Lilly Yokoi, an audacious cyclist who mastered half-balletic, half-gymnastic tricks as part of a family act and later broke away to perform solo on her gold-plated bicycle — in high heels — in circuses and theaters, on television and during halftimes of Harlem Globetrotters games, died on May 11 in Tokyo. She was 96.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by her daughter, Monica Yokoi. It was not widely reported at the time.
“Lilly Yokoi began where all the other trick cyclists left off,” Cyril Bertram Mills, who hired Ms. Yokoi for his family’s circus on London’s West End in 1962, once wrote. “She was an artiste down to her fingertips, her costumes were magnificent, and she had a smile which was so infectious that her audience was with her in the first minute.”
Ms. Yokoi’s tricks demanded remarkable balance and dexterity. She performed handstands on the handlebars of a moving bicycle and, like a gymnast on a pommel horse, swung herself repeatedly over the length of the bike.
She executed wheelies and spun herself around. She turned her two-wheeler into a unicycle by removing the handlebars and front wheel. Other times, she stood up, placing one foot on the seat, the other on the handlebars, her arms in the air. She rode backward, her rear resting on the handlebars, a leg stretched across the seat. When she finished, she leaped off the bike in a dismount.
Abe Saperstein, the impresario who owned the Globetrotters, an exhibition basketball team that became famous for its quirky, comedic play, was so impressed that in 1957 he called Ms. Yokoi “the greatest performer we’ve ever had with us.”
In the early 1960s, Ms. Yokoi made a decision that would forever define her image: She commissioned a new bicycle from the Swiss artistic cyclist Arnold Tschopp. It wasn’t performance alone that she wanted — she also had it gold-plated. (The bicycle is on display at Circusland, a museum in Besalú, Spain.)
She was, from then on, widely known as the Ballerina on the Golden Bicycle.
But it wasn’t all glamour. Monica Yokoi said in an interview that her mother’s acrobatics brought on pain from, among other things, misaligned bones and pinched nerves.
“This was not what she wanted in life,” she said. “She felt more or less obligated to support her family and didn’t want me to suffer through the same life. She wasn’t happy.”
Now a physiotherapist, Monica Yokoi tries to help people perform at their best and stay injury-free as long as possible.
“I wish I could have helped my mother,” she said.
Ms. Yokoi was born on Nov. 15, 1929, in New York City, but grew up mostly in Japan. Her father, Eizo and her mother, Rui, were also bicycle acrobats, and Mr. Yokoi was the primary teacher of the skills to their children.
When Lilly was later asked by The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., if she and her siblings had been groomed for show business, she said: “Oh, no! My father taught us to ride bicycles to keep healthy. We all began learning when we were about 3 years old — except Kimiko, the youngest. She was on her first bicycle when she was 18 months old.”
Ms. Yokoi’s daughter, said that performing as a group “was a way for the family to eat during the war in Japan. My mother was the main attraction whom her father trusted to find gigs, so she was sent to different places to ask if they were interested in a performance.”
The Yokoi Family Troupe — which, over the years, included five sisters and one brother — often performed in the United States with the traveling Hamid-Morton Circus.
Reviewing their act when the circus arrived in Memphis in 1954, The Memphis Press-Scimitar wrote that the Yokois “sustain themselves with more poise on a single quivery wheel (unicycle) than most folks do stoney cold sober on both feet at solid old Main and Madison.”
On her own for nearly 30 years, Ms. Yokoi performed at major venues like Radio City Music Hall, the London Palladium and the Lido in Paris. She was a major attraction at circuses in America and Europe; appeared on television programs like “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Hollywood Palace”; performed at Las Vegas hotels and in the 1966 circus film “Rings Around the World”; and returned to work with the Globetrotters in the late 1970s.
She retired in 1982 and lived the rest of her life in Tokyo.
In 1955, she married a fellow acrobat, Roland Johansson, a Swede known as the Great Rolando for his one-finger handstands. He also became Ms. Yokoi’s manager and performed on bills with her. The marriage ended in divorce.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Yokoi is survived by two grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
In 1956, Ms. Yokoi was photographed in a park in London riding her bicycle-turned-unicycle, holding one wheel in one hand and the handlebars in the other.
“Traffic jams could hold no fear for this petite Eastern Ballerina of the Bicycle, Lilly Yokoi,” The Daily Sketch, a tabloid, wrote. “She’d simply take her bike apart and ride out of any tight corner with a chuckle.”
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