10 notable women in motorcycling

Laia Sanz
Thirty-one-year-old Spanish motorcycle star Laia Sanz Pla-Giribert has claimed the Women’s Trial World Championship a total of 13 times, while lofting the Female European Outdoor Championship title trophy on 10 other occasions.

In 2010 she switched to compete in the Women’s Enduro World Championship where she finished third overall in her debut season, second overall in 2011 and won the world title for the next three consecutive years.

Her long-term dream of racing in the gruelling Dakar Rally was achieved in 2011, where her 39th overall placing saw her finish as the best-placed female rider, and it was a result she repeated (39th overall, first female) the following year in 2012.

She even came out to Australia in 2011 to impart some of her riding wisdom at a three-day training camp in Sydney.

Of the six Dakar Rallies she has raced, she's finished every one and her best result came in 2015 when she finished ninth overall. She's currently signed for the Red Bull KTM Rally Team, one of Aussie Toby Price's teammates, and she finished 15th overall in this year's rain-affected Dakar Rally.

Dot Robinson
Born in Australia in 1912 (after her father rode her in-labour mother to hospital in a sidecar), Dorothy 'Dot' Robinson paved the way for female participation in American motorcycle sport.

When she was six years old, her family moved to America from Melbourne in a bid to grow their successful sidecar venture and, after spending her childhood riding motorcycles, she won her first endurance race when she was 18.

She married a racer, Earl Robinson, and together they competed, set a new transcontinental record and opened and ran a successful Harley-Davidson dealership until 1971.

Her most notable achievement came in 1940 when she became the first woman ever to win a national AMA race event. She established the female riding group Motor Maids, she wrote a monthly column in American Motorcyclist and she used her sidecar as her main mode of transport until she was 85 years old. She passed away on October 8, 1999, aged 87.

Elena Myers
Former American racer Elena Myers rewrote history books in 2010 when she became the first female to win an AMA Pro Racing short-circuit road race. Two years later, she became the first female to stand on the top step of a podium of a professional race at the Daytona International Speedway, a result which she’d repeat again the same year.

In 2011, aged just 17 years old, Myers was given the opportunity to test Alavaro Bautista's GSV-R MotoGP machine at Indianapolis, such was her talent and maturity. But in a stark reminder of the struggles females still endure, she was a victim of sexual assault in 2014 by a sports masseuse, an experience she only recently revealed forced her to quit motorcycle racing for good.

Louise Scherbyn
The largest female-focussed motorcycle association in the world is the Women’s International Motorcycle Association (WIMA), which currently has representation in over 20 different countries.

It was the vision of American woman Louise Scherbyn who, at the age of 21, was bitten by the bug after a friend took her for a ride in a sidecar. But it would be another 24 years before Scherbyn would launch the organisation, in 1950, to become the founding president.

"I believed there should be more activities for women and that there should be a world-wide organisation for all women motorcyclists," she would write in 1952.

"People said to me at the time this endeavour would be an impossibility. My love of the sport and my determination carried me on to make it a possibility and eventually a successful reality."

Scherbyn lived to the ripe old age of 100 and died in 2003.

Maria Costello
British rider Maria Costello, 43, was for a long time the fastest woman around the terrifying Isle of Man TT circuit. A motorcycle racer for the last 22 years, she became the first female to stand on a Classic TT podium and in 2009 was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE).

Her best finish around the Mountain Course is 12th and she's currently in Australia to compete in this month's International Festival of Speed, to be held at Sydney Motorsport Park over March 24 to 26.

Today (March 8) she's a guest speaker at an event celebrating International Women's Day that is being hosted by Sydney's Blacktown Council.

Peggy Hyde
Australian road racer Peggy Hyde became the first women to be granted an open race licence – but it wasn’t easy. Racing in the 1970s, she was up against some of the all-time greats of Australian road racing and names her ultimate highlight as the 1970 Castrol 6 Hour, in which she raced with teammate Rod Tingate.

"After losing 20 laps with a broken-off muffler we still finished in fourth position, just one lap fewer than the Ken Blake/Kal Carrick team.

"We were one of the minority of teams which finished the race and did not crash at least once."

These days she's 73 years old and still rides regularly, racing in the AMCN International Island Classic as recently as 2015.

Jan Blizzard
Now in her 55th year of motorcycle sport administration (think about that), Jan Blizzard – along with her late husband, Arthur – has been a pillar of Australian motorcycle racing events since the early 1960s.

A competitive swimmer from a young age, Blizzard's dream of swimming the English Channel was thwarted when she began attending race meetings and fell in love with the sport.

It was 1962 at Oran Park's first-ever race meeting that it all began. "I was standing down on Yamaha corner watching Arthur on the inside working as a flaggie when an announcement was made following the first couple of races for volunteers to come and help with lapscoring," she recalls.

"The rest is history."

She was heavily involved in the organisation of Australia's first-ever international racing event held in 1972 and a year later she became the first-ever female to receive a Life Membership to ACU of New South Wales.

ISDE Australian women's team
Australian off-road riders Tayla Jones, Jemma Wilson and Jessica Gardiner are an unstoppable force as the Australian women's team in the International Six Days Enduro, having won every event they've competed in since 2013.

All enormously talented and each with celebrated and successful individual careers, the girls can lay claim to being the most successful unchanged team since the event's 1913 beginnings.