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Alberto Justiniano Olid cycled away from the Plaza de Mayo in the centre of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, at 1:30pm on February the 7th in 1898, with a gun in his pocket and his eyes set on the horizon, and beyond it, on the Andes mountains. Some friends, including Julio Guiraud (a Frenchman), Esteban Rodríguez (an Argentinian), and Emilio Sánchez (a Spaniard) decided at the last minute not to join him. Olid, a Chilean, rode off alone, resolving to be the first to cross an Andean pass on a bicycle. Ten days later he reached the Pacific Ocean at the port of Valparaiso. A local newspaper named him campeón de la bicicleta. He remained "fresh" having "proven his physical resistance" by riding 1.450 km, crossing the mountain pass at over 3.200 m above sea level, and even having been "suddenly attacked by a tiger on the pampa, which he shot fifteen times with his revolver, leaving it wounded".1
With its heroism, physical strength, and nationalist overtones -he triumphed where Argentinians, Frenchmen and Spaniards could not!- the report of this event in the Chilean press bears all the hallmarks of similar long-distance rides which have been lauded by cycling historians when they took place in the United States, France or Italy. There, the efforts of cyclists were creating new national myths as they conquered nature in the name of nations, pushing back the limits of human effort that had been unbounded by this new technology, the bicycle. Unlike their European and North American counterparts, South American cyclists did not have their stories widely reported elsewhere. This article assesses the early history of cycling in South America, demonstrating the ways in which the bicycle and its riders were part of the global history of cycling, linked to ideas of progress, race, gender, and nation at the beginning of the twentieth century. Egan Bernal, Mariana Pajón, and ciclovías did not emerge out of nothing: South American cyclists have their own histories, that formed part of and informed global networks.2
In the 1880s the development of a chain to link the power produced by the pedals of a velocipede to its rear-wheel was a revolution that enabled the two wheels to be of equal size, bringing the rider's centre of gravity closer to the ground on the "safety bicycle", that remains the predominant shape of bicycle ridden by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Bicycles were displayed as novelties, and people rode them in public parks and on roads, causing bemusement and amazement amongst pedestrians in Paris, Berlin, London, and New York, and anger and resentment amongst drivers of horse-drawn carriages. Industrial production of bicycles boomed in Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States as carriage-makers and blacksmiths used their existing factories and tools to meet rising demand. In the 1890s banked velodromes were built in towns and cities, with gambling on the fortunes of professional riders proving a big draw to spectators. New York's Madison Square Garden hosted massively popular cycling competitions lasting several days, as did arenas across Europe. But in the 1900s cycling lost its novelty, and advertisers as well as consumers began to move on to the motorcycle -the first of which were produced by the same manufacturers innovating with fixing engines to the rear wheel of a bicycle- and then the automobile. Cycling's appeal in France and elsewhere from the 1910s became not in its speed and endurance, which were easily surpassed by the motorcycle, but precisely in the limits placed by the human-powered nature of the machine. The cyclists' immersion in the rural environment -sweating to climb hills and crashing into trees at the foot of them, and the susceptibility to cold, rain, and wind- gave the touring and endurance cyclist a representative value for regions and nations that motor-powered sportsmen could not equal. The Tour de France, dating from 1903 and growing in popularity ever year, equated cyclist and nation in the minds of both newspaper-readers and roadside spectators.3
The global history of the bicycle until now has been focused primarily around technological innovation and the representative value of the sport of cycling in its 'traditional' regions of Europe and the United States. South America makes no appearance in this scholarship for two reasons. First, the continent tends to occupy the periphery of histories of globalization and technological innovation. Histories of South America have paid great attention to other technological innovations that bound the continent into the Atlantic economy at the end of the 1800s. The telegraph, the steamship, and above all the railway have been points of debate around the extent to which South America was wrapped into dependent or neo-colonial relationships with Europe and the United States of America at the precise moment when its national elites were seeking to strengthen their infrastructure and create a shared consciousness amongst their diverse populations.4
Second, historians working at the local and regional level in South America have, with few exceptions, ignored the practice of cycling before the mid-twentieth century. Sports history is booming with soccer and baseball as the principal targets of interest. In Brazil, Victor Melo de Andrade, André Maia Schetino, Wilson Gambeta, and others have produced studies of the social history of cycling in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, and elsewhere. his article draws their work into dialogue with global and local histories across the continent. It shows that neither Brazil, which has been better studied, nor Colombia, which later became famed for its cyclists, were exceptional cases at the beginning of the twentieth century. Both were part of continent-wide and global processes relating to technological innovation and the revolution in mobility taking place across the world.5
Methodology
By situating the analysis at the continent of South America rather than through a particular city or nation-state, I want to draw attention to shared histories and connections, comparisons and patterns that might be missed at the local, regional or national sphere.6 The focus on "South" rather than "Latin" America delimits the space of analysis to a more manageable corpus of data, but also, more importantly, to step back from unhelpful simplifications about "Latin" affinity for "simpler", more physical sports such as soccer when compared to mechanized "Anglo" innovations.7 I recognize and regret that this approach might appear to flatten social, political, economic, and cultural difference between places and people, and for this reason I use a series of micro-case studies to develop the argument, providing further detail around particular sites, races or individuals, drawing upon local histories and historiographies and on contemporary primary sources. Because of the lack of scholarly research on this topic, sometimes I rely on the blogs and websites of amateur historians that often provide excellent quality data. The pioneering Brazilian geographer of sport, Gilmar Mascarenhas, first revealed the extent to which South American understandings of space influenced the development of the meanings of football in the continent. In this article I apply Mascarenhas' insights to cycling, analyzing data both on delimited sporting spaces like velodromes as well as places where the only limits were the cyclability of tracks and roads, where they existed.8
The source material is plentiful though fragmentary and widely dispersed. The article draws on analysis of sport club statutes, newspapers, and photographs held in national and municipal libraries in Santiago and Valparaiso (Chile), Lima (Peru), Quito and Guayaquil (Ecuador), Bogotá (Colombia), Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil). Local, national, and regional newspapers were sampled between 1880 and 1920 for Argentina, Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Brazil, held in collections around the world and online. The accelerated digitization of South American newspaper collections by national libraries and archives since 2010 has facilitated this research, though many of these collections remain incomplete and the digital copies tend to reproduce the separations of their physical originals and the inequalities embedded in archives (making research drawing on newspapers from Brazil, Chile, and Argentina much easier than on Bolivia, Paraguay and Venezuela, for example). Despite the affordances of digital archives, the bulk of the empirical research here has entailed the stitching together of fragmentary histories, predominantly housed in physical collections across the continent.
