Daily Cycling Facts 18.07.2014

Fabio Casartelli
16.08.1970 - 18.07.1995

On this day in 1995, during Stage 15 of the Tour de France, 24-year-old Italian rider Fabio Casartelli lost control of his bike whilst descending the Col du Portet d'Aspet at high speed. Several other riders were also involved in the crash but got away with injuries of varying severity; Casartelli's head struck the low wall running alongside the road. Doctors reached him within ten seconds, but although television cameras showed him lying on the tarmac in a pool of blood for only a second or two it was obvious to fans that he had suffered massive head injuries and was very badly hurt indeed. He died in the helicopter on the way to hospital.

The next day, his Motorola team crossed the finish line together with the other riders following slowly behind them. Prizes were handed out as normal, then all recipients pooled them and donated them to Casartelli's family. Lance Armstrong, also with Motorola, dedicated his Stage 18 to him and there is now a memorial at the spot where he fell. Since 1997, the Youth category at the Tour has been known officially as the Souvenir Fabio Casartelli.

Amy Gillett
09.01.1976 - 18.07.2005

Today is also the anniversary of the death of Amy Gillett, who was born in Adelaide in 1976. Originally a world-class rower, Amy had been identified as a track and road cyclist with enormous potential and was predicted to win medals at the 2006 Commonwealth Games but was killed in Germany when a driver lost control of his car and ploughed into a group of cyclists with whom she was training in 2005. Five of her team mates were seriously injured, two sufficiently so that it was thought they also might die. Amy was 29 when she died and was studying for a PhD. She had been married for less than a year and a half.

The Amy Gillett Foundation was set up in her honour, an organisation that aims to cut cyclist fatalities on the road to zero by encouraging safer cycling and increasing awareness of cyclists among other road users as well as funding two scholarships per annum, one to a young female athlete and one to a researcher whose work will assist in reducing cyclist deaths on the roads. You can learn more about their work here.


Gino Bartali
Often, we describe Tour de France winners as heroes - which to cycling fans they are, but to the rest of the world all they've done is won a bike race. Gino Bartali, however, truly was a hero. Born in Pont a Ema on this day in 1914, he was the third child of a farmer and was raised in a poor household. His family were deeply religious, and his Catholic faith shaped his life every bit as much as his powerful physique and natural talent on a bike.

Gino Bartali, who was said to have "looked like a boxer but
climbed like an angel"

At the age of 13 he began racing after being encouraged by colleagues in a local bike shop where he worked to support his family. Success as an amateur brought his first professional contract with Aquilano in 1931, but his career didn't really take off until he joined Frejus in 1935 - in his first year with them he won a number of one-day races, the Tour of the Basque Country, one stage and the overall King of the Mountains at the Giro d'Italia and the National Road Race Championship. At the Giro the following year he won three stages, the King of the Mountains and the General Classification but almost gave up cycling forever when his brother Giulio was killed in a crash while racing. However, he was convinced to continue, and in 1937 he won another National Championship and the Giro's King of the Mountains for the third time and General Classification for a second time.

Bartali entered the Tour de France for the first time in 1937 and won Stage 7, but on Stage 8 he was in a collision on a narrow wooden bridge and fell three metres into a river where he was very nearly swept away by the current - thankfully, Francesco Camusso was nearby and managed to grab hold of him and haul him out. He continued, but lost significant time in the next stages and abandoned in Stage 12. Having been brought up to be respectful, he went to Tour director Henri Desgrange before publicly announcing his decision to leave and Desgrange was touched that he did, because no other rider had ever thought to do so before: "You are a good man, Gino," he told the rider. "We'll see one another again next year, and you will win."

Bartali in 1938

Desgrange was correct - in 1938, the Italian was able to defeat terrible weather and a very strong Belgian team, winning the toughest stage by a margin of 5'18" and finishing up with an advantage of 18'27". Georges Briquet, a radio commentator at the race, remembered: "These people had found a superman. Outside Bartali's hotel at Aix-les-Bains, an Italian general was shouting 'Don't touch him - he's a god.'"

