Section:GDN 1N PaGe:35 Edition Date:190827 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 26/8/2019 18:49 cYanmaGentaYellowb
Tuesday 27 August 2019 The Guardian •
35B
eryl Burton had a simple motto.
“Anything lads can do,” she told herself,
“I can do.” And then she got on her bike
and showed the world the truth of her
assertion through achievements that
provided an early sign of what we now
believe to be true: that in endurance
events, whether cycling or open-water
swimming or ultra-marathon running, the gap between
men and women decreases as the distance grows.
Between the ages of 19 and 39 the Yorkshirewoman
won enough cups and medals to fi ll a house. They
included two world road race championships, fi ve world
pursuit titles, 72 national time trial championships at
distances from 10 to 100 miles, 12 national road race titles
and a further dozen national pursuit titles. As a record
breaker in time trials at all distances, she was beyond
compare. Most of her national records lasted 20 years;
one stood for half a century.
When it came to showing she could compete with
“lads”, one incident has entered into legend. In
September 1967 she made the short journey from her
home in Morley, south of Leeds, to take part in the
12-hour time trial run by Otley cycling club. She was 30 ,
and at her peak. The male competitors were due to start
fi rst, at one-minute intervals, followed by the handful
of women. Among the men, the fi nal starter was Mike
McNamara, who was on his way to the coveted title of
best British all-rounder.
During his description of the event in The Greatest ,
his biography of Burton, my colleague William
Fotheringham records her list of the food she prepared
for a ride that started just after seven o’clock in the
morning and ended an hour before sunset: “fruit salad,
peaches, rice pudding, fruit and honey cake, egg andmilk, peppermint and blackcurrant, coff ee, glucose, malt
bread, bananas, four bits of steak and some cheese”.
Most of this was loaded into the support car driven by
her husband, Charlie, who, having introduced her to
cycling when she was in her teens, acted throughout
her career in a purely supporting role that not all men- particularly, perhaps, in the Yorkshire of 50 years ago –
would fi nd easy to accept.
B
urton’s list does not include what
became perhaps the most famous
bit of food – if you can call it that – in
the history of British cycling. Having
completed 235 miles, still with almost
two hours to go, she overhauled
McNamara, who had started two
minutes ahead of her and had been
trying to keep her at bay, which meant repressing
an urgent need to pee. As she went past, in a rather
ambiguous gesture of consolation, she passed him a
Liquorice Allsort. At that point he fi nally gave in to the
need to climb off and empty his bladder.
Earlier in the day Burton had suff ered a persistent
stomach ache, relieved only when Charlie drove up
alongside and off ered her a nip of brandy. In the fi nal
hour she allowed McNamara to repass her and sat
safely 100 yards or so behind him until the end of her
12 hours by which time she had covered 277.25 miles
outdistancing McNamara by almost half a mile and
setting a record for all-comers, men or women. A
woman had beaten all the men in a major endurance
event while competing against them in exactly the same
conditions.
The time trial was Burton’s thing and the only reason
she never won the world time trial championship is that
it wasn’t there to be won. By the time the governing body
fi nally decided to allow women to race against the clock
for a world title, her career was long over. It was the same
with the Olympics: when women cyclists were fi nally
admitted to the Games in 1984, she was 47 years old –
although that did not prevent her from hoping vainly for
a place in the British team.
Beneath the image of a straightforward Yorkshire
lass, Burton was a complicated person: strong willed
and obsessively competitive. At 11, having just endured
the blow of unexpectedly failing
the exam that would have secured
her a grammar school place, she
had suff ered severe complications
from rheumatic fever, keeping her
in hospital for nine months and
convalescent for a further year. It was
not until her new boyfriend got her on
a bike that she found her means of self-
expression, one that justifi ed the years
of maintaining her strength through
hard toil on a rhubarb farm. The most
moving and troubling passages of the
book concern her relationship with her
daughter, Denise, who followed her
into cycling. On the day the 20-year-old
beat her mother to win the national
road race title in 1976, the pain of
defeat was so strong that Beryl could not bring herself to
congratulate her daughter. Six years later, however, they
were sharing a British 10-mile tandem record.
At the end of September the world’s best cyclists will
gather in Yorkshire, competing for the women’s and
men’s rainbow jerseys over roads Beryl Burton knew
well. Having set an example that advanced the cause of
women in sport, she died in 1996 while out on her bike
delivering invitations to her 59th birthday party; the
heart attack that killed her may have had its origins in her
childhood illness. “She was well known but no one truly
knew her,” Fotheringham writes; he is a knowledgeable
and sympathetic storyteller but the reader is left with the
feeling there are layers still waiting to be peeled away, if
time has not sealed them permanently together.The Greatest: The Times and Life of Beryl Burton is
published by YouCaxton (£20).The ride
started
just after
7am and
ended an
hour before
sunset by
which time
she had
covered
277 miles‘Anything lads can do’
How a Yorkshire rider
with a liking for
Liquorice Allsorts
shook up cycling
Richard Williams
Football
Newport out to
add Hammers to
their list of scalps
Page 36 Cricket
Was it the greatest
Test innings
of all time?
Page 42 ▲ In 1963 in Liège
Beryl Burton won
the individual world
pursuit title for the
fourth time in fi ve years
KEYSTONE/HULTON ARCHIVE/
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