The short life and remarkable career of a sporting hero
FROM football legend Gary Lineker to snooker ace Mark Selby, Leicester has its share of sporting heroes.
Cycling is also a sport – and a manufacturing industry – with a rich tradition in the city and out of this environment emerged perhaps the greatest Leicester sportsman you’ve probably never heard of.
It is now 125 years since the tragic death of British bike racing pioneer Bert Harris, acclaimed as Leicester’s greatest sporting hero of his era.
His dazzling career as a racing cyclist was prematurely ended when he crashed during a race in Aston, Birmingham. He died from his injuries two days later on April 21, 1897.
He had just turned 24 at the time of the accident. On the day of his funeral, people turned out in their tens of thousands to pay their last respects to the champ.
Harris, who became Amateur
Track Champion of England and later National Professional Champion, became an internationallyknown name in the sport.
Born in Birmingham in April 1874, he moved to Leicester with his family as a boy. They settled at 4, Portsmouth Road, in Belgrave - one of the new roads of the time.
His father encouraged him to take up cycling - starting on a new Rapid with solid tyres and flat handlebars in schoolboy events at the age of 14. Belgrave also had its own nationally recognised cycling and athletic stadium at the time he was living there.
Most of Harris’s racing days were spent as a member of the London
Polytechnic Cycling Club. Some of his Midland opponents, jealous of his membership of the famous club, even dubbed him the Poly Provincial Pup.
This greatly amused Harris, who had PPP stencilled on his travelling bag. In the 1892 season, he won more first prizes than any other rider in England and netted more than £600 in prize money. Harris turned professional in 1894 and signed for the Humber team.
In 1895 Harris was reigning national champion and in 1896 “his best ever racing year” - he went to Australia, a visit which coincided with a cycling mania that hit the continent.
Harris’s total “bag” of prize money in Australia was more than £800 and trophies worth nearly £300.
His luck was destined to run out on Easter Monday 1897, when he was booked to race in a series of pro events at the newly-built steeplybanked cement track at Aston.
In Dick Swann’s book, Bert Harris of the Poly: A Cycling Legend, published in 1974, the author tells how, prior to the meeting, Harris had a premonition of disaster.
Before leaving Leicester, he is reported to have said his goodbyes to neighbours and friends. And he even told his father he felt he would never sleep in his own bed again. Sadly, he was right.
When the funeral cortege arrived at Welford Road cemetery, it was met by cyclists and athletes from across the country.
They paid for a memorial stone at the cemetery which remains today.
125 YEARS SINCE DEATH OF CYCLING CHAMPION