The First Arrivals
The first bicycles arrived in South America not long after they appeared in Europe. Francophile elites in the ports of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, were reported to have brought back bicycles from European visits in 1885 and 1886.9 Bicycle races took place in Rio de Janeiro as part of a racing "fever" also involving running, horses, and gambling. The first recorded bike races were organized by the Sport Club Villa Isabel for men, girls, and boys, quickly followed by the Club Athletico Fluminense, watched on occasion by the Brazilian Emperor Dom Pedro II (Brazil only abolished slavery in 1888, and became a republic in 1889).10 Members of the Brazilian elite often travelled to France for pleasure and it should be of no surprise that they shared French people's enthusiasm for cycling.11 The first races in Rio were of a few hundred metres in distance. In 1886, however, a Mr L. Azevedo won a 30 km race in Rio de Janeiro, and he was described by the newspaper O Paiz as "our first specialist in this type of sport". In 1887 the Veloce-Club was founded to organize races around the outfield of the Rio Cricket Club.12
According to Christopher Thompson, at this time in France, "the bicycle [came] to symbolize for many both the promise of modernity and its dangers".13 In Canada, according to Glen Norcliffe, the bicycle was a carrier wave in the arrival of modernity, where innovation, manufacturing, accessories, consumption, and display were central to cycling's popularity.14 This was also the case in Brazil, where the bicycle was embraced as a modern machine. The crucial distinction, however, was that bicycles were maintained rather than manufactured in South America. The bicycle could give freedom to men and women whose lives and dreams were becoming constricted by urban living and oppressive work, and it could be embraced by educationalists who wanted to create fitter, stronger humans, more robust through physical exertion in the open air.15 But it was dependent upon the arrival of machines from abroad, and newspaper advertisements for bicycles focused on announcements of the arrival of a new shipment, as much as they did on brand, design or cost.16 Reports of the arrival of ships carrying new bicycles and adverts for the new products, occupied more space in the newspapers than accounts of rides or races.17 French brands like Clement and Peugeot were popular in Brazil, and newspapers advertised both new and used bikes.18
In Bogotá, Colombia, the "Olympic" brand was advertised as "satisfying public demand".19 In Buenos Aires, bicycle importers clustered around Florida Street, with Worms (French) at no. 548, Guppy (North American) at no. 338 and the Casa Amarilla of Pratt and Cochrane (U.S.) at the corner with Cangallo St.20 Their large, colourful adverts in the press competed to persuade readers that their bicycles were the most appropriate for local conditions.21 The Italian importer Antonio Franchi, who also promoted races and organized long-distance rides from Buenos Aires, advertised his bicycles tongue-in-cheek by promising that one could 'cycle round the world in six days' on them.22
Alberto Justiniano Olid rode out of Buenos Aires and over the Andes in 1898 on a Prinetti Stuchi that he may have bought from Franchi. Bicycles made in the U.S. such as Gladiators and Columbias were predominant on the Pacific coast of South America.23 "British bicycles" such as Humber appeared all over, but they certainly did not "dominate the world market" here, as claimed by some economic historians.24 South American cycling enthusiasts could choose between the products of rival companies from Italy, Germany, France, the U.K., and the U.S. Competition in the bicycle market was between import houses, rather than between local and foreign producers as elsewhere. This was a competitive market with no dominant producer or state.
