Tillie Anderson (1875-1965)  -  A Woman Way Ahead of Her Time.

Tillie was an immigrant seamstress from Sweden who was so impressed by the bicycles that she saw in Chicago, that she saved up for 2 years to buy one of her own.  She was immediately hooked but decided that riding fast was her thing and started entering women’s races and winning.  In the 7 years that she competed, she entered 120 races and lost only 11 of them.

Although ridiculed for it, she was one of the first women to use weights for strength, go on training rides and use a carefully planned diet.  The women’s races consisted of them cycling around a velodrome-type structure (35 degrees from the horizontal) for 2 hours,  seeing what distance they could cover in the time and then repeating that for 6 consecutive days.  Women’s races attracted a huge audience at that time (bigger than the crowds at baseball games) and she earned a lot of money.  She was very proud of the ‘sinewy strength’ of her legs but racers’ outfits were considered a bit scandalous for the times – long tights, clingy shorts and curve-skimming sweaters –  ‘Oh, they really thought I was wicked’ she once said.

At age 20 she was recognised as the best woman cyclist  in the world by the League of American Wheelmen and in 2000 she was posthumously inducted into the ‘U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame’.

​