Perry Metzler

Perry Metzler

To person
Date of birth	October 11, 1940
date of death	February 14, 1971
nation	United States
discipline	Train (short term)
End of career	1967
Most important successes
US Junior Track Championships 1957 - Omnium
Last updated: March 9, 2020

Perry Metzler (born October 11, 1940 , † February 14, 1971 in Bình Định , South Vietnam ) was an American cyclist . He was the first African American cyclist to achieve a national amateur cycling title. The cycling historian Peter Nye describes his life as "may be the greatest tragedy in American cycling".

Athletic career

Perry Metzler grew up in Yazoo City , Mississippi ; he had a twin brother named Jerry. When the boys were around ten years old, the Metzler family - like many other black families at the time - moved north, to New York . In 1953, the brothers began cycling in the Crusaders Club of Brooklyn , founded by African American cyclists; the athletes drove used equipment and repaired their bikes themselves.

In May 1954, Jerry Metzler won his first race, his brother Perry finished second. Amos Ottley, an older black cyclist, and Ken Farnum , an Olympian from Barbados , looked after the two boys. Ottley became a father substitute after the Metzler family broke up. In the middle of the year the Crusaders disbanded because the treasurer had embezzled the club's treasury. However, other clubs did not accept the young blacks because of their skin color, so many of them stopped cycling.

In 1956, the Metzler twins qualified for the national championships in Orlando , but were expelled from the city because of racial segregation and had to turn back. Jerry Metzler then gave up cycling in frustration. His brother Perry, however, won the Junior Best All Round Trophy that year , an overall ranking of several races. In 1957 Perry Metzler qualified again for the US championships, which were held at the Washington Park Velodrome in Kenosha , but had no money for the trip there. Police officer and cycling official Al Toefield, who had recently met him on the street, offered to give him a lift in his car. There Metzler was American junior champion; at that time the track cycling championships were held as an omnium . This made him the first African American cyclist to win a national amateur title. Until then, only a black racing driver had succeeded in becoming the American champion when Major Taylor had won the professional sprint title in 1900 .

The largest New York cycling club, the Century Road Club Association (CRCA), wanted to include the great talent Metzler as a member. Since blacks were not allowed, he was registered as a Mexican . In January 1960, Perry Metzler was drafted into the US Army and stationed in Fort Jackson , South Carolina . Despite intensive efforts by Al Toefield, who was also a member of the United States Olympic Committee , Metzler was not accepted into the Armed Forces Special Services program , where he could have trained for the qualifying races for the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome . Toefield later found out that a southern officer had systematically thwarted this transfer. Perry Metzler failed to qualify for the Games, and his friend Herb Francis was the first African American cyclist to compete for the US in the Olympics .

In the 1960s, Perry Metzler occasionally competed in races in the northeastern United States. In 1962 he won the Eastern States Championships on a mobile velodrome in Fair Oaks . Four years later he was part of a team led by Toefield that took part in a Pan-American cycling meeting in Trinidad and Tobago , where he became a crowd favorite.

In 1967 Metzler qualified again for the US championships, but then had to give up cycling for financial reasons - he now had a family and was unemployed. In 1967 and 1968 he committed a number of crimes such as robbery . That is why he decided in 1969 to enlist again in the army: “He wanted to get out of the ghetto environment,” his wife reported later. For this purpose he drove from Chicago , where he now lived, to Detroit . To be accepted, he claimed to be unmarried and childless after being rejected as a married family man in Chicago. He trained as a paratrooper and was transported to Vietnam on February 3, 1970 . There he was presumed to have died of his own hands eleven days later. The official cause of death was stated: “Non-hostile, died from other causes. Accidental self-destruction ”. He was buried in Long Island National Cemetery .

literature

• Peter Nye: Hearts of Lions. The History of American Bicycle Racing . WW Norton & Company, New York / London 1988.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Nye, Hearts , p. 203.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Nye, Hearts , p. 304.
3. ^ Nye, Hearts , p. 199.
4. ^ Nye, Hearts , p. 201.
5. ↑ Sandra Wright Sutherland: No Brakes! Bicycle Track Racing in the United States . Iris Press, 1995, ISBN 0-9645243-0-9 , pp. 276 .
6. ^ Nye, Hearts , p. 203.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Nye, Hearts , p. 214.
8. ^ Geert De Vriese: Over de regenboog. ( limited preview in Google Book search).
9. ↑ Nye, Hearts , pp. 304 f.
10. ↑ Perry Metzler. The Wall of Faces, accessed March 9, 2020 . 
11. ↑ Combat Area Casualties Current File, 6/8/1956 - 1/21/1998. In: aad.archives.gov. June 30, 2005, accessed March 10, 2020 . 
12. ^ Perry Metzler: Private First Class from Michigan, Vietnam War Casualty. In: honorstates.org. February 14, 1971, accessed March 13, 2020 .