These bicycles required maintenance and the incursion of these new products created the need for a new class of mechanic, often branching out from established crafts like blacksmiths, hardware stores, and watchmakers.25 Bicycles might have been an attractive import from abroad, but they needed regular maintenance. The Basque merchant G. Menchaca advertised in Lima in 1897 the arrival of "all types of tools and repairs for bicycles", including ball-bearings, chains, pedal arms, liquid rubber, and inner tubes.26 Governments therefore had to decide whether the bicycle and its accoutrements were sporting implements like golf clubs, a mode of transport like a horse, a tram, or a pram, or metal implements like a "varnished kitchen utensil" or "stirrups".27 The bicycle mechanic was a crucial factor in the development of cycling cultures. The ability of local blacksmiths to service and rebuild bicycles in Andean Colombia, for example, is one suggested explanation for the residual popularity of the sport there as opposed to elsewhere.28
A postcolonial reading of cycling in South America is seductive, given the bicycle's status as a foreign, luxury object, adopted by cosmopolitan elites as another way of emulating the Paris of their dreams (what might be called the coloniality of the bicycle, as theorists following Anibal Quijano might be inclined to argue).29 The material found in the archives reveals interactions between bicycles, cyclists and landscapes.30 Most early South American cyclists came from middle and upper-strata of cities within reach of ports to which bicycles were brought by traders, to be sure. We might infer that cyclists from indigenous and Afro-American backgrounds were rare. Nevertheless, the numbers of people cycling, discussed below, and the photographic evidence, suggest a much wider social embrace of cycling than might otherwise be supposed.31 Whereas in the U.S. the League of American Wheelmen prohibited black citizens from joining their "fraternity", in South America cycling seems to have been conceived of as a more inclusive sport, and the barriers to entry were based on economic factors and access to the machines rather than ideological strictures.32
Spaces for cycling
In the big cities linked by ports to the bicycle-producers and importers, velodromes were constructed to facilitate races in front of crowds of eager spectators. South America's first velodrome, the Bellodromo Nacional in Rio, was built and inaugurated in 1892 and was followed by a wave of specially-designed stadia across the continent. The Jornal do Brasil described the luxurious seating with room for 2.000 spectators, space for a "musical band, who should play during the races", and the perfectly cemented track of 150m lap distance, illuminated with masses of electric lighting. It represented, according to Schetino, "a new era for the Republic, where modernity, progress, and novelty would form part of the city". In one of the first meetings A. Menard won a race between five French professional cyclists over twenty laps (3 km).33
Competition for space on the roads meant that cyclists used pre-existing sporting spaces for the first meetings and experiments (the Cricket Ground in Rio de Janeiro, Hippodromes in São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Bogotá, and Bull-Rings in Guayaquil).34 Across the continent, a pattern of urban cyclists taking up the practice can be detected, lobbying for their own spaces, and then building standalone velodromes for riding and racing safety bicycles from the mid-1890s. In São Paulo, the multisport São Paulo Athletic Club made the first moves in 1891, and the city's first dedicated cycling club was formed in 1892, the Club Olympio Paulista, directed by local engineer Fernando de Albuquerque. Many cycling clubs then blossomed across the city, creating a space for local sporting communities and providing a model for the later institutionalisation of football clubs. At this time, the landowner Veridiana Prado and her son the mayor Antonio da Silva Prado were remaking the city-centre. Inspired by their affinity with French culture and a desire to outdo their rivals in Rio de Janeiro, a velodrome was at the core of their plans. The Velódromo Paulista (sometimes known as the Velódromo Consolaçao) opened in 1895.35 The banked outdoor track was 380m long, more than twice as long as the track in Rio, flanked by a wooden stand in a rustic country style and a chalet-style out-building for gymnastics and fencing. here was again space for musical bands to perform during races. A photograph of the 1895 opening reveals an array of cycling dress and headwear, different styles of safety bicycle and popular interest. Soon, the President of the Republic Campo Sales was riding there regularly. For popular meetings it could accommodate 4.000 spectators -around 2 % of the city's residents- and there were clear continuities of personnel and culture with the hippodromes of the world of turf, of which many of São Paulo's cycling pioneers were enthusiastic patrons.36
By 1899 there were cyclists and velodromes across the continent, with many being built through the 1890s, as in France. he city of Montevideo in Uruguay had three velodromes. Lima's Union Ciclista Club was founded in 1896. In 1897 there were cycling clubs and races in Guayaquil in Ecuador and Valparaiso in Chile, and velodromes opened in Bogotá in Colombia (next to the racecourse and polo grounds for horses). here were several specialist cycling clubs in Buenos Aires and Rosario in Argentina, Bucaramanga in Colombia, and Caracas in Venezuela. By 1900, in Brazil there were velodromes across São Paulo state (in Santos, São Carlos, Rio Claro, Campinas, Taubaté, and Jacareí) and across Brazil (including Manaus, Sao Luis, Belo Horizonte, Rio, and Porto Alegre).37 Documentary evidence has survived attesting to twenty-five velodromes at least across the continent in 1900, and probably many more. The population of South America around 1900 is estimated at 37.6 million. At the same time, the population of France was 38 million. Given that we know that South America's population was rural in bigger proportions at this time than the population of France and its cities correspondingly smaller, we can observe, at the very least, that cycling held similar levels of popularity.38
Given the fragmentary nature of the data consulted, we should not take the existence of velodromes as evidence of the first instances of cycling in these places. However, it does reveal an urban continental boom through the 1890s, taking off first on the Atlantic seaboard and spreading through the ports through which bicycles were imported and heading inland to cities such as Rosario in Argentina, Bogotá and Bucaramanga in Colombia.39
The forgotten history of Argentinian cycling
Sports history in Argentina has hitherto ignored cycling, overshadowed by research into soccer and the sports of British expatriate communities. Argentinian newspapers from the 1890s reveal an institutionalized and popular cycling culture in Buenos Aires and elsewhere at least as strong as that in Brazil. The Rosario Cyclist Club, Club Velocipedista, Club Ciclista Italiano, and the Union Ciclista Argentina were all founded in 1898. Multisports clubs adopted cycling: the Lobos Athletics Club races in April of 1898 included one mile and three-mile bicycle races.40 Migrant communities were clearly crucial, with the Italian, French, and British communities organizing bicycle races as part of their national celebrations.41 The Chilean Alberto Justiniano Olid, with whose story this article began, was a member of one of those clubs.42
