“Bicycling is not nearly so much of a craze in England as here; and the reason therefore, as I figured it out after much interested investigation, is illustrative of a notable difference between the United States and England in athletic and sporting matters, said a wheelman just returned from a transatlantic trip to a New York Sun reporter. “Because of the superb roads to be found in every part of England I expected to find the country simply overrun with bicyclists. But I didn’t. Of course there are bicyclists to be met all over the land, but I soon learned that the sport had by no means the general hold on the people disposed to exercise or athletics that it has here. It has taken a comparatively greater hold upon the women than the men which is entirely consistent with my theory. Here in the United States the growth of bicycling has meant very largely the growth of the habit of taking exercise. We do not go into sports actively, as the English do. We, as a people, don’t play baseball, football, or any other athletic game. We are mightily interested in sports, but mostly in seeing professionals at play in them. Of the twenty thousand people who go to see the three or four big football games in a year, how many play football? How many of the ten thousand or more cranks who watch the paid baseball nines ever play the game themselves? Now in England there are actually dozens of football and cricket clubs in every town, and every village and hamlet has its team. They play cricket all summer and football all winter. Every fine evening and every Saturday afternoon every bit of turf near a town or village is covered with players of some game or another. Sport is a profession here; a pastime there. Here the mass of the people are interested as spectators; there as participants. Bicycling is there only an alternative means of exercise and amusement; here it is practically the one form of athletics that the whole people have taken to. It’s a might good thing that something has turned up at last to turn the attention of the nation to healthful exercise and athletics. The bicycle fad will wane after a while, for it isn’t an ideal sport, although in many ways an attractive one. But other popular outdoor sport will follow in its wake, and I imagine the bicycle craze will figure as the beginning of an important era in American history.”
[tags]Ann Arbor Register, September, 1895[/tags]