“The North Shore invented mountain biking,” claims Todd “Digger” Fiander, a trail builder and videographer. If the sport was indeed born in , Betty Birrell was there from the start.
North Shore Betty, a short film from Patagonia, introduces us to the eponymous Betty. Now entering her seventies, Betty reflects on what is means to be an older woman in the rough world of mountain biking.
One of the trails Betty rides in the North Shore mountains of British Columbia. Photo: Screenshot
One big playground
She didn’t start in mountain biking. Betty first made a splash (pun intended) pioneering women’s wave sailing in the early 1980s. By her mid-forties, she was a single mother and full-time flight attendant, but she also started mountain biking. She started riding Fiander’s “roller coasters for bicycles” after getting her first mountain bike in 1993.
Betty holds a photo of herself in the early 1980s, windsurfing in Hawaii. Photo: Screenshot
Rather than competing, Betty found that mountain biking and being a single mother worked together. It became an activity she could do with her son, and they still bike together now that he’s an adult.
Betty also isn’t afraid to get injured. She’s broken an arm, a wrist, a hand, and “lots” of ribs, dislocated shoulders, and torn her rotator cuff, but it didn’t, and still doesn’t, bother her.
According to Betty, when her ex told her she treated life like it was “one big fucking playground,” she took it as a compliment.
Betty mountain bikes with her son. Photo: Screenshot
The short film interviews Lea Holt, a nurse with a family who worried, as she approached fifty, that she would have to give up mountain biking. But Betty’s career changed her mind. “I have twenty more years…” Holt explained, “to get better.”
“Betty is a legend on the North Shore,” says fellow British Columbia mountain biker Amanda Moffat. When they ride together, she says, people will call out to Betty as they pass, like she was a celebrity.
Now 73, Betty plans to keep riding into her nineties. “Older people…need to know that you can keep going,” she says. On the screen, Betty’s bike leaps over rocky trails and races around bends and through the forests.
