Annie Londonderry

Who was Annie Londonderry?

Annie “Londonderry” Cohen Kopchovsky was the first woman to bicycle around the world. She was a free-thinking young woman, who reinvented herself as the daring “Annie Londonderry” — entrepreneur, athlete, and globetrotter.

She was born into a Jewish family in Riga in modern-day Latvia around 1870, and emigrated to the United States as a child. She married Max Kopchovsky in 1888 and had three children by him in the following four years.