Back in Italy a public subscription fund was started to reward him, the first man to donate money to it being Mussolini. Bartali's feelings about that haven't been recorded, but it's likely that it was a problem for him because, as he would later show, he was very much opposed to the Fascist leader's policies: it was known after the war that he had assisted in efforts to save the lives of Jewish Italians, but it's only comparatively recently that just how far he was willing to go to rescue a fellow human being from almost certain death has become known - not only did he courier information and fake documents around the Italian countryside, he personally transported Jewish refugees in a specially-designed trailer towed behind his bike across the Alps and into neutral Switzerland (if stopped by police, he explained that the trailer was deliberately constructed to be heavy and that towing it over the mountains was part of his training regime. If stopped, he'd almost certainly have been summarily executed or sent to a concentration camp). He was, therefore, a man whose courage went far beyond anything required in a bike race, as he proved when he was arrested and questioned by officers from the notorious SS secret service the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS and would tell them nothing other than that he did what he felt was the right thing to do.

It's estimated that he was responsible for saving more than 800 people, yet Bartali never asked for reward nor even recognition, stating years later that "One does these things, and that's that" and insisting that the only medal he expected for what he had done was the one he wore upon his heart. In 2012, Israel's Yad Vashem announced that it was gathering further information in preparation for declaring him Righteous Among The Nations, an honour bestowed upon those who helped defend and save Europe's Jews from Fascist attempts to exterminate them.

When Bartali returned to the Tour in 1948, he found that the riders he'd known in the past had either been killed or injured in the war or were now too old to compete so he memorised the names of several other entrants in order to be able to talk to them during the race. Prior to traveling to France, the Italian team had argued before the race over whether Bartali or Fausto Coppi, who had already won two Giri d'Italia, should be team leader. The Tour organisers wanted both men in the race and even permitted a second Italian team so they could both lead, but eventually Coppi decided to sulk and refused to take part at all. Bartali was no longer a young man and whilst the war had taken its toll on everyone, he especially didn't look to be in good shape. He won the first stage, but then began to struggle and Louison Bobet had little trouble in gaining the overall lead and keeping it - though he collapsed after Stage 11, he recovered in time to win the next day.

After finishing Stage 12 with an overall disadavantage of 20', Bartali told his team mates that he was going to abandon; but they persuaded him to sleep on it and see how he felt the following day. He did so, but during the night was woken by a phonecall from Alcide De Gasperi - the prime minister of Italy. De Gasperi told him that Palmiro Togliatti, chairman of the Communist Party, had been assassinated. Could Bartali try his very best to win the next day, he asked, in the hope that such good news might prevent the populace rising up and thrusting the country into civil war?

Bartali with Fausto Coppi

Bartali assured him that not only would he win the stage, he would win the race - and he kept both promises. Stage 13 was won with a 6'13" lead after he took on and beat no less a rider than Briek Schotte, reducing the gap between himself and Bobet to 1'06". Then he won Stages 14 and 15 too, which gave him an overall lead of 1'47" - and, more importantly, united Italy in their support for him. He finished 32" behind stage winner Edward van Dijck in Stage 16, but because his rivals lost significant time his overall lead grew to 32'20" and from that point onwards. Ten years after his first Tour victory, he had won another - the longest period between two wins by any one individual in the history of the race. What he may have achieved had the War not interrupted his career and stolen his best years can only be guessed at.

Considering the eras in which he raced, it's remarkable that Bartali appears to have never resorted to doping. However, he was convinced that Coppi did (with good reason: Coppi later admitted it) and took a dim view of it, which led him to try to find evidence to support his suspicions. During the 1946 Giro he saw Coppi drink the contents of a small glass phial which he then threw into the undergrowth at the side of the road, so he stopped his bike and retrieved it. Later, he gave it to his doctor to investigate but it turned out to have contained a legal tonic. He then began closely monitoring his rival and, while he could never prove anything conclusively, became something of an expert in Coppi's habits and was able to predict how he would ride the following day:

"The first thing was to make sure I always stayed at the same hotel for a race, and to have the room next to his so I could mount a surveillance. I would watch him leave with his mates, then I would tiptoe into the room which ten seconds earlier had been his headquarters. I would rush to the waste bin and the bedside table, go through the bottles, flasks, phials, tubes, cartons, boxes, suppositories – I swept up everything. I had become so expert in interpreting all these pharmaceuticals that I could predict how Fausto would behave during the course of the stage. I would work out, according to the traces of the product I found, how and when he would attack me."

