Eileen Gray (sports officer)

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Eileen Gray , MBE , CBE , (born April 25, 1920 in Bermondsey , London , † May 20, 2015 in Dulwich , London) was a British cyclist and sports official .

Athletic career

During the Second World War , Eileen Gray, who grew up in Dulwich , rode an old bicycle about 15 miles a day to work at a machine factory in Wembley because the railroad connections were cut off by the air raids by the German Air Force . She later reported that she was "a shy mouse" at first. However, riding her bicycle made her more self-confident, as she felt free and independent on the way, even though the streets she was driving through were destroyed by the bombing.

Gray joined the Apollo Cycling Club , the only cycling club in their area that also accepted women. 1946 Eileen Gray was with two other British riders, Stella Farrell and Joan Simmons, a track meeting on the velodrome in Danish Ordrup invited. On site it turned out that the Danish women against whom a competition was to be held were not athletes, but artists who also rode bicycles as part of their performances. The British women won the competition, but there were no medals or certificates.

Commitment as a functionary

The Copenhagen experience led Eileen Gray to advocate women's cycling as a recognized sport. Although she stopped active cycling herself in 1947 after the birth of her son, she began to get involved as a functionary. In 1949 she founded the Women's Track Racing Association (WTRA) and in 1956 the Women's Cycle Racing Association . In 1955 she achieved a success when she succeeded in getting the UCI to recognize records for female athletes. Shortly afterwards, the WTRA organized a competition on the Herne Hill Velodrome , in which Daisy Franks set the first officially recognized world record (38.40 seconds over 500 meters, flying start). Her husband Wally, himself a former cyclist, supported her in her endeavors, organized cycling races for women and managed the Herne Hill Velodrome , near which the Gray family lived.

The British women's team was invited to a three-day stage race to Roanne in France . Gray accompanied the athletes as a team manager. The media coverage in France was so great that the cycling journalist and organizer Jean Leulliot decided to organize the first Tour de France Féminin . Also in France, the first cycling world championships took place in 1958 , in which women also participated.

However, Eileen Gray and her team were also confronted with hostility from within their own ranks, such as world champion Reg Harris , who achieved that women were not allowed to ride on a certain cycle track, and which Gray described as "quite a nuisance". Once, when the women were taking part in a competition in Leipzig (it was probably the 1960 UCI Road World Championships ), a male colleague who was leaving earlier purposely took all of their spare tires and tubes with them, even though the women bought these parts themselves had. For this action he was applauded by other men in the association, which annoyed Eileen Gray into old age, as she reported in an interview. Despite these adversities, the British women cyclists returned home with several medals.

From 1976 to 1986 Eileen Gray was President of the British Cycling Federation (now British Cycling ). She attended a total of 16 Olympic Games , since 1988 as Vice President of the British Olympic Association . She successfully campaigned for women's cycling to be part of the program of the Olympic Games from 1984. In 1991 she was included in the Golden Book of Cycling . In the following year she looked after the British national teams at the Winter Olympics in Albertville and at the Summer Games in Barcelona . In 1976 she was instrumental in founding the London Youth Games and sat on the board for more than 30 years until she became Honorary President of the Games. In 2010 Eileen Gray was inducted into the British Cycling Hall of Fame . Two years later - she was now 92 years old - she was one of the torchbearers at the Olympic Games in London , 64 years after her first visit to the Olympic Games in 1948 in the same city.

Other offices

From 1982 to 1988 Gray was a member of the Conservatives Councilwoman in the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames and from May 1990 for one year mayor. For 50 years she was a member of the Masonic Lodge Honorable Fraternity of Ancient Masons and most recently Past Most Worshipful the Grand Master .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Eileen Gray, cyclist-obituary. In: telegraph.co.uk. May 22, 2015, accessed July 12, 2015 .
  2. ↑ a b Martin Childs: Obituary: Eileen, MBE, CBE, cyclist. In: The Scotsman. June 5, 2015, accessed July 13, 2015 .
  3. ↑ World Record Women-Femmes. UCI, accessed July 14, 2015 .
  4. ^ A History of Ladies Cycle Racing by Jon Miles. In: cyclingulster.com. Retrieved July 13, 2015 .
  5. ↑ Cycling. The Polytechnic Magazine, May 1956, accessed July 13, 2015 . (PDF file)
  6. ↑ Golden Book - Eileen Gray. (No longer available online.) In: The Pedal Club. Archived from the original on April 3, 2012 ; Retrieved July 12, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.thepedalclub.org
  7. ^ British Cycling Hall of Fame - 2010 Inductees. In: British Cycling. Retrieved July 12, 2015 .
  8. ^ Ellis Bacon: Great British Cycling. Random House, 2014, ISBN 978-1-4481-7112-5 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  9. ↑ Kate Meynell: Women of the Lodge. In: BBC. June 28, 2005, accessed July 12, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Gray, Eileen
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British cyclist and sports official
DATE OF BIRTH April 25, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Bermondsey , London
DATE OF DEATH May 20, 2015
Place of death Dulwich , London