Leone Roach

Leone Roach’s supersonic trajectory in cycling saw her go from racing around home roads for the Tamworth Cycle Club to breaking world records and achieving pioneering feats – as a teenager.

In January 1969, at just 15, Roach broke the women’s world hour record, covering 22 miles 698 yards.

“I’ve got a photo of Dad and I, I was still on the pushbike, I had my arms around his neck, I’d just gone flat-out for an hour behind a motorbike for the world record and I got,” Roach recalled. “All the Italians were cheering around the big wooden velodrome in Melbourne, I don’t think it’s there now, and singing out. It’s a beautiful photo, my Dad is grinning like a busted watermelon and I have got the biggest grin on my face.

“Bill Long wanted me to go further with it. He said, ‘You could move to Japan, make something of yourself,’ but I was very family orientated.”

A year later, aged 16, she became the first Australian female to compete at the UCI Track World Championships (1970), advancing to the quarterfinals in the individual pursuit.

“I was the only Aussie girl there, and the Russian women they were so fit and big and muscly. Here I was, this little 16-year-old by myself, I didn’t have any other team[mates]. They had teams – four or five in a team, the Russians,” Roach said.

“I was fit but I was smaller. I wasn’t like them.

“It was just amazing. My grandmother went over with me, because mum and dad couldn’t afford to go over there with my younger brothers and stuff like that as well, we stayed at Leicester,” Roach continued.  

Cycling was also an opportunity then, as it is now, to travel.  

“I went over to watch the Tour de France. I went down on a train by myself to meet these people from Melbourne in London, we went to France, and it was amazing,” Roach said. “All I had was Coca Cola and big bread rolls - in a basket, they gave them to you. That’s all I could eat because I didn’t know how to talk French, and I was just 16.”

Roach’s talent and breakthroughs as a young athlete laid the groundwork for pioneering recognition of Australian women in international track cycling. Revered track coach Gary Sutton recently recalled her power at a reunion event in Armadale.

“Gary Sutton said when he was 15, and I was 14 or 15, he was scared that he’d have to race against me. He said I was so nervous in case there wasn’t enough girls turn up and I’d have to race against Leone, and I’d get smashed by a 14-year-old girl,” Roach recalled.

Now, the 72-year-old, is engaged in a different type of endurance, as the hands-on caretaker of a property outside of Tamworth, owned by Australian rugby union player Ned Hanigan.

“I’ve got 118 cattle I’m looking after. It’s just unreal. Seven horses. I love it, I’m out in the fresh air, I’m wearing gumboots. I fell in the creek the other day, I was trying to fix the electric fence,” she said. “I feel like a farmer.”

Roach and eight of her family members will drive from Tamworth to Brisbane for the AusCycling Hall of Fame ceremony on December 3.

“It’s hard to believe. I’m so excited, but I’m nervous because, honestly, I haven’t worn a dress for 45 years,” she quipped.