Argentina's competitive cycling culture in these years was so strong that it produced one of the world greatest athletes, Lucien Mazan. His story epitomizes several of the themes of this article. The first and until Egan Bernal's 2019 victory the only South American winner of the Tour de France has been entirely effaced from South American sports history. This was largely his own doing, as he reinvented himself in France as Lucien Petit-Breton, where he became the first person to win the Tour de France in consecutive years, in 1907 and 1908. Born in France in 1884, his family migrated to Buenos Aires in 1892, when he was eight years old. He first got on a bicycle in Buenos Aires in 1899 "staying up all night to read and dream about cyclists". He won local and national races over 25 km, 75 km, and 100 km the next year. Given that he learned to ride and race in Argentina from 1892, and only returned to France to ride under his new name in 1902, it might seem surprising that his story is not better known. Egan Bernal is often spoken of as the first South American to win the Tour de France. This is in large part due to the efforts of Mazan / Petit-Breton himself, an early transnational sporting migrant. He was at pains to shed the "L'Argentin" nickname that cycling promoters gave him in France, when he was made to feel like "Moi, l'Outsider". He wanted to prove himself "a real Frenchman". When, still called Lucien Mazan, won the Lujan-Buenos Aires race in 1900, he was part of the 50 % of the Argentinian population who had been born outside of the national territory. In his writings and press appearances as Petit-Breton, he presented his formative years in South American cycling on the "terrible, nauseating roads" there, as something to be overcome rather than celebrated. His lengthy guide for competitive cyclists, published in Paris in 1908, includes some reflective comments on his lack of formal training in Argentina. He was photographed for the book dressed as a Breton peasant. His victories in the fifth and sixth editions of the most French of all races enabled him to leave his Argentine identity behind, and his Frenchness was confirmed by a patriotic death as a war hero in 1917. But Lucien Petit-Breton was not a French fish out of water in peripheral Buenos Aires, whose talent and destiny pulled him back to the mother country. Like many transnational migrants in later periods, he used sport as a way to find space to fit into society, and to relate to local and national communities.43 He was formed by a vibrant South American cycling culture that has remained out of view until now. Mazan's own rejection of his cycling roots served to undermine the history of South American cycling, rendering it peripheral if not invisible to European and North American knowledge.44
Rules and Transgressions
By 1900, the year that Lucien Mazan dominated Argentina's road-racing calendar, cycling was flourishing across the continent with many velodromes and thousands of people cycling for fun, sport, and mobility. This caused problems for planners seeking to control urban spaces for pedestrians and other modes of transport (the growth of velodromes was in part the result of the lack of tolerance for cyclists on the streets, as in the U.K.). In Buenos Aires, a newspaper editor denounced the "biking fiend", and that it was "high time for the mayor and the police to take some steps to keep bikers out of the central streets during the busy hours of the day and make them go slower at all hours. So long as they are allowed to scorch along at their present headlong speed, there must be accidents".45 The management committee of the Cycling Circle in the northern Colombian city of Bucaramanga issued its directions for cyclists on public roads, published by the new specialized magazine El Ciclista that recommends "a moderate speed, especially in places where there are lots of pedestrians".46 It set guidelines for cyclists when overtaking "no matter who they are", presumably a reference to the different social statuses of cyclists beyond the elites, also indicating some conflict between them about speed and riding behaviour. The rapid growth in the number of cyclists on the roads in this period was reflected by a joke printed in the same publication: "So, the bicycle is replacing the horse everywhere, isn't that right? Indeed it is! Yesterday I even found a piece of rubber tyre in a German sausage".47
Concerns about safety were common, and municipal authorities acted to assuage them and control cycling. The Buenos Aires press reproduced photographs of the police stopping cyclists in the streets -"bicycle hunting"- to check their license papers, in the wake of a law being introduced to make carrying them obligatory. There were reports of individual cyclists being 'ambushed' and 'entire families pedalling away in flight'.48 In Porto Alegre, Brazil, 445 cyclists were fined for riding without a visibly-displayed license.49 In São Paulo in 1903, the press made a series of recommendations, including that cyclists change their underwear after every ride, to avoid health complications, and by 1908 in Valparaiso cyclists had fitted enormous hooters to their handlebars to alert pedestrians.50
Cycling came up against significant social and political obstacles, despite and possibly because of the support of the authorities and influential citizens. Cyclists were sabotaged in Lima by "some malevolent individuals who broke several glass bottles and scattered the broken glass across Boza St, with the disgusting objective of putting the bicycles that passed that way out of action".51 Newspapers often revelled in describing the crashes suffered by cyclists. On a single day a Guayaquil newspaper reported one cyclist crashing into a market stall and being obliged to pay for the damage caused, and another "crashing into an enormous rock, breaking his mouth and splitting his bicycle in two".52 A common theme was how the bicycle was unsuited to local conditions. The construction of municipal and private velodromes was in part a reaction to the difficulties caused by having to share road space with pedestrians and other vehicles, as well as the lack of paved, flat and safe spaces to ride on.
The lone cyclist was an individual who disrupted the growing conventional understandings of the representative value of sport in South American cities. Erika Hanna's work on Dublin's cycling history in the decades after 1930 shows how "the cyclist [...] became a locus of anxieties about urban citizenship, seen as poor, dangerous, anachronistic, and unable or unwilling to conform to the formal and informal practices that made the city function".53 In Buenos Aires, Lima, Santiago de Chile, and Rio de Janeiro, the individual cyclist ran against ideas of community and nation that favoured teams of eleven footballers, representing in their kit and their shared endeavour the collectivism that was so valued by the republican authorities in the 1910s. The individual cyclist was an irritant, unconfined by a field of play and relatively uncontrolled by sporting institutions.