Bartali remained a competitive rider until he was 40, when a road accident ended his career. By that time he had given much of his money away to deserving causes and lost most of what remained in ill-advised investments. Fortunately, his fame was so great that he could earn a living from it, becoming the acerbic host of a popular television show and making a few cameo appearances in films. In old age he developed heart problems (not helped at all by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle - Miguel Indurain's manager once warned the five-time Tour winner to avoid being "like Gino Bartali" in his post-racing life) and underwent bypass surgery in 2000; but the operation was not successful. He was given the last rights and died ten days later, after which an official two-day period of mourning was declared throughout Italy. To this day, historians are still discovering the extents of his heroism - as recently as 2010 new evidence came to light proving that he had concealed a Jewish family in the cellar of his home, saving them from death at the hands of the Fascists he detested so much.

Bartali wins the Tour, 1948

Russell Mockridge
Russell Mockridge was born in Melbourne on this day in 1928 and started his career with the Geelong Amateur CC, where he was nicknamed Little Lord Fauntleroy on account of his accent. Then he began winning races - a lot of races - and people called him The Geelong Flyer instead.

Two years later he rode in the Olympics, but his race was ruined by two punctures; at the British Empire Games two years after that he won two gold medals and a silver. Mockridge was selected for the 1952 Olympic team but initially said he would turn down the invitation due to a requirement that athletes on the team remained amateur for two years - no less a figure than Hubert Opperman personally saw to it that the rule was reduced to one year, and Mockridge won another pair of gold medals. He did indeed turn professional a year later and in 1955 came 64th at the Tour de France - one of only 69 riders from 130 starters to finish the race.

Mockridge died on the 13th of September 1958 when he collided with a bus some 3.2km from the start of the Tour of Gippsland. He was only two months past his birthday and left behind his wife and three-year-old daughter.


On this day in 1947, Federico Bahamontes entered his first race - and won it. On this day in 1959, he won the Tour de France.

Leandro Faggin, born in Padua in this day in 1933, won two Olympic gold medals and held three World Championship titles over the course of his career. He died at the age of 37 of cancer on the 6th of December 1970, and since 2000 is frequently included on lists of probable dopers.

Other cyclists born today: Rafał Furman (Poland, 1985); Martin Stenzel (West Germany, 1946); Sergey Kucherov (Russia, 1980); Joseph Racine (France, 1891, died 1914); Stephen Hodge (Australia, 1961); Michael Neel (USA, 1951); José Velásquez (Colombia, 1970).

Daily Cycling Facts 24.05.2014

The Giro d'Italia started on this date five times - in 1914, 1922, 1947, 1950 and 1992.


The Epic 1914 Giro

1914. The stage isn't known and the rider isn't named,
but he looks like Giuseppe Azzini.

1914 was the last edition before the outbreak of the First World War and the first to decide the eventual winner on overall time rather than points, the same system having been used at the Tour de France the year before (the 1903 and 1904 Tours had also been decided in this way). Whilst the parcours was comparatively short at 3,256km (some sources put it even shorter at 3,162km), the race consisted of only eight stages which meant, as was common in those times, stages far longer than riders today face - though we should be fair to modern riders and remember that early Grand Tours had many more rest days. Five stages were more than 400km, Stages 1 and 8 were 468km (some sources say 428km; either way they began at midnight) and the shortest stage, 5, was 328km; for which reason it's considered by many historians to have been the hardest Giro of all time. Stage 3, 430km in length, took longer than any other stage in Giro history to be completed with Costante Girardengo first over the line after 19h20'47".

Costante Girardengo

As if the distances weren't bad enough, the riders also faced severe weather, incompetent officials who supplied them with incorrect directions on numerous occasions and widespread cheating by other riders, many of whom drafted behind cars, and fans who spread nails over the roads to slow down riders they didn't like. It's perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the average speed of 23.375kph was the lowest ever and only eight out of 81 starters finished - another record. Among those to fail was Giuseppe Azzini, leader of the General Classification for one stage after winning Stages 4 and 5 - he went missing during Stage 6 and couldn't be found anywhere. Organisers discovered the next day at a farmhouse, fast asleep in bed.


