Name: The First Woman to Bicycle Around the World … Kind Of
Uploaded: 2021-02-10T21:01:30.000Z
Duration: 2 min 29 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Annie Londonderry is famous for being the first woman to bicycle around the world.

And, the story starts, as most things do—in a dark bar.

There is no possible way a woman could ride a bicycle around the world.

Can you imagine a woman trying to do it in a skirt?

If a woman could do that, I'd pay $10,000.

I, Annie Londonderry, will take that wager.

When Annie took that wager, she was oozing with confidence and charisma.

But, here's the thing, she had never even touched a bicycle.

In the late 1800's, bicycles were seen as dangerous for women and very unfeminine.

Riding a bicycle was a revolutionary act.

Legend has it, she cycled from Boston to New York City to Paris riding her bike one-footed after an injury.

Singapore, Hong Kong, getting caught up in a war and sustaining a gunshot wound to her shoulder.

Nagasaki, being interned in a Japanese prison.

San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix and all the way back to Boston in exactly 15 months.

I'm Peter Zheutlin, and Annie was a my great-grandaunt.

Even her name, Annie Londonderry, wasn't real.

Her real name was Annie Cohen Kopchovsky.

She even concocted the story of the wager.

And she definitely was not shot or thrown into a prison during the Chinese-Japanese War.

Well, what about all that other stuff like the leg injury?

How about hunting for tigers with royalty?

So, with some true stuff and some not so true stuff, how do you view her journey?

Although hers was a remarkable physical achievement,

her real achievement was becoming world-famous as a symbol of the women's liberation movement in the 1890s.

Annie's sheer audacity and the way she fought for herself, for her own adventures, on her own terms, was remarkable for her time.

Even if her story was kinda, sorta, not totally accurate.