This is certainly what happened in São Paulo, as the city's public roads became taken over by "autos and progress".54 The magazine A Cigarra published a graphic detailing of the fate of the cyclist, buffeted by potholes, squeezed between a tram and a car, averting their gaze from a corpse at the side of the road and ending up with broken limbs in hospital.55 Critics were unnerved and even angered by the bicycle's competition for road-space, as it was neither fully human nor fully machine. When the municipality of Montevideo organized a Festival of Locomotion as part of the celebrations of Uruguayan independence on August the 25th, 1899, "enthusiastic sportsmen on bicycles" had to push themselves into the parade without an invitation (a photograph showed thirteen members of the Club Ciclista Uruguaya wear ing white caps, black jackets, and white plus fours).56 Cyclists had to assert their rights to occupy public space, and often suffered injury as a result.
Cycling in the countryside
If cyclists left the city, perhaps they could find more freedom and fulfilment, but they faced other dangers there. In France, Canada, the Netherlands, Ireland, and the U.S., citizens were encouraged to tour their countries on bicycles, giving a physical experience of landscape, smell and sense to the "imagined community". Cycle-touring was promoted and embraced as a way for citizens to get to know their countries. Historians of North America have shown how cyclists' lobbying created the Good Roads movement, and paradoxically created the conditions for the growth of an automobile culture. The municipality of Brussels in Belgium used special taxes to fund the construction of dedicated cycle paths. South American cyclists also lobbied for better roads, rode long distances from cities, and even fund-raised to build "cycling roads" themselves.57
Photographs of cyclists in turn-of-the-century South America show that the association of cycling with fresh air and the countryside had purchase here too. Because of the initial cost of the machines, many cyclists were urban-based aristocrats like the Prado family in São Paulo, but they lived in the new suburbs that existed alongside the smells and unevenness of the countryside. Surviving photographs of the São Paulo velodrome show how cycling culture was the heir to bucolic images of the rural cricket ground, of physical exercise in the fresh air. For Peru, Fanni Muñoz argues that elite enthusiasm for sports 'came to signify not only the modernizing elites' emulation of European society, but also their program for using modern sports to form the ideal bourgeois man: autonomous, virile, healthy, slender, and clean (because sports became linked to physical hygiene) and this meant exercise in the fresh air away from city centres.58 Cycling could create fitter citizens, and bring the countryside into the nation too.
In the first sections of this article we have established that cycling took place in South American urban boulevards and velodromes in the late nineteenth-century, which was probably to be expected given everything we know about the rapid urbanization in some cities that accompanied the continent's incorporation into the global economy in this period. Perhaps more surprisingly, given what we think we know about the poor state of South American tracks and roads at this time from the reports of many travel writers, and the potentially enormous distances involved compared with the European scene, we find that evidence of cyclo-tour excursions and long-distance cycling is also sprinkled throughout the surviving sources. This activity stretched riders' understanding of their national spaces and raised awareness of the content of the national territory.
The clearest example is Alberto Justiniano Olid, with whom we began this article, who cycled over 1.400 km from Buenos Aires to Valparaiso in ten days, via Villa Mercedes at the half-way point, most probably following the route of the Transandino railway that was under intermittent construction at that time.59 Although his local paper presented his Andean crossing as an act of individual Chilean heroism, reports from the sporting scene back in Buenos Aires reveal that Olid pedalled out of a vibrant cycling community that was already pushing beyond the city limits. On the Sunday before his departure, the Argentine Athletic Club held a major public meeting. The Ministers of War and Justice were present, as was the sporting pioneer and celebrity Jorge Newbery. "Boxing, ball-playing and biking" were the most prominent sports. Elsewhere, in Mar del Plata, bicycle races with prizes including "four gold chronometer watches costing over £ 1.800, and nine medals of 18 carat gold, each containing from 40 to 100 grams of the precious metal" were taking place.60
Olid's Andean odyssey is perhaps best understood as part of a wave of expeditions that set out from the Argentinian capital on train, on foot, and on bicycle, using modern technology to move through and come to know the national territory, following the groundwork of the railway companies.61 Olid was not the only adventurer, but he was the only one crossing the Andes on a bicycle. Touring rides within national boundaries were increasingly common across the continent. In Venezuela, a Club Centro Ciclista Excursionista was in undertaking rides up to 100km out of Caracas.62 A 13 km race from Recoleta in Buenos Aires to Villa Devoto was organized by the Italian promoter and bike-shop owner Antonio Franchi. Photographs show the group of amateurs wearing striped jumpers and caps, and the professionals in workmen's jackets, revealing a keen separation maintained between amateurs and professionals.63 The Chilean Club Velo Excursionista was formed to "undertake long rides on bicycles, once or twice a month", and the Club Ciclista Valparaiso organised Sunday morning hill-climbs.64
Cycling beyond the city allowed riders -and those who read about them in the papers- to imagine a world beyond urban society, to cross the national boundaries that were still in the process of being fixed. The first Argentina-Chile cycle ride took place about ten years before the two countries played each other at football, and at a time of international conflict over the boundary to be fixed between the two countries.65
Popular cycling
Cycling in South America enabled physical boundaries to be crossed. It was also potentially subversive of social barriers. For those positivists worried about their "degenerate" citizens, the vigour and physicality of cycling seemed to offer a way of 'improving' their peoples. For liberals seeking greater equality in divided societies, cycling was a potentially egalitarian method of bringing people together, whether across long-distance topographical barriers, or within rapidly-expanding cities. As South American cities like Buenos Aires, São Paulo, and Rio de Janeiro expanded in the 1890s, the bicycle offered a potentially revolutionary and cheap way of getting workers to and from the new factories, because it did not rely on fuel beyond the rider's food. Here, as we have seen, the bicycle competed with horse and carts, new tram companies, urban railways, and eventually motor-powered buses and private cars. But it was not just young South American workers who cycled. he surviving evidence shows that men, women, and children took up the practice, from a variety of migrant and local backgrounds, and with clear efforts to spread cycling beyond the elite.