1921 winner Giovanni Brunero was favourite to win in 1922, but he faced stiff competition from Girardengo and Gaetano Belloni. He finished the first stage with a good lead, but was then docked 25 minutes for cheating. Rather than giving up, he redoubled his efforts and mounted some long-distance solo breakaways which, bit by bit, enabled him to claw his way back into contention. He then won Stage 7 with a time good enough to take the General Classification leadership, which he retained for the remaining three stages. He took 119h43' to complete the 3,095km - neither Girardengo nor Belloni finished.

1947 covered 3,843km in 19 stages and saw Fausto Coppi finally exert his dominance over Gino Bartali, who had taken what would prove to be his last Giro victory the previous year - but the old warhorse wasn't ready to let the younger man go without a fight just yet. They spent the first stage sizing one another up and allowed Renzo Zanazzi to win (Zanazzi, who few remember now, had won Stage 10 the previous year, would also win Stage 5b and finished a stage in third place in 1948, 1950 and 1952 - at the time of writing, he's still alive), but Bartali attacked hard in Stage 2 and finished with a 1'41" advantage. Coppi was the better man in the mountains from Stage 4, but he wasn't quite good enough to prevent his rival taking the General Classification on that same stage and then keeping it all the way through to Stage 15. However, in Stage 16 Bartali finally cracked on the Passo di Pordoi, at 2,239m the highest paved road in the Dolomites - and Coppi beat him to the finish by 4'24". From that points onwards, his victory was as good as decided and he rode less aggressively, keeping himself out of harm's way and won the race with a 1'43" advantage.

Hugo Koblet

Bartali raced again in 1950, when the race consisted of 18 stages over 3,981km, and looked a likely contender when Coppi broke his pelvis in Stage 9 - but now he also faced problems from the Swiss Hugo Koblet who, having won Stages 6 and 8, realised that he too stood a good chance in Coppi's absence. A rider as clever as he was famously handsome, Koblet rode wisely and effectively and led the General Classification from that point onwards; eventually beating the Italian by 5'12" and becoming the first foreigner to win a Giro.

The 1992 edition covered 3,835km in 22 stages. Miguel Indurain gained an early lead in the time trial, but it was on Stage 9 - the first summit finish that year - that he really got the upper hand when he dropped all his main rivals and gained a 30" advantage over Claudio Chiappucci. When he then dominated the final time trial, he secured his winning time of 103h36'08", 5'12" ahead of Chiappucci who took second place. Later that year, he would become the sixth man to achieve the Giro-Tour double when he also won the Tour de France (and the next year, he would become the only man to have achieved two Giro-Tour doubles in consecutive years).

Sean Kelly
John James "Sean" Kelly is frequently listed as the most successful Irish cyclist in history, but he was much more than that - alongside Bernard Hinault, he was one of the most successful cyclists anywhere in the world and remained so for much of the decade.

One of cycling's most iconic images - Sean Kelly
at Paris-Roubaix

Born in Waterford on this day in 1956 to John and Nellie, who made their living from a 48-acre farm, Sean (the name was chosen to prevent confusion at home) has never been much of a talker. Friends at school believed him unintelligent (or believed that he thought he was, at least) and, while he appears the type who may have turned out to be a genius at maths or physics had a teacher ever have been able to discover such a latent talent, he never got the chance to prove it and they never got the chance to find it - aged just 13, he was taken out of school and went to work on the farm. His older brother Joe, still at school, obtained a bike at about the same time to cycle to and from classes every day and Sean got a bike of his own so that they could go for rides together. When Joe began racing (and winning), Sean followed him once again: his very first race was an eight-mile handicap on the 4th of June 1960. Setting out three minutes ahead of the more experienced riders, he remained three minutes ahead at the halfway point and then increased his lead on the return journey to win the race. Two years later, he was National Amateur Champion; a title he held for two years.

In 1975, Kelly travelled with a certain Pat McQuaid and his brother Kieron (coincidentally, Kelly shares his birthday with Pat and Kieron's cousin John McQuaid, who represented Ireland at the 1988 Olympics) to South Africa, where they planned to use the Rapport Tour as part of the preparation for the upcoming Olympics. Aware that the country was being boycotted due to the government's refusal to end apartheid, they entered under false names; however, they were caught and banned from competition for six months by the Irish Federation and then from the Olympics for life. Though this seemed a disaster, it would prove advantageous for Kelly who would, in all likelihood, have found himself outclassed by the top European cyclists at the Games; instead, he entered the 1976 Tour of Britain where he faced opponents closer to his own level and won Stage 6, then came second on Stage 7. This earned him an invitation to join a club based in Metz, which offered him a salary equal to £25 a week, four francs (40p) for every kilometre of every race he won and free bed and board - he accepted, then paid the club back by winning 18 of the 25 races he entered with them, including the amateur version of the Giro di Lombardia.

