The Madison is a form of track cycling race . The form just witnessed at the London 2012 Olympics as part of the Omnium (like pentathlon on bikes with no brakes at 50kph plus) is relatively safe, even docile if compared with others.

Other forms have teams of two and as many as forty riders on the track, some racing others resting out for a lap or two, the racing rider hands over to their team mate by grasping their hand and slingshoting them into the racing pace and lane.  It can look to new eyes a lot like barely harnessed chaos – it is.

But you couldn’t do that with a “broken brain”.

Mad or Madison?

In it’s original form Madison originates out of the banning of six day races, which were even more extreme [24hr racing for six days], in New York State,  and started at New York’s Madison Square Gardens. Huge crowds paid to watch days of  racing, gambling on which riders would win , gambling more on which might fall off,  delirious, exhausted, sometimes “hallucinating”, in near breakdown of mind and body – and aferwards needing weeks to recover from their  exertions. Til the next Madison…

That’s no “chemical imbalance”, its just feckin’ mad, son.

Really, it’s but one simple expression of normal human desire to push, to test the limits of ability and endurance of mind and body: for fun, for sport and maybe to earn a living, and maybe just an excuse to grow insanely huge thighs.

We humans do this and we do it with an understanding that any ill effects are only temporary…and we will get over it.

More on the origins of Madison from Wikipedia….

The madison began as a way of circumventing laws passed in New York, USA, aimed at restricting the exhaustion of cyclists taking part in six-day races.

The Brooklyn Daily Eagle said:

“The wear and tear upon their nerves and their muscles, and the loss of sleep make them [peevish and fretful]. If their desires are not met with on the moment, they break forth with a stream of abuse. Nothing pleases them. These outbreaks do not trouble the trainers with experience, for they understand the condition the men are in.”

The condition included delusions and hallucinations. Riders wobbled and frequently fell. But the riders were often well paid, especially since more people came to watch them as their condition worsened. Promoters in New York paid Teddy Hale $5,000 when he won in 1896 and he won “like a ghost, his face as white as a corpse, his eyes no longer visible because they’d retreated into his skull,” as one report had it.

The New York Times said in 1897:

“An athletic contest in which participants ‘go queer’ in their heads, and strain their powers until their faces become hideous with the tortures that rack them, is not sport. It is brutality. Days and weeks of recuperation will be needed to put the Garden racers in condition, and it is likely that some of them will never recover from the strain.”

Alarmed, New York and Illinois ruled in 1898 that no competitor could race for more than 12 hours a day. The promoter of the event at Madison Square Garden, reluctant to close his stadium for half the day, realised that giving each rider a partner with whom he could share the racing meant the race could still go on 24 hours a day but that no one rider would exceed the 12-hour limit. Speeds rose, distances grew, crowds increased, money poured in. Where Charlie Miller rode 2,088 miles alone, the Australian Alf Goullet and a decent partner could ride 2,790.