Major Taylor was the greatest cyclist of his generation. Born black in America in 1878, if Major was to fight his way to the top of his sport, he would have to fight his way through brutal racism and unfairness to do it. The dual battles took their toll on Taylor. In the end, he lost not only his fame and fortune but the family he loved too. He died alone, penniless, and estranged from his young daughter, Sydney.
As Michael Kranish writes in The World’s Fastest Man, for many years Sydney just thought her father had failed her, and naturally, she was angry at him. “Sydney had been bitter at what she interpreted as her father’s rigidity and aloofness. Only later, she said, did she truly understand the strains he had faced—the physical one of racing for decades, and the mental one of battling racism. The combination, she believed, had slowly killed him.”
Sydney didn’t know her father’s battles. Those battles weren’t his fault . . . but his failure to talk to her about them was. We all struggle. There has never been a parent (or a human being) who didn’t have their own battles. If we don’t explain this to our children, if we can’t be vulnerable or honest with them, there will forever be an unbridgeable gap between us. We will lose time and connection that we can’t ever get back.
All of us will lose what Sydney and Major lost: a chance to support each other, to understand each other, to learn from each other’s struggles, and to be loved and fully appreciated by each other.