Unsurprisingly, bosses from professional teams began to take note; among them the legendary Cyrille Guimard and Jean de Gribaldy. De Gribaldy had in fact made him an offer previously but was turned down as Kelly then wished to remain an amateur - this time, though, wanted him so much that he made hasty preparations to go to Ireland to track the rider down, despite having no idea where he lived and not even being sure he's recognise him if he saw him. He did know, meanwhile, where Kelly's parents' farm was located, roughly at least; so, taking an English-speaking rider to act as translator, he flew to Dublin and took a taxi to Curraghduff - a distance of 164km. Eventually, they tracked down the farm only to be told that their quarry was out in the fields somewhere on a tractor and so they ordered the taxi driver to cruise around the lanes looking for him. When they found him, they went to his brother-in-law's house where de Gribaldy offered him £4,000 a year with bonuses - more than three times what the Metz club had been paying him. But, being a simple country boy, Kelly felt loyal to his old club and asked for time to think things over, to which de Gribaldy agreed. Metz offered him more money but couldn't match what de Gribaldy could offer. Kelly, feeling guilty for considering turning his back on the team that had given him his first opportunity, asked de Gribaldy for £6,000, certain the Frenchman would turn his back and walk away. De Gribaldy wrote up a new contract on the spot and Flandria-Velda, at long last, had its great new hope.

The Cavendish of his day, Kelly
was a devastatingly fast sprinter

Now loyal to de Gribaldy, Kelly remained with Flandria for two seasons. However, Flandria was really two outfits: the A team, who raced in the top events around Europe; and the B team which remained confined to smaller, local races in France where they were used as little more than an advertising gimmick for Flandria's mopeds and bikes - while Kelly even to this day is a country boy at heart, he'd glimpsed cycling's upper echelons now and knew that he could get there. The chance to do so appeared to come at the end of 1978 when Michel Pollentier, who had been thrown out of the Tour de France that year when the doctor in charge of taking samples discovered that the rider in front of him in the queue was attempting to fill the jar via a tube connected to a condom filled with somebody else's urine hidden under his armpit demanded that he lift his jersey to prove that he too wasn't using such a device (he was, but later redeemed himself by being one of the first riders to warn others of the dangers of doping when he admitted he'd needed treatment for drug addiction when his racing career came to an end), left to set up his own team. Freddy Maertens, another ex-Flandria rider, wanted him too, as did several other teams that had been hovering around, but when Pollentier secured sponsorship from the very generous Splendor bicycle manufacturer he was able to offer the Irishman a better salary than his rivals.

Unfortunately, Pollentier was not cut out for team management and his new squad faced serious problems - among others, the bikes they rode were of such low quality that they couldn't enter Paris-Roubaix in their first year. Kelly responded by doing what he'd done at school, withdrawing into himself and getting on with things, even winning a few races - including two stages at the Vuelta a Espana (Stage 1 and 8a, 1979) - and, in time, things began to improve as team logistics were ironed out. Meanwhile, Splendor had been joined by Wickes and EuropDecor as sponsors and money was plentiful, Pollentier easily matching offers made by other teams as they tried to lure Kelly away. In 1981, he was paid £30,000 plus bonuses - an astonishingly high figure at a time when the average annual salary in Britain was just over £8,500. However, when Pollentier brought another sprinter - Eddy Planckaert - into the team, Kelly began to wonder what his role was and when he heard that de Gribaldy was assembling a new team decided to find out more.

De Gribaldy had long been known as a rather unconventional manager with a tendency to pick up riders nobody else wanted. More often than not, they'd let him down; but from time to time he'd discover an overlooked diamond. Kelly was of course not overlooked, his results to date had been far too good for that, but he was viewed in a very similar way to Mark Cavendish today - get him in the right position for the final sprint of a race and he was all but unbeatable, but if you wanted a rider who could win stage races look elsewhere. De Gribaldy thought differently - he believed that Kelly had the potential to be more than a sprinter, and this time he signed him up as team leader. Other managers no doubt assumed this was just another de Gribaldy eccentricity, but that year the Irishman won Paris-Nice. Then, he won the Points competition at the Tour de France. The year after that, he won Paris-Nice again, and the Points competition again too. And the Tour de Suisse, and the Critérium International. When he won the Giro di Lombardia, beating Francesco Moser, Hennie Kuiper and Greg LeMond, he proved himself capable of doing battle with the best riders in the world.