The Peruvian Cycling Union drew members from across Europeanised society as well as Peruvians, including the Osma, Cisneros, Gildemeister, Dominguez, Crosby, La Torre, Pazos Varela, Tudela, Budge, Ramos, Malmborg, Miró Quesada, Coello, Silva, and Fochamovitz families. This was a broad, cosmopolitan and also a popular culture. Membership was deliberately kept cheap. When tacks and nails were thrown onto the floor on Unión St., causing mass crashes and punctures, a sense of community and self-defence was generated across these diverse backgrounds.66 Cycling was presented, by its elite promoters like the Miró Quesada publishing family, as a non-ideological, modern activity. Members of the first cycling clubs included intellectuals, poets, and writers, such as the Colombian Roberto MacDougall, who extolled its potential inclusivity.67
Women cycled in all these places, though to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the resistance they faced. Buenos Aires adverts specified that they were selling bikes for women, children, and men of all sizes.68 The regulations of the Peruvian Cycling Union do not talk about gender, and it may be that some of the members listed with an initial rather than a first name were women. Many photographs of women on bicycles survive (though none in velodromes).69 Rental schemes for bicycles were promoted to facilitate wide adoption of the practice. One scheme in Lima rented bikes for 50 cents an hour: its advert proclaimed that it was open from 8 a.m. till 2 a.m., and had nineteen bikes for men, four for women, and ten for children.70 In the Argentinian resort of Mar del Plata, where cycling was promoted by the Casa Amarilla firm, bikes could be hired for anything between 15 minutes and a month, and "competent teachers" could be contracted to give riding lessons at any level, suggesting a leisure activity aimed at a broad tourist audience.71 In North America, as Ellen Gruber Garvey has argued, magazine editors and journalists worked to embrace women cyclists as consumers of the new technology and its affordances.72
Certainly, women who cycled were not unanimously welcomed. Colombian women cyclists caused "quite a stir" in the Bogotá velodrome.73 An Argentinian editor suggested that women should not cycle because it made them too masculine, and that they deserved to be "punished" if they transgressed.74 Yet it was precisely the potentially transgressive nature of cycling women that appealed to advertisers, beyond selling those bicycles, here as elsewhere. A Buenos Aires shop advertised a new anti-rheumatism medicine with an image of a smiling woman cycling downhill in the countryside, asking readers to equate cycling with women's health and happiness.75 The bicycler importer Guppy went further, commissioning an artist to produce an image of a woman and a man kissing whilst cycling through a tree-lined boulevard, dressed with the latest sophistication. A shop on Maipu St. promoted its wines and olive oil with an image of a woman smoking while leaning on her bicycle in a club, where near-naked women danced in the background, observed by men wearing suits and top hats. This advert, which ran for several weeks, associated a woman on a bicycle with independence and an expressive sexuality.76 The opportunities for freedom that the bicycle afforded to modern, urban women were clearly visible, and were not being promoted to rural, indigenous or Afro-American women.
Racing Bicycles
Given that so many people were cycling it should be no surprise that competition ensued to see who could go fastest. The sport of cycle racing seems to have been predominantly one where men participated in this period. We might infer from reports that some women did race. In 1897 in Ecuador the Club Atletico de Guayaquil organised "athletic and bicycle races", noting that "this latter sport now attracts numerous participants in many places, even among the feminine sex", implying that women were racing as well as riding for leisure.77 Further research is likely to locate more evidence of women cycle racers, just as Brenda Elsey and Josh Nadel have found evidence of unheralded women footballers in South America before 1920.78 Bicycle races, as reported in newspapers, attracted large crowds to watch the male champions compete against each other, sometimes with considerable prizes for the professionals. Papers reported huge crowds at velodromes such as the Belvedere in Buenos Aires, demonstrating that cycling had become "a true sporting institution"; photographs attest to members of the public, dressed in male and female fashions, lining the streets for road-races.
