The Maurice Burton Way charts the life and times of Britain’s first black cycling champion. Here Burton shares some of those memories, from his childhood in London to a life on the track in Belgium
Photography Juan Trujillo Andrades
Me and my book
My signature tune is ‘My Way’. But my biographer, Paul Jones, said, ‘Well, there might be a bit of an issue with having a book with that name, because of the whole Sinatra thing.’
I thought, there’s this cycle route in London, from Colliers Wood to Cannon Street, which the public voted to be named after me – the Maurice Burton way – so that’s where the name for the book came from.
My dad didn’t really want me to have a bike. Whether he felt it was dangerous or I was accident proneor something I don’t know, but he decided he didn’t like the idea.
I had to take things into my own hands, as I’ve often done over my life. I got this smashed up bike from someone’s front garden and I fixed it up. I was 12, and I’d meet up with my cousin Dexter on Blackfriars Bridge. He lived in North London, we lived in South London, and we’d meet up and go riding all over, and soon it was noticeable that there wasn’t anyone that I knew that could get the better of me on a bike.
I knew I had this ability. But back in those days if you don’t know anybody that’s involved in a club, how do you know to join a cycling club?
My school had an option for sports: football or rugby in the winter; summer you could do athletics or tennis or whatever. Then when I was 14 years old, cycling became an option and we got taken to Herne Hill.
The first time we went we didn’t ride the track; we had to go in the grandstand and listen to a talk from a man called Bill Dodds who ran the whole thing down there. I remember the words he said: ‘From here you can go to the Olympic Games.’
For me, it meant I knew this was where I needed to be to get to where I wanted to go.
My parents didn’t really know what I was up to, as long as I came back and there wasn’t the police bothering them or anything like that. I was the British junior sprint champion in 1973 before they even saw me ride a bike.
I don’t know how much they ever saw. When I won the senior 20km national title at Leicester in 1974 [the scratch race] – the one where the crowd booed me – the race was on television, on Grandstand. A friend of mine called my dad to tell him because the problem was Grandstand was BBC and my dad used to like watching the wrestling on ITV. My dad p
