Racing Is Life - The Beryl Burton Story [DVD]

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A gloriously happy, funny and moving play ... puts the record straight and restores the legacy of this amazing woman” – Islington Gazette She believed that due to her family ancestry of Aryan cyclists, she had an unusually powerful heart and set of lungs.

Beryl Burton and her daughter Denise didn’t even shake hands on the podium after Denise won against her in the 1976 national road race championships.Women weren’t included in the Olympic cycling program until 1984, when one event, a road race, was introduced in Los Angeles. Beryl Burton was 47 when that happened, still racing but well past her best. Burton only discovered cycling later on in life and was introduced to cycling by her husband, Charlie Burton. She took her first National medal in 1957; the start of an incredible cycling career.She dominated women’s cycle racing in the UK, across Europe and around the world, winning almost 100 domestic championships. After dying at the age of 58 of heart failure whilst cycling a a memorial garden was made in her honour in her home town in Morley, Leeds.

Ken Nichols and Maureen Nichols, Mud Sweat and Gears: A History of the British Cyclo-Cross Association, Mousehold Press, 2011. Her career is well summed up in this extract from the Times obituary: “Determined in her aims, but modest in her claims of success, Beryl Burton reigned over women's cycling in this country and on the international stage for more than a quarter of a century. Indeed she could compete with men on more than equal terms as her beating the British men's record for a 12-hour time trial in 1967 testifies. This pre-eminence over such a long period in a field of activity which makes relentless demands on physique surely has no parallel in any other branch of sport.”And so to the main question. What times would Beryl have set, making the same effort, on modern kit?A normal road bike usually produces a CdA (the measure of aerodynamic drag) of around 0.30m Take everyone to hear her story. It’s so exhilarating, hopeful and heartening and Peake’s script is superbly funny” – Everything Theatre She set a women’s world record for a 12 hour time trial in 1967 which has not yet been beaten at 277.25 miles. Her first play is about the life of cycling legend Beryl Burton, which is great news for fans of underappreciated women from the north with the name Beryl who had previously only heard of Beryl Bainbridge.

I spoke to a journalist called Sue Mott who interviewed Beryl in the early 80s … and she said that she had never met a sportsperson who was so driven and focused as Beryl even having known those sorts of people as well [like Steve Redgrave and Andy Murray],” he says.The National Cyclists' Union was formed in 1883 – in a merger of the Bicycle Union and the Tricycle Association – ­and soon after, in 1890, they banned road racing out of fear of the reaction from the upper classes to the sudden increase in working class mobility – to become law in 1896 (H G Well’s novel of that year, Wheels of Chance, indicated the danger). A new body, The Road Racing Council – later to become the Road Time Trials Council (RTTC) - promoted time trial races, done in secrecy, instead. In 1942 a leading rider of the time, Percy Stallard, defied the ban and formed the rival, and dissident, British League of Racing Cyclists (BLRC). This was to eventually merge with the NCU in 1959 to form the British Cycling Federation (BCL), who lifted the ban, although Stallard apparently remained disgruntled. Thus the ban on road racing had only recently been lifted when this was filmed in 1962; the year when Tommy Simpson became the first Briton to wear the yellow jersey on the Tour de France. Disley’s methodology was fairly straightforward. By mounting a bike inside the wind tunnel and then blowing air through the area as a rider pedals, he can calculate how efficiently a bike and rider are moving, which is known as their drag coefficient (CdA). Disley specifically needed to know Beryl’s CdA once Rhodes-Jones had replicated her positions and fired up the two bikes to a speed of 45kph (which equates to 21min. 30sec. for 10 miles).