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...

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...