IT'S safe to say then whenever the names of Sheffield's great sporting heroes are mentioned – Seb Coe, Derek Dooley, Gordon Banks – that of George Littlewood of Attercliffe won't fall from anyone's lips.
Yet 130 or so years ago Littlewood the Lionheart was a sporting sensation, a superstar of the day and he set a world record here in Sheffield which has yet to be beaten.
He was a professional pedestrian, otherwise known as a go-as-you-please or heel-and-toe foot racer.
He and his fellow athletes were the peds, although that word has a different connotation today.
Whatever you called it, it meant walking 12 hours a day for up to six days to see who could walk the furthest.
During the 1870s and 1880s men like Littlewood, also called the Sheffield Flyer, were the sporting superstars of their day on both sides of the Atlantic.
In one tumultuous week in March 1882, at the Clough Road Drill Hall, Littlewood, the joint favourite at 6-4, was pitted against four other "peds" to walk the fastest in six days.
Some 3,000 people were there at the start and bets were made.
Some 138 hours, 48 minutes and 30 seconds later Littlewood had clocked up 531 miles in 142 hours, still unbeaten today.
"He was a phenomenal athlete," says Paul Marshall, who has written a 752-page book, King of the Peds, about Littlewood and his rivals.
They could have completed a six day race before you've even read it halfway through!
Littlewood raced in Britain and in America. On one visit to New York in 1888 he walked 621¾ miles – a record which remained intact for 96 years.
Paul has a good reason for writing about Littlewood. He's an ancestor.
"I was born in Hillsborough and when I was eight my grandmother told me we had a famous ancestor, who was the champion runner and walker of the world," he says.
His interest fired, many years later Paul, who now lives in Northumberland, set out to write a book about George.
He soon discovered there was a bunch of other athletes who could also be called King of the Peds.
There was Edward Weston, the Wily Wobbler, Charlie Rowell, the Cambridge Wonder, and Daniel O'Leary, the Plucky Pedestrian, and others who could claim the title.
"I'm letting readers decide based on the evidence in the book," says Paul, who reckons George is still Sheffield's greatest ever athlete (sorry Seb).
Paul says there is something of a revival in pedestrianism with 12 events worldwide last year of six days or more.
"In two races in Madison Square Garden in 1879 Rowell, the Cambridge Wonder, won $50,000, the equivalent of half a million dollars today.
"If that sort of cash was put up again today, I think there would be huge interest."
- The book is published by Authorhouse at £18.99. To buy visit http://kingofthepeds.googlepages.com/home
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