Think Serena Williams beating Roger Federer - Beryl Burton was that good

When Alistair Brownlee, the double Olympic triathlon champion, was asked about the greatest record in sport, he paused before considering several options. Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile. Eliud Kip...
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The Telegraph
2022-09-16T08:30:25Z
When Alistair Brownlee, the double Olympic triathlon champion, was asked about the greatest record in sport, he paused before considering several options. Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile. Eliud Kipchoge’s sub two-hour marathon. Brownlee is a student of athletic feats and eventually settled on his answer: Beryl Burton’s record for the distance cycled in 12 hours when she obliterated not only the women’s record but also surpassed the men’s record.
The story of this record, which would last for half a century and was set 55 years ago this week, is told in a new book ‘Beryl, In search of Britain’s Greatest Athlete’ by the Telegraph’s Jeremy Wilson.
Beryl Burton woke shortly before 4.30am on the morning of Sunday, Sept 17, 1967. She liked to be up for a few hours before racing and, after a simple breakfast, had a last check of her kit: bike, cycling shoes, water bottles, flasks of tea and the numerous small parcels of food that would be passed by her husband, Charlie, every 15 miles.
The family, including 11-year-old daughter Denise, then squeezed into their Cortina and set off on the short journey from their home near Morley towards the Yorkshire market town of Wetherby. At 7.11am, Beryl would begin an attempt at the record for the longest distance cycled in 12 hours.
Two weeks earlier in the Netherlands, she had won her seventh world title, demolishing by more than two minutes a field that included full-time state-sponsored riders from the Soviet Union and East Germany.
It was her second world road race title - a feat that remains unmatched in British cycling - but this was an era when events like the Olympics and the Tour de France were the preserve only of male cyclists.
It had left the thriving British time-trial scene as the principal means through which Beryl could express her unique talent and, on this September day 55 years ago, she completed a three-mile warm-up before gently pedalling up behind a queue of the last men's riders who were setting off at one-minute intervals.
"Thirty seconds," said the timekeeper, Arnold Elsegood, before her allotted start time. Beryl nodded. And then the words that will forever send a surge of adrenalin through any cyclist: "Five, four, three, two, one... Go!"
Beryl muttered a "thank you", stood up on the pedals and pressed down. "Do your best, lass - make it crack," were Charlie's last words as his wife disappeared into the distance for a sporting achievement that would shatter preconceptions of a woman's capabilities in endurance sport.
To appreciate the importance of this record, you need also to know something of British cycling’s history. Track and road racing may be the contemporary focus for elite riders, but priorities were different in the decades immediately after the Second World War. Group racing had been outlawed and, with track facilities desperately scarce, time trialling was the way that most people raced their bikes. Known as ‘the Race of Truth’, it is a discipline in which no rider can hide. Shielding oneself from the wind by following closely behind a competitor - a standard tactic in the massed peloton of any road race - is strictly prohibited.
It is just a bike, the undulating road, a ticking clock and the limitations of both your mind and body. This particularly appealed to Beryl and an outlook on life that could not easily compute shades of grey.
“It is a completely honest form of competition - the fastest and strongest rider wins,” she would say. It also suited Beryl’s extraordinary training regime. She worked full-time on a rhubarb farm, fitting in her cycling between arduous shifts labouring alongside some of the most physically strong men in Yorkshire.
From the mid 1950s until her death following a heart attack while out cycling four decades later, there was scarce deviation from a training routine that would average around 400 miles a week. It was a time, quite simply, when the generally lone sight of Beryl Burton out on her bike was as much a fixture of the Yorkshire Dales as the sweeping valleys or rugged hills.
Beryl would also think nothing of cycling the 170 miles back from London to Leeds up the A1 immediately after a 50-mile time trial on a Sunday morning and, as well as those punishing rides through the Dales, would often train in the slipstream behind trucks, wagons and lorries on the A64 between Leeds and York. “We all thought she was mad,” said Pam Hodson, an international team-mate.
Dorothy Hyman, an