At a time when cycling in the United States rivaled baseball as the nation's most popular professional sport, along came Reggie McNamara, a farmer's son from Australia. Within a month of his arrival in the United States in 1913, he had earned the moniker "Iron Man" for his high tolerance of pain and his remarkable ability to recover from seemingly catastrophic injury. The nickname proved justified. Not only was he tough, he was also one of the best and highest-paid athletes in the world. During his thirty-year career, McNamara won seventeen punishing six-day races along with an inestimable number of shorter distance races, including high-profile events on three different continents, peaking in 1926-27 at the age of thirty-nine. The fans, media, and his fellow professionals all idolized him as an example of the true grit needed to succeed in this grueling and dangerous sport. Late in his career, however, hard drinking and injuries took their toll, and McNamara became estranged from his wife and children. He fought back just as he always had on the race course, conquering his addiction to alcohol and becoming one of the earliest success stories of Alcoholics Anonymous. In this humorous and exciting biography of the original Iron Man, Andrew M. Homan pulls McNamara back into the spotlight, depicting a flawed but beloved man whose success in those unrelenting six-day races came at a price.

A century before Lance Armstrong captured headlines around the world by winning a record seventh consecutive Tour de France, another American dominated the world of competitive cycling. His name was Bobby Walthour, and in the early 1900s he was one of the world s most famous and highly paid athletes."Life in the Slipstream" chronicles Walthour s rise from a lowly bicycle messenger in Georgia to a two-time national and international cycling champion who was nearly as popular in Paris and his adopted home of Berlin as he was in his hometown of Atlanta. His career parallels the surging popularity of the bicycle in America, and this biography depicts his life against the backdrop of the bicycle craze that swept America in the late 1800s and early 1900s.Readers will experience the rough-and-tumble world of professional cycling at the turn of the twentieth century, where deadly accidents and illicit drugs were commonplace. During Walthour s long career, more than a dozen of his rivals were killed or permanently injured. He himself suffered multiple injuries from fractured ribs and separated collarbones to mangled fingers and concussions and was twice declared dead as a result of racing accidents. But Walthour s fortunes on the racing circuit ultimately took a dramatic turn for the worse when his personal life began to unravel because of drug abuse and an unhappy marriage that culminated in his attempted murder by his own wife. "Life in the Slipstream" is an unforgettable account of the rise and fall of one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century.