05/02/2026
The crowd at Madison Square Garden on the night of January 6, 1896, was about three thousand people.
The track was a banked wooden oval, eight laps to a mile, built indoors. The arena was lit by electric lamps that had only been installed that decade. The smoke from the audience drifted across the boards. The bell rang at eight in the evening.
A small twenty-year-old woman in a self-tailored racing costume came out of the gate among ten other riders. Her dark hair was cut close. Her legs were already legendary in the cycling press. She rode a bicycle she had bought herself, working as a seamstress, two years earlier. Her name on the program was Tillie Anderson.
She rode at top speed for two hours.
The format of the women's six-day race in 1896 was punishing in the specific way American spectator sports liked their athletes punished. Two hours per day. Six days. Eight laps to the mile on a banked indoor track. The lap counts and elapsed times were recorded by hand by lap counters in the infield. The audience bet on every race. The newspapers covered the women's races on the front page.
Tillie won the race in Madison Square Garden that week.
She would win, by the time she was done, one hundred and twenty-three out of one hundred and thirty races.
She had been born Matilda Andersdotter on April 23, 1875, in the southern Swedish province of Skåne. Her father was a farmer. He died when she was a child. The family was poor.
In 1891 she emigrated to Chicago with a younger brother. She was sixteen. The rest of the family followed over the next two years. They settled in Chicago's Swedish neighborhood, the area the locals called Swedetown.
Tillie took a job as a seamstress in a tailor's shop. She worked extra hours on her own sewing machine at home for additional money. By the standards of immigrant women in Chicago in 1893, she was making a living.
The bicycle craze hit America that year.
The new safety bicycle — two equally sized wheels, a chain drive, a saddle the rider could actually balance on — had replaced the dangerous penny-farthing. Four million bicycles were sold in the United States in the early 1890s. Roughly a third of the riders were women. The bicycle was, for women in 1893, a piece of personal liberation that had no precedent in American history. Susan B. Anthony said in 1896 that the bicycle had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.
Tillie watched women cycle past her on the streets of Chicago. She decided she wanted one.
It took her two years of saving on a seamstress wage to afford the cheapest model available.
She bought it in the summer of 1894. She started training immediately.
She joined the Monitor — the Swedish cycling club of Chicago. She rode every day after work. Her first race was the next summer — a hundred-mile road race over the Elgin-to-Aurora course in Illinois. She won. She broke the existing women's record by eighteen minutes.
She was nineteen years old.
The League of American Wheelmen, the governing body of American cycling, named her the world champion of women's cycling within a year. She was twenty.
Her riding partner was a Swedish-American cyclist named Phil Sjöberg. He had been a racer himself. Watching Tillie train, he understood quickly that she was faster than he was, faster than almost anyone in the country. He gave up his racing career to coach hers. They married in December 1897.
For the next five years she traveled the United States in a circuit of indoor track races and outdoor century rides, taking on every female competitor she could find. Madison Square Garden. Detroit. Boston. Philadelphia. The crowds came to see the Terrible Swede — the press's nickname for her, used affectionately, derived from the speed she rode at and the small unsmiling intensity of her face during a race.
Her best times still hold up against modern professional women's cycling. She rode a hundred miles in six hours, fifty-two minutes, fifteen seconds. She rode a half mile in fifty-two seconds.
She submitted herself, in 1898, to a medical examination by physicians who wanted to study the physical effects of intense exercise on a woman's body. The newspapers across America published the results, including an illustration of her bare leg. Her mother was horrified. Her Bible teacher — the celebrated evangelist Reverend Dwight L. Moody — formally denounced her from the pulpit.
She kept racing.
In 1901 her husband Phil developed tuberculosis. He died in early 1902. She was twenty-six.
In the same year, her chief rival on the women's circuit — a Detroit racer named Lizzie Glaw — died of typhoid. Another major competitor, Dottie Farnsworth, was killed in a circus cycling accident.
Within twelve months, women's professional cycling in the United States effectively collapsed. The League of American Wheelmen stopped sanctioning women's races. The newspapers stopped covering them. The promoters stopped booking them. The sport that Tillie Anderson had ridden to the top of in seven years was simply dismantled around her.
She rode her last race in 1902.
She was twenty-seven years old. She had been world champion for seven years. She did not race again.
She moved to a small house in Chicago. She worked as a Swedish masseuse for wealthy Chicago families. She advocated, into the 1930s, for the construction of bicycle paths in the Chicago city parks. She remained an officer in the League of American Wheelmen, and later in a small organization called the Bicycle Stars of the Nineteenth Century, until the end of her life.
She was widowed at twenty-six. She never remarried. She had no children.
She lived another sixty-three years.
She died on April 29, 1965, in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota — a small town near the lake cabin where she had spent her summers for decades. She was ninety years old. The newspapers in Chicago did not run an obituary. The cycling world had forgotten her. The women's cycling she had been world champion of had not existed in any organized form for the better part of a century.
She had, however, chosen her own gravestone.
It is a small marker in a Minnesota cemetery. It bears her name. It bears her dates.
Below the dates is one inscribed line.
World Champion Cyclist.
She had not raced in sixty-three years. She had decided, at some point in her last decade, that those four words were what she wanted to leave behind.
Her racing papers, calendars, and photographs are still at the family's lake cabin in northern Minnesota. So is her racing bicycle. Her great-niece Alice Olson Roepke kept everything for the rest of her life and still uses the cottage today.
In June 2000, thirty-five years after her death, Tillie Anderson was inducted into the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame.
She had been waiting on a stone in Minnesota for someone to come looking.
