BERYL, IN SEACH OF BRITAIN’S GREATEST ATHLETE, JEREMY WILSON (2022)

An exceptional subject gets the write up she deserves

Pursuit Books, 9781788162937 Octo 338 pp

Beryl Burton has a fair claim to be Britain’s greatest ever sportsperson. Despite this, but consistent with the prejudice, hostility and discrimination she endured for most of her cycling career, a decent biography has been a long time coming. Gratifyingly, the wait has been repaid with a book that swells the heart, jerks the tears, and illuminates its subject with deserved brilliance.

Burton dominated British women’s cycling from the late 1950s until the early 1980s, winning seven world championships. She was time trial ‘British Best All Rounder’ 25 years running, and in her prime, beat endurance world records set by men.

Her years of dominance, however, came at a time when, despite tens of thousands competing in time trials every weekend, cycling attracted little attention beyond enthusiast circles. The sport’s establishment was also deeply indifferent to female competitors. Men raced bicycles from the outset of the modern Olympics, for example. Women were excluded from Olympic competition until 1984, and some events were not open to them until a decade later. 

Most British cycling was also strictly amateur. Burton combined elite competition with heavy manual work. Travel to and from events was self-organised and haphazard, prize money was minimal and sponsorship outlawed.

For those familiar with Burton’s extraordinary career, Wilson delivers multi-perspective accounts of landmarks such as 1967’s ‘Otley 12 hour’ casting them in fresh, cinematic, animation. He combines this with a penetrating and honest account of a women who put cycling before all else, including her family. Indeed, her premature death at 59 came after she had arguably pedalled herself to destruction.

Burton sprang from, and remained deeply loyal to, Morley Cycling Club, based on the edge of Leeds. Like many sporting clubs of that era, it was a collective of self-organised devotees, dependent on homespun resources, for whom the club was the centre of their leisure lives. Wilson’s insights into this slice of social history evoke a largely disappeared world, and are as compelling as his exploration of Burton’s athletic accomplishments.

It is a long time since I read Burton’s dry, ghost-written autobiography. When I did, I felt that we all deserved a better account of her remarkable life. Long wait notwithstanding, it is a treat to be rewarded with a biography of such shimmering illumination.

TD Feb 2025

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