A new book and film tell of bicycle racing’s Golden Age.

Ever hear the name Ty Cobb? How about Babe Ruth? Probably you have, unless you lived the last century under a rock.

Now try the name Alf Goullet. Doesn’t ring a bell? Try Bobby Walthour. Nothing?

Jeff Groman knows these names fall flat for most Americans. He’s on a mission to change that.

“That’s exactly why I wrote this book,” said Groman, eyeing the freshly-printed hardback in the back office of his Winslow cycle shop.

Groman, who owns Classic Cycle on Winslow Way, has long collected the stories, photos and memorabilia of cycling’s Golden Age. Many race-winning bicycles crowd the museum in the rear of his shop, including Goullet’s last remaining, fully intact bike.

The longtime island resident has now poured his voluminous knowledge into the pages of “The Six-Day Bicycle Races,” a 224-page tome crafted with co-author Peter Joffre Nye.

Groman also collaborated with filmmaker Mark Tyson to produce a companion documentary that has already joined the roster of the Celluloid Bainbridge and Seattle film festivals.

“Even in the cycling community, these guys who raced the “six days” have been largely overlooked,” said Groman, who will present his book and portions of the 76-minute film Thursday night at Eagle Harbor Books. “But when you talk about professional sports before World War II, the money was in bike racing.”

Goullet, in the 1920s, raked in more money than ‘The Babe’ even at the Yankee’s home run-hitting height.

Walthour, nicknamed “the Dixie Flyer” by adoring turn-of-the-century sportswriters, annually pocketed $20,000 from racing and product endorsements. During the same period, Ty Cobb made himself a sports legend earning just $5,000 a year.

Crowds turned out by the thousands at such venues as Madison Square Garden to see Goullet and Walthour push themselves past the brink of exhaustion.

Racing for six days straight on wood-paneled velodromes, these Golden Age cyclists often covered more miles than the Tour de France and eschewed sleep and food in favor of strychnine concoctions and cocaine-laced Vaseline rubs.

“It was a bloodsport, putting 16 cyclists on a track for 40 hours at a time,” Groman said. “If one went down, they all went down.”

And down they often went, sometimes twice a day.

“They’d sometimes just fall asleep right over the handlebars,” he said. “There were thrills and spills.”

Week-long displays of speed and agony weren’t for everyone. Public outcry over the sport led to restrictions on how long the cyclists were allowed on the track. Six-day races still drew crowds, but they began to fade after World War II.

At the sport’s height, Broadway playwright Damon Runyon was often in the stands cheering on Goullet, whom Runyon deemed “the greatest of all Six-Day bike riders.”

In 1921, Runyon captured the flavor of a race in its 144th hour:

“Tier on and tier the yell-tossed crates of humanity hung over the rim of the pine saucer in Madison Square Garden, their shrieks seeming to blow the riders onward like a gale, voices pitched to the cry, ‘Long live the King!’

“Then out of the tobacco fog came ol’ Al Goullet, the King that was to die. Out of the mist of defeat he came nine feet high to the strained imaginations of the other riders, and growing taller every minute. On he came, the Man of War of the wooden loop.”

Groman interviewed Goullet in his New Jersey home shortly before the racer died at age 104.

“Each six was my last,” Goullet is quoted as saying in Groman’s book. “They were so hard. But after a few night’s sleep, I was ready to go again. It’s a good thing to put your bad experiences behind you.”

Groman grew up hanging out in New Jersey bike shops, listening to the old racers reminisce about their glory days.

“The old timers would come in with old stuff – parts and bikes – that nobody wanted. But I wanted them,” Groman said. “Most didn’t pay any attention to them because they were just ‘old guys’ who always talked about the racing old days. But I listened.”

Groman spent years tracking down the racing greats, recording interviews and collecting rusty bits of pedal-powered history.

“I just started to collect their histories because they were really good stories and I knew they wouldn’t be around much longer,” he said. “One lead led to another and another guy and another guy in California, Chicago, Arizona, New Jersey, Las Vegas, Florida. I had hours and hours of interviews and didn’t know what to do with them.”

With the help of Nye and Tyson, Groman has finally found a place to tell the nearly forgotten tales of cycling’s glory days.

Groman served as “instigator” of both projects, lending his video interviews, thousands of photos, archived films and newspaper clippings to his collaborators.

The book and documentary are aimed at stoking the appetites of cyclists and history buffs “hungry to learn more” about the sport’s history in America.

But, even more so, Groman hopes to honor their nearly-forgotten legacy.

“(Goullet’s) neighbor, who I got the bike from, just knew him as the ‘old guy across the street,’” Groman said. “These guys, who were world champs, just became regular guys and lived quiet lives…and just fade away.

“I want to show where we come from. But mainly, I want to honor these guys.”

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Rolling royals

Jeff Groman will discuss “The Six-Day Bicycle Races: America’s Jazz-Age Sport” and show portions of a related documentary Thursday at Eagle Harbor Books. The event begins at 7:30 p.m. Groman plans to premiere the full documentary in early December, with later showings at the Celluloid Bainbridge Film Festival.