The invisible champion
As a youngster in south London, more than anything Maurice Burton wanted a bike to go riding with his cousin Dexter. The son of a Jamaican father and an English mother, ‘My upbringing was quite strict,’ he tells us at his bike shop in south London. ‘Each time I had to build the courage to ask my dad, and each time the answer was the same, which was no.’
Burton’s solution was to liberate a broken bike from a nearby garden. Meeting his cousin on Blackfriars Bridge, the pair would spend any free time riding.
Burton was soon aware he was faster than the riders they met out on the roads, and a school trip to Herne Hill Velodrome would provide his talent with the direction it needed. It was September 1970, and he was 14 years old.
‘On the first day we sat in the grandstand and the coach gave us a talk. He said, “From here you can go to the Olympic Games,” and that was all I needed to know’.
By the next year he’d won the schoolboy league on a borrowed track bike, while also racing criteriums on the machine he’d found in the garden. Yet with his parents still largely unaware of his exploits, Burton rarely ventured beyond south London. This didn’t stop him winning the local junior division in 1972, and with it an invitation to the National Championships, and by 1973 Burton was heading to the prestigious European Championships in Munich.
However, in Germany the