Histories of cycling races and records ignore data from South America, for the reasons of historical amnesia discussed above, and because this period predates the incorporation of "official" South American cycling federations into international bodies.79 But by reconnecting individual stories we can see that South American cyclists and landscapes were present early in cycle racing history, too. Like Lucien Petit-Breton, the Tour de France winner of 1907 and 1908, sometimes their origins were hidden. Luis Subercaseaux, a young Chilean cyclist, rode in the 1896 Olympics in Athens representing France, the country where he was studying, in track events and the 100 km and 12 hour endurance races.80 The Buenos Aires Cycling Champion for 1898 was Angel Jaquier, who completed 25 km in three laps of a street circuit in 45 mins 49.20 seconds.81 Francisco Rade won the 100 km Argentinian Championship in June 1899, riding a Cleveland bike, adding this to his other "major resistance records".82 In Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1900 Joao Alves set the 50 km record with a time of 1 hour, 16 minutes and 53 seconds, after a series of competitions in the city's three velodromes.83
The variety of surnames in those examples of champions indicates how cycling in Brazil and Argentina appealed to South Americans of Central European, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and British backgrounds. Further to this, professional cycling on the Atlantic seaboard of South America was a transnational phenomenon from its beginning (riders moved around in search of competition and prize money). In March 1899 promoters brought the Italian Federico Momo, representing Peugeot, and the Brazilian Antonio Oliveira, representing Wolffbicycles, to compete in an International Challenge Match in the Palermo velodrome. The Brazilian Oliveira was the favourite, having recently been victorious in a similar challenge in São Paulo, and he won again in Buenos Aires. An extensive report marvelled that "some of the world's most famous cyclists" had come to the city. Oliveira's triumph made him "the South American champion".84
At the beginning of the twentieth century images of these transnational cyclists circulated in the South American media, showcasing new ways of spectatorship and leisure. Photographs of the packed Velodromo Uruguayo showed thousands of spectators standing to watch the races, and were printed in the widely-distributed Caras y Caretas.85 In Buenos Aires 2.500 people attended races at the Palermo Velodrome, including an "international race" pitting "the best-known professionals from this country" against "the Europeans who have recently arrived". he winners of the paired relays were Listar-Bugallo, Cervera-Sintich and [Antonio] Oliveira-The Midget. Several of these riders also raced in Brazil and Uruguay. he rider using the English nickname The Midget remains unknown (he was the only rider whose photograph was not published).86
The appeal of "famous" international celebrity professional riders was key to the way these events were marketed.87 When in 1909 the Chilean aviator and cyclist Don Luis A. Acevedo won a 100 km challenge set by the bicycle importer, Casa Friedman, in the capital's thriving Parque Cousiño velodrome, a new sports paper, El Sport Ilustrado, observed that "cycling has now been adopted everywhere".88 Some cycle-racers like The Midget were referred to in the press by their nicknames. Winners in Mar del Plata included Porteñito, Rambla, and Talisman.89 Victors in São Paulo included Avelino, Pitinho, Virgilio, and Mephistofeles. The use of nicknames suggests that these professional riders were of lower social status than the Dons and Señores reported elsewhere. No memoirs from this first generation of international professional cyclists in South America have been located, but we might identify continuities with the status of jockeys in the horseracing culture where bike-racing emerged.90 The historical anonymity of celebrated South American bike-riders has much more in common with that ofjockeys than it does with footballers or other famous sportsmen.
Cycling and technology
Contemporaries regularly compared bicycle races to the horseracing that predated it as a gambling-focused spectator sport. As hippodromes were supplanted by velodromes, sports were seen to be becoming more "civilized". Purpose-built velodromes were clean, compact, modern versions of the hippodromes with which they competed for spectators and gambling revenue. The modernity of the riders' mounts was contrasted with the physical sensations and odours of horses, reminiscent of the countryside and another age. Cycling promoters in Montevideo grasped the visual dimension of their races to showcase a certain image of sporting novelty that emphasised the sportsmanship and civility of the riders.91
The first moving pictures captured in Uruguay were of a cycling race: Carrera de bicicletas en el Velodromo de Arroyo Seco [Bicycle Race in the Arroyo Seco Velodrome], produced by the Spanish filmmaker Felix Oliver in 1898. The short film shows a banked velodrome, a race involving four safety bicycles advancing sometimes as a group, occasionally separately, with some aristocratically-dressed women crossing between the racers to award prizes, and bunches of spectators clustered around the track.92 The Arroyo Seco Velodrome was established and run by the private company Carrara & Volonte. The commercial operation closed in 1903 when it apparently started losing money, though the surviving images show advertisements placed around the track.93 It seems likely that the film was produced as part of the marketing of the velodrome, to be shown in local theatres. The surviving scraps of newspapers and archive footage shows us the role of gamblers and municipal authorities in the early history of the sport, as well as the dominance of the elite social groups who were conscious of producing a hygienic, safe form of leisure for their peers.
The many adverts promoting bicycles in the press in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, and Peru demonstrate how hygiene was a prime selling point, as it was elsewhere. he inauguration of the Velódromo Paulista was a celebration of its harmonious lines, electric lighting and being "the meeting point for the city's elegant society".94 This was reflected in the typography and content of the continent's first dedicated cycling magazine, A Bicycleta: Semanario Ciclystico Ilustrado, produced in São Paulo by Otto Huffenbacher from 1896.95
There were some South American engineers and pioneers of aviation and motorized travel who embraced the bicycle, such as Luis Acevedo in Chile. But critically, cycling occupied an ambiguous place between a technologically-enabled future and the simplicity of human endeavour and endurance -it was a human-powered machine-, and long-distance cyclists were often photographed dirty and exhausted. Many modern, elite sportsman looked down at the bicycle, for example the Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont, who apparently showed no interest in motor-free bicycles, despite studying in cycling-mad Paris and Bristol.96 Although promoters sought to present cycling as a modern example of technological progress that South Americans should aspire to, the reality was that its practitioners often ended up covered in dirt, grease, and bruises.
Cycling innovations became the regular subject of speculation regarding technological progress.97 Commentators often remarked upon the incongruity of seeing this apparent paragon of sporting modernity alongside older traditions, as when a crowd persuaded promoters to replace cycling with bull-fighting in an improvised event in Callao, Peru, or when bicycles were juxtaposed with horses.98 The bicycle seemed to capture something of the overlap between an aspiration to embrace modern technology, and the physicality of human effort that modernizing elites could avoid, from the 1920s onwards, with the motorcycle and motorcar.
