Reg Harris : biography
Reginald Hargreaves Harris OBE (1 March 1920 – 22 June 1992) was a British track racing cyclist in the 1940s and 1950s. He won the world amateur sprint title in 1947, two Olympic silver medals in 1948, and the professional title in 1949, 1950, 1951 and 1954. His ferocious will to win made him a household name in the 1950s, but he also surprised many with a comeback more than 20 years later, winning a British title in 1974 at the age of 54.
Career achievements
Major results
- 1944
- National championships –
- 1944
- National championships — quarter-mile
- 1944
- National championships — five-mile (8 km)
- 1945
- National championships –
- 1945
- National championships — quarter-mile
- 1945
- National championships — half-mile (8 km)
- 1947
- World amateur sprint
- 1948
- Olympic Sprint — silver medal
- 1948
- Olympic Tandem Sprint — silver medal
- 1949
- World Professional sprint championship in Copenhagen
- 1950
- World Professional sprint championship in Belgium
- 1951
- World Professional sprint championship in Milan
- 1954
- World Professional sprint championship in Cologne
- 1974
- British title
Awards and honours
- Bidlake Memorial Prize: 1947, 1949
- Sporting Record Sportsman of the Year: 1949
- Sports Journalists’ Association Sportsman of the Year: 1950
- Order of the British Empire: 1958
Personal life
He was married three times. The first two marriages (in 1944 to Florence Stage (daughter of the former Bury Football Club captain Billy Stage), then to Dorothy Hadfield) ended in divorce. He married Jennifer Anne Geary in 1970. He died in Macclesfield of a stroke, survived by his third wife, and was buried at St John’s Church in the north Cheshire village of Chelford.
A memorial to his achievements can be found in the National Cycling Centre in Manchester.
Harris’s achievements will be marked annually with the Reg Harris Sportive, organised by his family and friends. The inaugural event on 25 August 2013 will raise money for charities.
Amateur career and military service
His ability attracted the attention of other cyclists and Harris joined the Cyclists’ Touring Club and then its racing offshoot, the Lancashire Road Club. In 1935, he won his first race, a half-mile handicap event held on a grass track in Bury, and also started competing in individual time trials.
Harris moved from the motor mechanics job to a slipper factory, then, in early 1936, found a position in a paper mill that he felt would pay him enough in the winter to spend the summer training and competing. During 1936, he competed in and won his first events in a proper at Fallowfield Stadium in Manchester.
In early 1937, he was confident he could support himself as an athlete and left the paper mill to focus on the summer cycle racing season, returning to the mill the following winter (repeating the process the following year). He continued to win races and attract attention, and by the summer of 1938 was able to beat the existing British sprint champion. At the end of that season, he joined Manchester Wheelers’ Club, and in 1939 won a major race in Coventry, leading to his selection for the world championship in Milan. He travelled to Milan and had familiarised himself with the Velodromo Vigorelli when World War II broke out and the British team was recalled to the UK.
Harris joined the 10th Hussars in the North Africa Campaign as a tank driver but was wounded and invalided out of the services as medically unfit in 1943. Despite the judgment of the army medics, in 1944, he won the , quarter-mile and five-mile (8 km) national cycling championships. He retained the two shorter titles in 1945 and added the half-mile on grass. He was invited to race in Paris in 1945 and again impressed the crowds, and he was expected to do well in the 1946 world championships in Zurich, only to have his chances ruined by an over-enthusiastic pre-race massage. Harris’s amateur world championship achievements were celebrated in 1947 when Cycling Weekly awarded him his own page in the Golden Book of Cycling.