‘I’m a woman and I won the world title by riding like a girl’
NO MATTER WHAT happens in the future, there will be a few brave racers who will for ever have their names carved in the annals of motor sport history: most famously John Surtees, the first to win world championships on two and four wheels, Valentino Rossi, the first to win back-to-back premier-class races on different makes of motorcycle, and Ana Carrasco, the first woman to win a motorcycle road racing world championship.
Carrasco’s achievement is particularly significant because little more than half a century before she won the 2018 Supersport 300 world title, she would not have been allowed to enter the championship in the first place.
In 1962, the governing body of bike racing (the FIM, Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme) banned women from world-class racing. Why? Because Londoner Beryl Swain was planning to become the first woman to go grand prix racing. The FIM were stunned that any woman would want to do such a thing, so they rewrote the rules to keep women out.
‘No one should like to think about such a charming person getting hurt in a motorcycle race,’ wrote an official in turning down Swain’s entry.
Sadly, Swain died a few years before Carrasco’s triumph, so she never got
