Saturday, 30 August 1958. A host of the world’s best female riders lines up in front of the grandstands of the Reims-Gueux motor racing circuit. Poised, they wait for the pistol crack that will start the first women’s World Championships Road Race.
Thirty riders have signed up across eight countries: Britain, France, Belgium and the Soviet Union have six riders apiece, and they are joined by riders from the Netherlands, Romania and the German Democratic Republic. Alongside them is a lone 25-year-old Luxembourger: Elsy Jacobs.
Jacobs was born in March 1933. The youngest of nine children in a family that lived in the small community of Garnich,
