Steven Steel

Steel is a mature man of roughly 190 centimeters whose hair falls into a jagged-edged bob, not unlike Foo Fighters. He generally wears a high-collared coat trimmed with tassels along the collar, matching trousers, and a pair of small rectangular spectacles.

For all the bold showmanship he projects as host of the race, Steel is privately an anxious man riddled with doubt. Over the years he has reinvented himself again and again as a performer, sportsman, and eventually a promoter, and he has a gift for bouncing back from every collapse. His real ambitions are modest, since he is content simply to see his name in print even at the bottom of a page, and he confides such feelings only to Lucy. Their marriage stays strictly platonic. Having lost his first love in his youth and sworn off romance, he regards Lucy as a protégée, closer to a daughter than a spouse, and the two share deep mutual trust. He agrees to help Funny Valentine recover the Saint's Corpse without grasping how brutal the operation will turn, and stays indifferent to the relics throughout.

Steel is born in New York in 1840. As the fourth of seven siblings, he is the son of an Irish immigrant. At fifteen he falls for a florist's daughter and pledges himself to her, only for her to die in a carriage accident, which plunges him into despair and a vow never to love again. He enlists in the cavalry but never sees combat, drifts through a fresh job nearly every year, then vanishes for more than a decade before resurfacing as an adventurer hunting dinosaurs in Costa Rica. Reinventing himself as a promoter earns him fame until a hoax about a monkey passed off as an alien wrongly labels him a fraud and costs him his mansion.

At rock bottom, a young Lucy Pendleton floats the idea of a race spanning the whole American continent with a fifty-million-dollar prize. Steel dismisses it, yet sponsors flock to him the next day, and it is later implied that Funny Valentine quietly arranged the backing to use the race as cover for locating the Saint's Corpse. Years afterward Steel finds Lucy grown and nearly identical to his lost love, and learning that her father has been forced to sell her to a gang, he protects her with a lie about her chastity. She later proposes marriage, which he reluctantly accepts, though he regards her more as a daughter than a spouse.

During the race itself, Steel serves largely as its public face while Lucy secretly works against Valentine. When Hot Pants stages Lucy's death, he is shaken but senses the body is a fake. He later suffers a mortal wound from Magent Magent and is taken prisoner by Valentine, reviving just in time to spare Lucy from Ticket to Ride. After Valentine's downfall he watches Lucy behead Diego Brando, then rides out to rescue Johnny from his own Tusk. In the aftermath he is condemned for the many lives the race cost, but silences his critics by handing all of his winnings to charity, and his ultimate fate is left unknown.