Eileen Sheridan, who has died aged 99, was a multiple cycling champion who became a household name in Britain in the late 1940s and early 50s thanks to a series of spectacular record attempts. However, she retired relatively young because she had exhausted the meagre opportunities that the sport offered to women at the time.
As a professional cyclist racing for the Hercules bicycle company from 1951 to 1954, Sheridan captured the public imagination, “defining cycling as Roger Bannister defined athletics or Denis Compton cricket” according to the bike-racing historian Peter Whitfield. Records such as London-Holyhead or Edinburgh-London were easy for the man in the street to understand; Hercules marketed the diminutive Sheridan heavily as the “Pocket Rocket” – “no ordinary woman” said the Pathé newsreels, while she had an unerring ability to smile in every photograph.
