The Mayo cyclist who conquered Le Tour

It began without fuss. Without fanfare. Without boisterous crowds lining narrow roads. There were no epic ascents into the Alps, just the quiet undulations of the French countryside. Just five days, five stages, and 373 bumpy kilometres through Normandy. It was a race with all the glamour of a wet summer’s day in a Ballycroy bog, but history doesn’t always need confetti A peloton of 41 women took to the line in late September 1955, racing in what was billed as the Tour de France Féminin. The name carried weight, even if there wasn't a long convoy of support cars and soigneurs. The race itself had been the brainchild of French journalist Jean Leulliot, a man with an unwavering belief that women, too, deserved their moment on the road. What followed was modest and imperfect, but quietly radical.

Among the women taking her place in the peloton was Millie Robinson, a quiet and unassuming figure from the Isle of Man. She didn’t come in as a favourite; her legs were built more for time trials than tactical bunch sprints and her preparation was more reliant on resolve than resources. But on stage four, finishing in Gournay-en-Bray, she did what no one else could: she slipped off the front and finished thirteen seconds ahead of the pack, enough to seize the overall lead heading into the final day.

Then came the individual time trial, the purest test of a cyclist’s mettle. No teammates. No shelter. Just the stopwatch and the wind, the sort of solitude that would make a monk sweat. Robinson nevertheless delivered her defining ride, bolding her advantage, averaging nearly 38 kilometres per hour and winning the race outright by approximately half a minute over her closest rival, June Thackeray.

She had become the first woman to win a race carrying the Tour de France name. But when the podium was packed away there was no grand narrative, just the quiet realisation that something historic had happened – whether the world noticed or not.

The road that brought her to Normandy, as it happened, started all the way back in the West of Ireland. In 1924, she was born into a farming family as one of nine children in Mayo. That's where she spent most of her childhood until, in the spring of 1935, Thomas and Sarah Robinson upped sticks and settled in Peel, a fishing town on the west coast of the Isle of Man.

During World War II, Robinson joined the Women’s Land Army, working on farms across the Isle of Man as part of the wartime effort. It was physical and unglamorous work – planting crops, caring for livestock, helping to keep Britain fed. During that time she would've nurtured her talents, riding her bicycle across the island’s backroads, often travelling long distances simply to get to and from her work on the land. It wasn’t training, at least not in the way anyone might have called it then, but it became a kind of foundation for her future exploits. In those solitary miles she began to develop the stamina that would later serve her well in the peloton.

She made it to the top the hard way, of course; there was no other road available. As a child, she rode a bicycle that never punctured, but only because, as she admitted later in life, “it didn't have any tyres”. But it did its job, giving her a taste for a gruelling and unforgiving sport.

Robinson’s rise through cycling wasn’t dramatic. It was methodical, built not on hype or headlines but on consistency and a deep well of stamina. She began racing competitively around 1949, starting out in grass-track events and time trials on the Isle of Man with the Manx Viking Wheelers.

Then, in 1954, she left the island for England. She worked first as a van driver in Leeds for her brother’s haulage firm. From there, she moved to Nottingham, where she took up work as a wheel builder for Raleigh, one of Britain’s largest bicycle manufacturers. It was a fitting job, assembling the very machines others would race, while fine-tuning her own ability in the evenings.

Her competitive peak arrived in the mid 1950s. In 1955, she won the British 25-mile time trial championship, dominating a discipline that suited her upbringing pedalling through very remote areas. That title immediately marked her out as a rider with natural strength and an abundance of potential, before she ultimately backed that performance up by retaining the title in 1956 and 1957. She also proved she could win in a pack, taking the first accredited National Cyclists’ Union road race title in 1956, a more tactical event that didn’t always favour time trial specialists.

All of this was achieved without much of the scaffolding that surrounded most successful athletes, even back then. She worked long days and trained hard. But that had always been her way, quietly building strength, unnoticed until it could no longer be ignored.

In 1958, she travelled to Milan, where she set a new women’s world hour record by covering 39.718 kilometres in sixty minutes alone on the Vigorelli track. Earlier that year, she had already set a national hour record in Manchester, confirming her place among the elite.

And then, in 1960, she stopped racing. No farewell tour. No ceremony. Just the end of a chapter. She returned to the Isle of Man, where she worked first in sign-writing and later as a prison officer. She didn’t speak much about her victories and she died aged 69 in 1994 without the global status she deserved.

There are no statues to Millie Robinson. No murals. No roads named in her honour. And there’s no doubt that there should be.

She was a pioneer in women’s sport, long before women’s sport found its voice or was given a microphone. In another era, laden with cameras and sponsorship deals, there’s no doubt she’d be a figure of global renown.

As it was, she carved out her place in history with little more than a bike, a number on her back and the will to keep going.