Fast Digs and a Man Called Jack

Thirty years before the first Los Angeles Olympic Games brought world-class bicycle racing to the city, a man by the name of John Shillington Prince accomplished the same spectacle of competition. Though never able to entice the nation's greatest cyclist of the era, Major Taylor, to race at the Los Angeles Velodrome (where Prince had become manager in 1900) during its short, two-season existence, he was able to bring many of Taylors' closest competitors.

Who was this man, popularly known as Jack Prince? He was born in Coventry, England in 1859, and from the very beginning of the "high-wheel" era, possessed a fascination (and above average aptitude) for the bicycle. Prince began racing almost as soon as he began to ride and by 1880, at twenty-one years of age, was regarded as a world-class racer. Three years later Prince left England for the United States where he intended to sell English-made bicycles in the growing American marketplace. To establish name and reputation in his new home country, Prince resumed racing and promptly won billing as the "Champion of America." In 1886 Prince was one of five riders racing for the Gormully & Jeffery Company team, and that same year won, what was being called the high-wheel world championships, held at Omaha, Nebraska.

Now known on this side of the Atlantic, Prince quit the selling trade and took up promotion - promoting races and, ultimately, the tracks upon which those races took place. Among the tracks he managed, or helped build in California (beside the one at Los Angeles) included Fresno and Sacramento. Prince's management and ownership endeavors brought him into contact with the top racers in the states, and many from overseas. Those contacts allowed him to further his standing in the game, and organize some of the most competitive races seen up to that time. With the decline of bicycle racing in the early 1900s Prince's interests shifted; he took what he had learned from bicycle tracks and adapted them to motorcycle racing, and then automobiles. Among the board tracks for motorcycle and automobile racing that Prince would build between 1910 and 1915 were the first, the Motordrome at Playa del Rey, and followed by Chicago, Omaha, Des Moines, Baltimore, and Beverly Hills. Between 1910 and 1928 twenty-four board tracks were opened in the United States, of those, seventeen were built by Prince.