Reg Harris
cyclist
Reginald Hargreaves Harris OBE (1 March 1920 – 22 June 1992) was an English 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 world 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.
Early life
Harris was born as Reginald Hargreaves at 7 Garden Street, Birtle, Bury, Lancashire,. His mother, Elsie Hargreaves, a cotton weaver, remarried and Reginald took the name of his stepfather, an engineer and businessman called Joseph Harris.
Reg Harris left school without qualifications and his first job was as an apprentice motor mechanic in Bury, soon moving from the workshop to the salesroom. During this period, at the age of 14, he bought his first bicycle, and entered a roller-racing competition organised by the Hercules bicycle manufacturing company.
Amateur career and military service
His ability attracted the attention of other cyclists and Harris joined the Bury section of 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, to a paper mill which he felt would pay him enough in the winter to spend the summer training and competing.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1317557. VIAF identifies the subject as 20928268. The Library of Congress control number is n50026642. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 1992, 1947 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reg Harris” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.