Women's Cycling Pioneers: The Riders Who Built the Sport Before There Was One

/ 01

Beryl Burton — the woman who beat the men

Beryl Burton is the legend of pre-modern women's cycling. A Yorkshirewoman who never turned professional, she dominated British time-trialling from the late 1950s through the 1970s, winning the BBAR (Best All-Rounder) competition 25 years in a row. Her 12-hour time trial record — set in 1967 — was 277.25 miles, a distance no man in Britain bettered that year either.

Burton was famous for handing a liquorice allsort to the men's record-holder as she passed him on that ride. She never raced internationally in any meaningful way — women's road racing in that era barely existed outside the Eastern Bloc — but her dominance at home made her impossible to ignore.

/ 02

Jeannie Longo — the French polymath

Jeannie Longo's career is so long it defies summary. She won her first French national road title in 1979 and her last in 2011. In between she stacked world titles on road, track and in cyclocross, an Olympic road race gold in Atlanta 1996, and more than 50 overall victories across major stage races and World Cups.

Longo was controversial — she was a vocal opponent of mandatory helmets long after the science was settled, and was banned briefly for missing doping controls — but her palmares is unmatched. She was still winning elite French titles in her fifties.

/ 03

Pioneers at a glance

/ 04

Van Moorsel and the Sydney four-medal Olympics

Leontien van Moorsel did something at the Sydney 2000 Olympics that no cyclist, male or female, had done before — she won three golds at a single Games (road race, road time trial, individual pursuit) plus a silver in the points race. The breadth — road and track, sprint and endurance adjacent — has never been replicated.

Van Moorsel's record was a one-Games statement of female sporting dominance that is rarely matched in any Olympic sport. She came back from anorexia in the mid-1990s to do it, and her openness about that recovery changed how the sport talked about rider health.

/ 05

Nicole Cooke — the double

Nicole Cooke's 2008 season is the one modern pioneers are measured against. In September she won the World Road Race Championship in Varese. Six weeks earlier, she had won the Olympic road race in Beijing in the rain. No rider — male or female — had done both in the same year.

Cooke retired in 2013 and became a sharp critic of the women's sport's economics, telling a parliamentary inquiry in 2014 that she had been pressured to dope as a junior. Her advocacy is part of the reason women's cycling's wage floor and calendar are taken more seriously now.

/ 06

What they share

Each of these riders was, for stretches of their careers, the only woman being talked about. Burton in the 1960s, Longo in the 1980s, Van Moorsel in the 1990s, Cooke in the 2000s, Vos across the 2010s. The modern peloton — with Vollering, Kopecky, Wiebes, Niewiadoma — has more depth and more stars at once.

The common thread is that none of them had a generation before them. They each invented what a women's career could look like, and then they kept going long enough to set the bar.