It's one thing to call a baseball player "the Black Babe Ruth." One player wore that moniker. But some called "the Bambino" "the White* Josh Gibson."
Gibson died at age 35, three months before Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier.* Yet he wasn't enshrined in the sport's Hall of Fame until a quarter-century after his passing.
Five years ago, Rogatien Vachon was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame--more than three decades after he played his last game in the National Hockey League. When he retired, he was among the sport's top five or ten in several categories for his position. He spent the bulk of his career with the Los Angeles Kings, where he became the franchise's first superstar. But, as great as he was, he was overshadowed by other goalies like Ken Dryden, who played for the dynastic Montreal Canadiens teams, and Ed Giacomin, who spent his career with the New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings.
So why am I mentioning them on this blog?
Well, a parallel just played out in the world of cycling. On 6 November, Marianne Martin will accept her induction to the US Bicycling Hall of Fame in Colorado Springs. She actually was inducted last year but, due to the pandemic, her ceremony was postponed.
Her enshrinement comes three decades after she retired from competition and nearly four after her most notable achievement on two wheels. That her induction was so late in coming is also a sad commentary on the state of competitive cycling.
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| Marianne Martin and Laurent Fignon, winners of the women's and men's Tour de France, 1984 |
In 1984, she won the inaugural edition of the women's Tour de France. The race, 18 days long, ran in tandem with (though on shorter courses than, with the same climbs and peaks as) the men's version. Six editions of the women's Tour were held, the last coming in 1989, the year Greg LeMond came back from a near-fatal hunting accident to win the men's Tour for the second time.
LeMond got his induction, well-deserved as it was, five years after his last race. Martin's honor took a quarter-century longer to come her way. Still, she doesn't express anger or resentment. "Half my friends don't even know that I was a cyclist. It's not something I carry out in front of me," says Martin, who is a photographer. While she says that cycling was something she did, not who she was, it's hard not to compare her post-cycling life and reputation with that of LeMond who, in turn, is less famous than the disgraced Lance Armstrong.
*--The only athletes I respect as much as human beings as I respect Jackie Robinson are Billie Jean King, Muhammad Ali, Colin Kaepernick and Simon Biles. That said, I will not refute (or confirm) the rumors that Jackie wasn't the first Black Major League Baseball player, as others--including Babe himself--were rumored to be Black. Also, it wouldn't surprise me if some light-skinned Black players moved north (where all of the MLB teams were, and Jim Crow laws weren't) and passed themselves off as white.
