race, in Brooklyn, New York. In January it was back to Pittsburgh. In February he returned to New York, this time to the venue that was to become the spiritual home of American cycling: Madison Square Garden. And this time Troy signed Elsa von Blumen and Louise Armaindo to take part, the old guard given the chance to face the new.

Armaindo at this stage had been racing for eight years, mostly long-distance, multi-day events. She had been on top of her game throughout those eight years. But by 1889 she was no longer on top of her game. Some blamed her recent marriage. Some blamed the eight years of marathon races. Whatever it was, she simply didn’t have it any more. In the Garden race, she led through most of the first day but as the day’s racing drew to a close she fainted and had to be carried off the track. Throughout the rest of the week, try as she might, she simply wasn’t in the race.

Over the next few months Troy took his troupe of riders, along with Armaindo, on the road, visiting Denver, Chicago, Kansas, Omaha, as well as return visits to Pittsburgh and New York. In the summer the women split into different camps, with Tom Eck taking Armaindo and half the other riders east as the others went west. In August Eck’s group crossed the Atlantic and took their show to Great Britain, racing in Long Eaton (Derbyshire), Belgrave Road (Leicester), the Victoria Gardens (Northampton), New Delaval (Northumberland), Sheffield, and Sunderland. Suddenly, women’s cycling on both sides of the Atlantic was in rude good health. Armaindo’s health, on the other hand, was in decline, and her victories were few and far between, her reputation carrying her further than her strength could.

A Girl Like You

By the time MB of Redondo Beach wrote to the Police Gazette in 1903 looking for her contact details, Louise Armaindo was three years dead. According to Ann Hall’s research, Armaindo was still a young woman when she died, 42 years of age.

Hall’s research offers the most detailed portrait of a woman whose name has been featuring in books about cycling, women’s sport, and sport in Canada for many years. For most of that time Armaindo has just been a ghost image, known – sometimes inaccurately – for one or two feats, the context of those feats, and of her career itself, lost. Now, with Hall having diligently chased Armaindo’s ghost through newspaper and other archives, we have a more full and rounded picture of a woman who was ahead of her time. For the first time we know – as best we can known in the absence of descendants who know the family history – when and where she was born and died, and how her professional career played out during a dozen or so peripatetic years when Armaindo travelled from one city to another in search of rivals and audiences.

In the absence of private letters, diaries, an autobiography – all of which are available for Marshall ‘Major’ Taylor – what can we really know of Louise Armaindo? As much as we know about many of the riders of today: her public image. Drawn from the newspapers of the time, the portrait Hall paints is one that those following Armaindo’s exploits throughout the 1880s would have been familiar with.

But Hall adds the benefit of hindsight and we can see the past in the light of what it became. We can see the obstacles strewn in the path of Armaindo and the twenty-or-so other women who raced professionally in the United States in the high-wheel era. Many of those obstacles are today gone. But not all of them. Men writing about sport in Armaindo’s time frequently dismissed what she was doing as just an entertainment, didn’t take her seriously as a sportswoman. As well as offering young women today a fresh take on an old role model, a hero to aspire to emulate, Hall is also speaking to men, inviting them to consider how they view women’s sport today. In giving Louise Armaindo today the respect she earned during her career, we’re also being asked to ensure that we give due respect to the Louise Armaindos of today.