Nora Young (cyclist)

Nora Young (1917-2016) was a competitive Canadian cyclist who was inducted posthumously into the Canadian Cycling Hall of Fame on September 30, 2018.

In 2005, Young moved from Toronto to Newcastle, Ontario, where she lived independently during her final years; she finally gave up bike riding at the age of 92. She died in Bowmanville on March 26, 2016, at 98, a friend and inspiration to many and a true pioneer and lifelong athlete.

In the 1980s she embarked on a second astonishingly successful athletic career in masters athletic tournaments. As a masters athlete, she competed in Canada, across the U.S., and even in Australia, in cycling and a number of other sports, accumulating numerous medals and setting many records, and often beating others much younger than she was.

Outside of her sporting career, Young also had a career in the workforce. She was employed in a variety of jobs during her peak years as an athlete, from domestic servant (in her teens) to lab technician . She served in Europe in WWII in the Canadian Women's Army Corps as a jeep driver and canteen operator. In 1959, Young bought a house in the Danforth area of Toronto on her own (a rare thing for a woman in those days). She retired from her job early, in her 50s, as she was beginning to experience arthritis that affected her work. She also stopped cycling for a while, but missed it, and began racing training again in the 1970s.

She was a basketball player who helped her Toronto team to capture the national championship (Underwood trophy) in 1948.

Young was one of the top Canadian female cyclists in the 1930s and 1940s.

She competed constantly in the cycling competitions of her day, starting in the early 1930s, and usually winning or placing near the top of the weekly women's races on dirt tracks the Canadian National Exhibition (where the top female cyclists of the time competed). Often Young was racing on her women's coaster bike – because that's what she had – except in cases where she borrowed a professional bike from one of her male colleagues. It was at the CNE that she set a national record in the ¼ mile time trial in the 1930s, winning the Corcoran trophy.

In her teens, Young began participating in organized sports in the city, starting with softball at age 11. At the time, women were beginning to participate in organized sports at a mass level in the 1920s and 30s, a phenomenon colloquially referred as the Golden Age of Women's Sports in North America, Young being a paradigm of the era.

Nora Young was born in Middlesbrough, Yorkshire, England (September 8, 1917), the youngest of ten children, and her family immigrated to Fort William (now Thunder Bay) when she was two years old. She grew up playing hockey on Lake Superior and in backyard rinks, with Eaton's catalogues under her wool socks for shin pads, always the only girl on the ice. As she grew older, she began to play for girls’ hockey teams in the area such as the Port Arthur Maroons. In the late 1920s, when Young was about 10, her family moved to Toronto so her father could find work as the Great Depression began. They settled first in Cabbagetown, and then moved to Parkdale.