 Charlie Winter was a six-foot-tall New Yorker who took up cycling on a dare. At the age of 19, he placed a second in the National Amateur Championship. His time of 38.6 seconds for the one-third-mile standing start in 1923 was a national record that stood for over 63 years. In 1924, at the age of 20, Charlie won the amateur national championships in Buffalo. The next year, in 1925, Charlie won the National Cycling Association's Sprint Track Season Championship. But it was in the grueling six-day races that Charlie Winter made his mark. With non-stop cut-throat racing, the Monday through Saturday six days in the 1920s packed arenas drew celebrities and top racers became America's highest-paid professional athletes. In December 1927, Winter teamed up with bicycling hauler famous Freddie Spencer from New Jersey in a six-day at New York's Madison Square Garden. Although they were down by six laps, one of the fastest men on a bike, Marshall Major Taylor, told Spencer that they were aces. The Winter Spencer team picked up the pace and won by six lengths in front of 21,000 screaming fans. They had ridden a total of 2,522 miles during those six days of cycling. In 1927 at a dinner in New York, Charlie Winter appeared with the other kings of sport, including Babe Ruth of Baseball, boxer Gene Tunney, Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmiller, hockey star Bill Cook, tennis player Bill Tilden, Atlanta golfer Bobby Jones, six-day partner Freddie Spencer, and Charlie Winter. Charlie went on to compete in 104 six-day bicycle races, mostly in the U.S. and Canada. His team was victorious seven times, including a 1936 race in Toronto with Hall of Famer Jimmy Walthour. He had nine second-place finishes and 14 thirds. After winning his last six-day race in Kansas City in 1937, he retired from racing at the age of 32. Charlie worked in the New York heating business for 40 years. He retired in 1977 and moved to Merced, California. He died there in 1986 at the age of 82. Charlie Winter, the Bronx strong boy, rode over 225,000 miles during his racing career.