But selfish is what one needs to be sometimes. At least if you are going to succeed in the way that Beryl Burton did, setting standards unthinkable not only for her gender but crashing through many 'glass ceilings' long before feminism had thought of the phrase. An appreciation of what she achieved in the Otley CC 12 Hour in 1967 was given in some detail by Paul Sinha on his Radio 4 programme of obscure quiz knowledge earlier this year. It's still somehow outrageous that such knowledge should still be regarded as 'obscure' and news to many of those who heard it then but the art of amateur time trialling on bikes, then much more than now, was our special secret.
I'm not convinced that we wanted people to know, the same as it is with those of us who think we know about a certain sort of sensible poetry. For all that William Fotheringham looks back in anger at the shambles of organisation of British cycling, bemoans how much more Beryl might have achieved had cycling, women's rights and opportunities been better catered for and how she was left with nothing else to do, it doesn't read like that to me.
Beryl Burton was Yorkshire and, even if I left in 1968 at the age of 8, I'm Notts. There is a difference. They were militant, we were moderate. Beryl came from Boycott country, like Fred Trueman, Brian Close, Ray Illingworth. Had I been good enough, I'd have batted with Derek Randall.
Her decades of unimaginable record setting and unassailable title-holding might only amount to the same dreary litany of facts and figures that make sports biography usually such a dull area, written by ghost writers because the subject is no writer and written for sports anoraks who know no better than to think such statistics matter. But Beryl's story comes down to two illuminating episodes.
The first is the increasingly most famous licorice allsort that she passed to top male rider, Mike MacNamara, when she caught him from two minutes behind in the Otley 12 in 1967 before making the male 12 Hour record only a sub category of the overall record with her 277.25. Even then she turned down the chance of extending it by finishing 45 seconds early.
The other is when Denise, her daughter, beat her in the National Championship Road Race in 1976 and she struggled to come to terms with it. Maybe you need to be like that if you are so concentrated on winning but what not all of us knew is that Denise still lived at home and Beryl wouldn't even give Denise a lift to the start first thing that morning. My dad was kinder than that and thought nothing of taking me to the Swindon Road Club '10' in 1995 when I put 4 minutes into my mother and father on their tandem. I was spoilt rotten.
Beryl blamed her defeat, probably quite rightly, on the fact that she had to set the pace in the leading group and was left vulnerable to attack in the finishing sprint from those who had hung on to her back wheel. But that is what cycling's like. Even she couldn't continue to dominate in such different disciplines as the relentless churning out of miles in marathon 12's while retaining the speed and immediate acceleration to win in last-minute sprints and short distance pursuits on the track.
If Fotheringham does his journalistic best to diagnose some flaw in Beryl and decides she had nothing more than winning at cycling as an obsession, he's already shot himself in the foot by detailing the friends she had as an ordinary club member, as well as her knitting, baking and even, yes, ironing, that I'm sure Alf Engers didn't do.
Considering the headlines made this week by Fallon Sherrock, who has beaten two men in the Darts, yes, Beryl had more than plenty going on and that was all the Good Yorkshire, not the Boycott Yorkshire.
What she started out with was debilitating childhood illness, unexpectedly failing the 11-plus and then the hard work on a rhubarb farm. And then she never let it show that she had to try to keep up but what she ended up with, as well as taking on Eastern Bloc opposition with state-sponsored advantages, was,
her enduring ability to time trial the living daylights out of any stretch of road in Britain.
My favourite bit, though, is domestic not sport-related,
Immediately after crossing the line in a National Championship time trial, Burton...had spotted some cheap potatoes and was going back to buy some.
Sad though Fotheringham tries to make the story, with her compulsion to continue riding when she could have stopped, with mounting injury problems and not winning any more, I don't think he makes the case for the emptiness inside that he finds in Beryl.
Never being satisfied is at most the least one needs to have to dominate above one's division in the way that she did. For sure, her claim that she had no natural talent are absurd because natural ability plus commitment are essential to any such longevity at far beyond the top of any chosen discipline but that's Yorkshire for you, claiming that it was just grit and determination.
It's a great book and a fine tribute but that's more due to Beryl than it is to William Fotheringham's attempt to interpret her.
