'Sod off, I’m passing you': Pioneering cyclist Eileen Cropper's amusing take on beating the men and fending off their advances

This month's Women's Sport 12-page supplement will be out in print on Friday. From child prodigies to centenarians, we focus on the athletes defying age. As a starter for 10, here's Jeremy Wilson's interview with the colourful 84-year-old pioneering cyclist Eileen Cropper.

Eileen Cropper has been waiting patiently on platform one of Leominster station in rural Herefordshire and, having identified herself by waving a cycling magazine, the greeting is both apt and memorable. “Lovely to meet you,” she says, smiling. “It has taken a little while for anyone to notice we existed. In fact, you are only about 60 years late.”

Cropper is now a sprightly 84 and does not break stride as she then ushers me into her car before candidly revealing the remarkable detail behind her own part in a moment of sports history. The wider story is, by turns, scandalous, hilarious, infuriating but also inspiring.

The year was 1958 and, fully 65 years after the inaugural men’s world cycling championship events had been staged in Chicago in 1893, women were finally being admitted.

It was a giant and overdue stride forward for a sport whose World Championships return to England this weekend even if Cropper, a straight-talking Yorkshire-woman, makes no attempt to sugarcoat the experience.

“I had won quite a few races but had no idea I was even being considered,” she says. “I just got a letter from Eileen Gray [the women’s team manager] saying I had been picked for the World Championships. We were given a joint passport. We got an England vest.

“Everything else we had to provide or pay for, although the local cycle stores all offered to give me a bike when they heard I was riding the world championships. I got three bikes out of it! I had to say to each one that I had ridden their bike in the race … but I didn’t.”

And what did the men think of women riding in the World Championships?

“Benny Foster [the men’s team manager] didn’t think women should be there and he tried to segregate us. He didn’t succeed. The men’s riders thought it was great. They were trying to seduce us.”

Cropper, who was already happily married to Sidney (they have just celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary and he is also grinning away at his wife’s stories), then recalls what happened on the day before the big race.

“Chaos,” she says. “They put us up in a doss house. Three beds in one room and three in another. Beds on top of each other. Nowhere to put your clothes. Bikes in a shed at the back of this ramshackle house. We ate at the track. Horsemeat full of garlic. That’s all there was.

“I felt poorly and went to lie down during the afternoon. Someone else was on my bed. Messing about. One of the male participants with one of the ladies. I went bananas. Kicked them out. I said, ‘You are not doing it on my bed!’ I could tell you a bit more … but I won’t.”

Cropper also recalls how Fausto Coppi – then the world’s greatest ever cyclist – made a point of introducing himself to the women’s teams with the French rider Raphael Geminiani. “Coppi had a suit on. Brown pinstriped. He looked like he might sell you something. You could imagine him opening this suit and saying, ‘Stockings?’

“They asked how long we had been here and wished us well. They said they’d come back and see us again but we left as soon as the race was over.”

Cropper had set off by train from Bradford to Leeds on the Thursday and then onto London. She had continued by train to Folkestone and then an overnight ferry crossing to France and further trains to Paris and then Reims where the race was held. “We had just Saturday to look at the circuit, raced Sunday and straight back home,” she says, “No time to get used to anything and it was very warm. I was shattered.” Barbara Harris, Dorothy Johnson, Joan Poole, Molly Swann and Sheila Clarke also made up the British team.

And so how was the historic first World Women’s Road Race Championships?

“An absolute shambles,” says Cropper. “Some of the riders were popping pills while they were riding. They had it in theSo ir back pockets and were quite open about it. We were offered it. I said to Barbara, ‘I’m having nothing to do with that’. None of the British girls did. We didn’t know what drugs were, but there were a few people shovelling things down themselves and doped to the eyeballs.

“Another thing was that the French colours and ours were similar. Red, white and blue. You couldn’t tell the difference. Elsy Jacobs had finished about 200 yards in front of everybody and the rest came over together in a flash.

“They put us all down as equal second. They had no idea who was second or third. Then we read the news and we were down as seventh, ninth and eleventh. I knew it wasn’t right. They just guessed. We didn’t go to any presentation. It was straight back to the doss house to collect our stuff, back on a train and off to Paris. No seats booked and it was heaving. We sat on the floor all the way home on the trains and boat. The treatment for people representing our country was pathetic. It really was.”

There is no bitterness in how Cropper tells her story – she remains amused as well as angered by elements of it – but there is also no sentiment in describing the reaction to their feats and the wider treatment back then of women’s cyclists. “If the men did anything it was all over the papers,” she says. “The women were ignored. No respect whatsoever. People were quite rude about girls riding bikes. It was, ‘What’s your mother letting you ride a bike for’.”

Some male club riders would secretly place bricks in Cropper’s saddlebag to slow her and so it is especially satisfying to hear how she grew to be faster than so many of them. In her prime, she would cycle around 400 miles a week. “A lot of the lads couldn’t stay with me – some of them hated me,” she says laughing. “I remember catching one of the lads in a time-trial in Otley and him saying, ‘Please don’t pass me, Eileen’. I just looked at him and said, ‘Sod off, I’m passing you’.”

Cropper’s international career, however, would be fleeting. Upon returning home from France, she discovered that the sickness she felt was actually explained by being several months pregnant with their second baby boy. “I had to make up my mind – was I going to let my mother go on looking after these children?” Cropper, though, has never stopped riding her bike for pleasure and hopes to be roadside in Yorkshire next week to see the British women follow the trail she helped blaze.

Harris and Johnson are also from Yorkshire and they all remain in regular contact. Cropper is not expecting any formal invite from the world championship organisers – “they probably don’t know we exist” – but is genuinely excited to think that the race will be held on her old training roads through the Yorkshire Dales. “I’m looking forward to it,” she says.

“It might be nice for the people in Yorkshire to see that there were Yorkshire girls doing this years ago and nobody took any notice. It is so different now – the girls are well cared for and I really am so happy for that.”

Do you have any friends or family members over the age of 50 that still regularly participate in competitive sports? Do you think they deserve some recognition for their hard work and dedication? We want to hear their stories. Send us an email and pictures to yourstory@telegraph.co.uk for the chance to have them featured in the Telegraph.