Jack Stoutenburg makes the Sports Hall of Fame on a bicycle. He was the top bike
racer of his days in the Georgian Bay district and probably one of the best in Canada when bicycle racing was a major sport.

Would you believe that a crowd of 3,000 came to Collingwood to watch a five mile bike race just after the turn of the century? He became prominent as a bike race almost overnight when he won surprise victory over the famed McKee brothers, Art and Jack, of Barrie in a five-mile race at Meaford.

He accumulated a case full of trophies and medals from 1904 to 1912.

Although the five-mile events was his most specialty, Jack won one & two mile events but his most important one-miler was a victory at the C.N.E. track in Toronto in 1908. He almost missed that race when he took the wrong street car from the Union Station and ended up in Scarborough. Still lugging his racing bike he finally made it with the co-operation of two or three kindly street car conductors. He was on his mark a few seconds before starting time and did not have time to procure a starter- that’s the fellow who gives the rider a shove when the starting gun is fired and Jack had to mount from a dead start. This cost him several precious seconds and by that time the field had a fifty-yard lead. But he caught them on the third lap and he won the race
by the width of a bicycle tire They say it was the greatest mile bike race ever witnessed at the C.N.E. grounds but another sporting event got he headlines that day. It seems that on that same afternoon, Tommy Longboat, the peerless Canadian Indian runner, won a fifteen- mile foot race against the great Alfie Shrubb of England.

Jack Stoutenburg continued racing bikes until 1912. Not because he was physically
finished. He just ran out of competition. Jack passed away in his 90th year.