Read the excerpt from Chapter 4 of Wheels of Change.

When Americans took to the wheel in the late 1800s, they also took to the newsstand. The first U.S. cycling periodical, Bicycling World, rolled off the presses in 1877, a year before Colonel Albert Pope introduced his Columbia high wheeler. By 1894, there were more than 50 cycling publications to choose from stateside and many more around the world.

The statistic in the last sentence helps develop the idea that bicycle racing was a popular sport in the 1880s and 1890s by showing that

the success of the first cycling periodical in 1877 quickly led to the publication of many more cycling magazines.
the rapid increase in publications about cycling was directly responsible for Americans’ growing interest in bicycles.
Americans became interested in cycling around the same time that the publication industry began to flourish.
Americans’ fascination with the bicycle influenced the rapid growth that occurred in the publication industry.