The raft of poems, paintings, and cartoons composed about cycling in South America show that the practice acquired a romantic image similar to that evoked later in the twentieth century by Flann O'Brien, combining the purity of human movement and exertion with the lure of mechanized mobility. A poem by Abdalasis Gomez Jaime, in Colombia, evoked a bicycle coming to life at night "dreaming and racing without a care across the plains".99 A cartoon by Villalobos in Caras y Caretas, "Ciclomania", pictured a Cyclist talking to St. Peter, preferring not to pass into Heaven when informed that he could not bring his bicycle with him.100 The appeal of the sport was observed to lie in the constant threat of death that shadowed cyclists in their freedom and grace, but also the lure of the machine that threatened the humanity of its rider. In Bucaramanga, Colombia, Roberto J. Diaz wrote:
Oh, lovely lady cyclist, my indiscreet soul Can no longer hide from you, how much it loves you; And faced with your indifference, it prefers to die Beneath the imprint of the tyres of your bicycle. 101
A poem written in 1909 in Ecuador ruminated on the links between cycling and the cult of the athletic body:
Those skinny lads you know / Who used to just hang around Now they have got on a bike / And it has brought them back to life Now we see them open-mouthed / Tasting the sweet warm breeze Filling up their lungs / With air that makes them stronger. In whichever part ofthe unhygienic city / You happen to find yourselfin. As long as you cycle everyday / You will enjoy your health on the way.102
Conclusions
The material analysed here demonstrates that cycling was widely adopted across South America at the end of the nineteenth century, just as it was in Europe and North America. It shows that cycling "booms" in the mid-1880s and mid-1890s were much more global than has previously been accepted. Given the numbers of people cycling and watching races in velodromes, relative to the population size of South American cities, it might even been suggested that South America's cycling boom was more intense and popular that it was in conventional heartlands such as France and the United States.103 The differences lay in the manufacture of bicycles, that did not develop in South America until the 1930s, and in the great distances and diverse geographical features that were both catalyst and obstacle to cycling in South America. he research presented in this article shows that there were many bicycles and cyclists in South America in the 1890s and 1900s, not just in isolated pockets but in enough urban centres to demonstrate a clear pattern of cultural and technological transfer. These centres were often located in port cities like Rio, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Valparaiso, but cycling also flourished inland at São Paulo and Santiago, and up in the Andes in Bogotá.104
Consideration of these findings suggests two main conclusions. First, that the nature of cycling as an individual sport intimately connected to the geography of place meant that it rode against rising currents of nationalism in South American sport, which found representative national value in collective team sports such as football. In its extension of human capacity in speed and endurance cycling could be liberating across social barriers, whether in terms of gender, race, region or class. Indeed, we might go as far as to suggest that cycling cultures were most effectively established in this period by people and in places that were peripheral to national representative projects, as amongst the mestizo population of Boyacá state in Andean Colombia, or in Porto Alegre in Brazil's most southern province of Rio Grande do Sul.105 Cycling flourished in urban velodromes but was not confined to them, despite the dangers of the street or the uneven roads. Cyclists like Alberto Justiniano Olid set out to tackle the continent's major topographical challenges and were lauded for their endeavours, and then forgotten by national chroniclers. Press reports from smaller towns like the Pacific post of Esmeraldas, in Ecuador, where cycle races formed part of the national independence celebrations, and surviving through undated photographs, is suggestive of the existence of club cultures away from the standard media radars.106 Cycling survived in smaller towns and in the countryside, and persisted in some clubs or localities as a result of the commitment of determined promoters, mechanics, and riders.
The material presented here demonstrates the weakness of a global history of cycling that neglects the South American experience. As he challenged for the Tour de France title, Lucien Mazan sought to leave behind his education on Argentinian roads and became Petit-Breton. This South American was himself part of the mythologization that linked French nationhood with cycling. Incorporating apparently peripheral histories into global narratives demands changing the way historians think about chronology and the diffusion of practice and technology. The technological advances in travel and communication of the late nineteenth-century facilitated national and international sporting encounters. New social forms were created through the quest for sporting records. Who could fly the highest and the furthest, or who could ride the fastest or the longest, were questions that engaged directly with dominant ideas about race and positivism in early twentieth-century South America. Cities with thousands of new immigrants adopted new forms of sport and recreation where the meanings of technological innovations were transformed by South Americans, opened "new possibilities", and created resistance that could be local or global in outlook, or both.107
Bicycles took South Americans in new directions, climbing mountains and linking places. Urban promoters of cycling saw their role as part of a broader civilising process where South Americans would be improved through physical exercise, dedication, and subjection to international regulations. The 1925 statutes of the Unión Ciclista de Santiago, for example, drawn up by Eduardo Lasalle, Pedro Vidal, and Guillermo Araya, stated that cycling had "nothing to do with any political or religious idea" and that the club's members would be "sociable, civilized, and humanitarian with every human being" because of their 'training in reason".108 Francisco Juillet, the president of the Union, had competed for Chile in the 1924 Olympic games. He argued that cycling should be above the rowdiness of soccer, where the rider became at one with their "physical culture" and the surrounding environment.109
South American cycling was not characterized by its "coloniality", and its development was not limited to the incorporation and adaptation of a European invention by elites. Cycling fed into South American nation-building projects based in the big cities and then surpassed them and moved into the margins -both geographical and social- where it left fewer traces. Years before South American victories in international soccer tournaments came to symbolise the continent's athletic prowess, a cyclist trained on the roads of Argentina won the Tour de France. These were often transnational riders, whose stories have evaded the national historical and sporting frameworks later imposed upon them. Cycling flourished on the margins because of the freedoms it offered in apparently unpromising areas. Lucien Petit-Breton entered France's national sporting pantheon of heroes. Lucien Mazan and his even less celebrated contemporaries like Alberto Justiniano Olid are yet to find their place in South American histories.
