Cyclist
Pro race history: Beryl Burton wins her first road Worlds in 1960
The front cover headline on the October 1960 edition of Coureur – Sporting Cyclist could not have been more understated. ‘Dual World Champion – Beryl Burton’ ran the simple tagline with a picture of the newly double-crowned champion crouched low over her bike, eyes locked forward.
‘If there’s anything nicer than one world title it’s two,’ Burton said in the short first-person account that appeared in the magazine. ‘I’m thrilled and happy to have won both the pursuit and the road titles… I have my two rainbow jerseys and two gold watches to take home with me.’
The 1960 event was only the third edition of the women’s World Championships Road Race. Burton, born in 1937 in Halton, a suburb four miles east of Leeds city centre, was not part of the six-woman squad Great Britain sent to the inaugural race in 1958. That was won by Luxembourg’s Elsy Jacobs, with Joan Poole the best of the British starters in fifth. Burton made her debut the following year, finishing fifth in the Netherlands behind winner Yvonne Reynders, who would claim four titles between 1959 and 1966.
Burton was at the beginning of a 30-year career that would see her amass seven world titles (two on the road, five on the track), amid a haul of national records and titles too exhaustive to list. She claimed 13 pursuit and 12 road race national titles and won the Best British All-Rounder title, awarded to the nation’s most complete time-trial rider, an incredible 25 years in a row.
‘Beryl the peril’
In 1960, for the first and only time, the World Championships were hosted by East Germany. In her first event Burton claimed her second world pursuit title, beating Belgian Marie-Theresa Naessens in front of 17,500 spectators in Leipzig.
‘Burton clocked a world fastest-ever for the women’s 3,000 metres – 4min 6.1sec,’ wrote Bill Marsh in The People. Naessens had initially taken the lead, ‘but the anxious moments passed,’ Marsh reported. ‘Burton made up the gap and drew away on the last two laps to win by 50 yards.’
Fast forward a week and Burton lined up at the start of her second World Championships Road Race, facing seven laps of the 8.7km Sachsenring, which included a 3km climb at the start of each circuit. Burton led the 30-strong field at the end of every one of those laps and spent the final 35km alone, holding off a chasing pack of 13. It was the inaugural champion Jacobs who had provided the initial spark for Burton’s solo move when she made a signature bid to break from the pack at the halfway stage.
‘Elsy started the break halfway up the long hill in the fourth lap and I went after her, catching up down the other side and going through to the front,’ Burton later reflected. ‘I expected her to do bit-and-bit with me to get a break going, but when I swung out to let her through Elsy wasn’t there. I looked round and she was well behind. There was nothing else to do then but to keep going on my own.’
And so Burton rode to a dominant victory, dragging her lead out to over three minutes from the second-placed Rosa Sels (Jacobs would finish 11th).
‘The car behind her contained six spare bicycles and there was time for her to run through all and still win handsomely,’ reported Cycling And Mopeds. ‘Beryl the peril of East Germany. They will not easily forget her!’
It was the first time any rider had won the world pursuit and road race titles in the same year. In the Daily Express, Ronald White reported, ‘The army of foreign journalists here are widely acclaiming Beryl’s unique double. One told me, “Even the maestro Fausto Coppi could not do it!”’
After the race, Burton was congratulated by compatriot Tom Simpson (as pictured here). Simpson was riding his second road Worlds having also made his debut in 1959, although he would crash on the sixth of 32 laps. Simpson would go on to claim his own world title in 1965.
After her unique double, Burton simply went back to work on her rhubarb farm, shunning all offers to go professional. Seven years later she claimed a second world road title, riding at the front from the off and taking a 43sec lead at the end of the opening lap in Heerlen in the Netherlands. Once again, her display prompted seasoned journalists to compare her performance to Italy’s legendary rider.
‘This was like one of Fausto Coppi’s great wins, two Belgian and Italian journalists said to me after she crossed the line,’ reported Cycling magazine’s Alan Gayfer. Burton later observed drily that she had ridden harder races.
The 1967 road race would be the last of her rainbow jerseys, bringing her eventual haul to seven World Championships gold medals (she had also claimed five world pursuit crowns). She continued to dominate the domestic scene, securing an unprecedented haul of titles and records in a career remarkable not just in its success, but also for its longevity. In his award-winning book Beryl – In Search Of Britain’s Greatest Athlete, Jeremy Wilson writes of ‘a career that began when Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee were respectively Conservative and Labour leaders and ended when Tony Blair and John Major were vying for Downing Street.’
That end came only when Burton died of heart failure in 1996 while delivering birthday party invitations on her bike.
‘The outpouring of correspondence that appeared in Cycling magazine just four days later was overwhelming,’ writes Wilson. ‘It underlined not just the shock of her unexpected passing but also an enduring and undiluted awe at her achievements.’
Giles Belbin is the author of Tour de France Champions: An A To Z (thehistorypress.co.uk)
• This article originally appeared in issue 155 of Cyclist magazine. Click here to subscribe
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