Racing Is Life - The Beryl Burton Story [DVD]

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Beryl’s bike frame is made from Reynolds 531 double-butted tubing. It has some nice curly lug-work and was resprayed at the Universal Cycle Centre in Maltby, South Yorkshire, who loaned us the bike. The 1960 paint finish has been copied quite well, the big differences being the omission of the white head-tube seen on the original in the above photo, and the use of more recent Viking decals. The seat-tube decal references the five Tours of Britain won by Viking sponsored riders.

With that in mind, my only gripe is that ‘Beryl’ is sometimes in danger of becoming mawkish in its level of reverence for its heroine; when we’re told a record she broke remains unbeaten today, the audience break into applause, and the actors do too. The play ends with a roll call of her achievements, the stage laden with trophies. It’s astonishingly formidable, but we’ve just spent two hours learning what an incredible woman she was – we don’t need to have it, quite literally, spelt out to us.

4.  Sport in Leeds  - Beryl Burton and the British Cyclo-Cross Championship

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

When she was just 11 years old she had chorea and rheumatic fever and had to stay in hospital for 9 months. As her powers declined and her dominance waned, Burton refused to retire. In 1984, when Burton was 47-years-old, the first women’s Tour de France was held and women were allowed to compete in the Olympics for the first time. She lobbied for a place in both teams but was ultimately not selected.She believed that due to her family ancestry of Aryan cyclists, she had an unusually powerful heart and set of lungs. One of the best bits of Peake’s writing is her confidence with breaking down the fourth wall to provide a sardonic commentary on events. When the play starts, the actors talk about how they had to google Beryl Burton before their auditions. At one point, an actor blames a crap prop on ‘David Cameron and his arts cuts’. It’s an endearing, playful device, almost like being on a school trip and having your mate next to you whisper in your ear. Beryl Burton won everything she could win in the restricted world of women’s cycling that existed when she raced. Women have had a bad deal in sport, but cycling has been one of the worst offenders. If you think the life of an obscure female cyclist from the 1960s sounds a bit niche, join the club. Forget your preconceptions; it’s an evening of relentless fun, committed to teaching its audience something, whilst simultaneously never taking itself too seriously and maintaining a fierce respect for its heroine.

It's a blast ... A really good yarn and four wildly talented actors. What's not to like?” – Camden New Journal Beryl Burton with her daughter Denise in 1963 (Image credit: Getty Images Sport) ‘She just kept going and going’ 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).

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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.” Maxine Peake, a British actress, wrote and starred in ‘Beryl: a Love Story on Two Wheels’, a radio play based on her life, with contributions from her husband Charlie Burton throughout. That inability to stop wanting to be the best - part of me loves it and part of it is quite tragic as well. It’s also quite moving because she just was who she was,” Wilson says. “There was a sort of authenticity to it. She just kept going and kept going because she wanted to win and didn’t really care about the medical advice.”

The camera is on a low section of a field looking up at a cyclist who rides down the hill, then gets off her bike, lifts it over a stone wall and runs down the rest of the hill carrying the bike. A couple of other cyclists do the same thing. Actress Maxine Peake wrote a play to celebrate Beryl Burton’s extraordinary achievements. Simply called ‘Beryl’, it was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on the 27th of November, 2012.

Beryl Burton never competed at the Olympics, as Women’s Cycling was introduced at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984, too late in Burton’s career; she was 47.