A housewife, farmworker and seven-time world champion, AnOther considers the female amateur cyclist who set new women's records, and then broke the men's ones too
British cycling has undergone a mammoth renaissance in recent years, but 50 years ago female competitors, let alone professional ones, were almost unheard of the in the UK – a fact which makes the story of Beryl Burton, an amateur athlete and working housewife who was crowned women’s world champion seven times over, all the more unbelievable. From the moment when she was first grudgingly accepted into the men’s local cycling club, until her final race win in 1986, Burton dominated the sport, winning a host of titles across both road races and time trials – a dual approach which hadn't been seen since until recent years – and no less than seven wold championship jerseys to boot.
Defining Features
Burton was born in Leeds in 1937, but she was a sickly child, suffering with chorea, rheumatic fever and a heart arrhythmia – and as a result she was warned by doctors that she should never undertake any strenuous exercise. Rather than allowing her medical history to control her lifestyle, however, she decided to disprove her doctors, and joined the local men’s club, Morley Cycle Club. “The first year the men pushed her around, the second year she rode alongside us, and by the third year all we could see was her back wheel,” her husband and coach Charlie Burton fondly recalls in one documentary. Before long she was competing in national races, working 12-hour shifts at a local rhubarb farm in West Yorkshire to support her family, and raising her daughter even as she undertook 100-mile rides for training – proving that it wasn’t only possible to do it all, but to excel, too. To this day, she is considered the best female cyclist the world has ever seen, boasting a career which endured almost 30 years.
Astonishingly, by the time Burton stopped competing she had a handful of world titles to her name – five in the 3,000-meter pursuit, and two in road racing – a rare feat which meant that she was afforded cycling’s great honour, that of the ‘arc-en-ciel’, or rainbow jersey. Her medals didn’t stop there, however – she was crowned Britain’s Best All Rounder an unprecedented 25 years in a row, and won a total of 90 domestic titles too. In spite of her innumerable successes in cycling-crazy Europe, where she was fêted as one of Britain’s proudest exports, her renown in the UK remained limited. “I was a double world champion in an international sport, and it might as well have been the ladies darts final down at the local as far as Britain was concerned,” she stated in her autobiography, Personal Best.
Seminal Moments
The most magnificent of Beryl’s 90 wins, is ostensibly that of the 12 hour time trial record that she sent in 1967. Surpassing the expectations of all the spectators present, she achieved a soaring victory of 277.25 miles of the race – a record in women’s cycling which still stands to this day, almost 50 years on. Even more incredibly, her time also beat the men’s world record at the time, and remained unbeaten until two years later. “The men were set off first, and the ladies were set off after the men, [the organisers] thinking that that would be a safe bet,” her daughter once told Trans World Sport of the day of the double victory. As the story goes, Burton was a few hours into the event when she realised that she was gaining ground on Mike McNamara, one of the male competitors whose race had set off long before the women’s. “She didn’t know what to do,” her daughter continued, “so as she passed him she decided that the least she could do was offer him one of the liquorice allsorts that were in her pocket as she passed him.”
She’s AnOther Woman because…
Documentary footage of Burton is littered with extracts of her recalling her treatment by men. “Take it very steady,” she remembers a man telling her in one clip, a small knowing smile pulling up the corners of her mouth. “If the hills get too hard you must get off and walk. I’m sure the boys would wait for you.” Yet in spite of many years of her spectators watching on in disbelief as she won races, Burton never stopped to bathe in the glory of her achievements. Instead, she kept quietly training, ever modest and endlessly hardworking, while she set the women’s records and then broke the men’s, too. What better candidate for AnOther Woman?
