Revolutions by Hannah Ross

Author:Hannah Ross
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER NINE

AROUND THE WORLD

A Race against the Clock

Crowds lined the streets of Naples as a motorcade drove through the city toward Piazza del Plebiscito on December 22, 2012. People weren’t gathered to see the men on their Harleys; they were here to see the woman on her bicycle following behind—the exhausted but elated cyclist who was about to cross the finish line to become the first woman to hold a Guinness World Record for circumnavigating the globe on a bicycle. A journey which, unlike Dervla Murphy’s, is very much about getting to that end point, and within a punishing time frame. The world’s press was there to capture the historic moment.

When the cyclist Juliana Buhring had left her home city on her record-breaking journey 152 days before, few had taken her attempt seriously. Her trainer had told her she needed at least another year of putting the miles in before undertaking such an audacious endeavor. No sponsors had been willing to fund the attempt, even though men had been breaking the record for decades. They may or may not have had reservations about a woman being able to do such a thing, but it’s likely they had doubts that this particular thirty-one-year-old, who had only started cycling eight months before, could pull it off. Apart from the support of friends, Juliana was on her own when she cycled out of Naples, heading west first to Lisbon and then on to America, for over five months of life on the road.

Juliana may be the first female record holder for cycling around the world, but she wasn’t the first to attempt to do so. Almost exactly 118 years before Juliana pedaled out of the Piazza del Plebiscito, a twenty-four-year-old woman was being waved off by a crowd in Boston, which included suffragists and Woman’s Christian Temperance Union members, as she pedaled off in June 1894 toward New York on the first leg of her journey. Like Juliana, she wasn’t an obvious contender for such a feat; Annie Kopchovsky, a Latvian-Jewish immigrant, had never even been on a bicycle until a few days before she set out.

Until then, Annie had worked for local newspapers selling advertising space while living in a tenement in Boston with her husband, Max, and their three children, all under five. Despite appearing a world away from the idea of a record-breaking cyclist, Annie told the press that she had been chosen by two wealthy Bostonian merchants who had made a wager about whether a woman could get around the world by bike within fifteen months. At the time, the record of 13,500 miles in thirty-two months was held by an Englishman, Thomas Stevens, who had done the journey the previous decade on a penny-farthing. If she succeeded, they would reward her with ten thousand dollars—a huge amount of money at a time when the average annual income was around a thousand dollars.

The Victorian era was one of invention, exploration and adventure. It was also one of competition, with

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