Kelly's Paris-Nice record is legendary - having won those first two, he would also win for the following five consecutive years; an achievement unmatched by any rider before or since. This created a sense, especially now that he'd learned climb and ride breaks almost as well as he sprinted, that it was only a matter of time before Kelly won a Tour -  that accolade would escape him, though he finished in the top ten three times with a best result of fourth place. He did win a Grand Tour, however, taking the 1988 Vuelta a Espana with a 1'27" advantage over Raimund Dietzen. He was also a remarkably talented Classics rider, winning nine Monuments (Milan-San Remo twice, Paris-Roubaix twice, Liège-Bastogne-Liège twice and the Giro di Lombardia three times) and came very close to adding his name to those of Eddy Merckx, Roger de Vlaeminck and Rik van Looy, the only men to have won all five Monuments, when he finished the Ronde van Vlaanderen in second place three times.

Kelly today, as rooted in the soil and
unpretentious as he always was

Kelly has been the subject of numerous books on cycling, some of them concerned with his own great achievements and others using his career as a frame work to examine a remarkable period in cycling - when he first raced in Europe, Eddy Merckx was the king. His first Tour de France, 1978, was also the Tour debut of Bernard Hinault. Greg Lemond and Laurent Fignon, Francesco Moser and Robert Millar, Jan Raas and many others all came and went in the time that Kelly was winning races. When he retired in 1994, Miguel Indurain had already won three Tours and was eyeing up his fourth while a young American rider named Lance Armstrong began to show he might one day do well, too.

Today, Kelly works as a cycling commentator for Eurosport and still sounds like a farmer's son from rural Ireland. In 2000, he rode across the USA to raise money for a charity that works with blind and partially sighted people. He created and is still actively involved in the Belgium-based Sean Kelly Cycling Academy, home of the Sean Kelly Racing Team that he also established and which has brought a number of promising new Irish and Belgian riders to the sport. Anyone who has listened to him, following his superb dissection of race tactics and admired his enormous knowledge of cycling history, will be in no doubt that his school friends were very, very wrong about him.

Bo Hamburger
Bo Hamburger, born in Frederiksberg, Denmark on this day in 1970, began his professional career with TVM in 1991 and, in 1994, finished the Tour de France in 20th place after winning Stage 8. He improved in the coming years with 1995, then 13th in 1996 and took the silver medal at the 1997 World Championships. Having switched to Casino-C’est Votre Équipe for 1998 he won La Flèche Wallonne, came fifth at the Amstel Gold Race and then 15th again at the Tour, then had a couple of quiet years before joining CSC and winning the National Championship in 2000.

However, his time with CSC would be short, because at the 2001 Tour the team sacked him after he failed a test for EPO. This was the period before reliable tests for the drug had been developed, meaning that when his B sample proved to be below the minimum level that would have caused suspension from competition, he escaped further charges and returned the following season with Alexia Alluminio. Later, in his autobiography, he admitted to using EPO and growth hormones between 1995 and 1997. He says that he stopped taking EPO in 1997 when he discovered that he had a naturally high haematocrit count which, in the days when the only test for the drug was to count red blood cells in an athlete's sample, would have caused him to fail tests had he continued using it. In 2009, Denmark's Ekstra Bladet newspaper received intelligence that he was involved in a financial pyramid scheme and decided to expose him, later getting a scoop when a hidden camera caught him and an accomplice stealing a journalist's video camera.

Left: Antoine Mazairac. Right: Willy Falck Hansen

Antonius "Antoine" Hendrikus Mazairac, born in Roosendal, Netherlands on this day in 1901, won a silver medal for the Sprint at the 1928 Olympics. He died in Dortmund, Germany, on the 1st of September 1966.

Matthew Lloyd, born in Melbourne on this day in 1983, turned professional with Predictor-Lotto in 2007 and was "released" from the team at the end of 2011. This led initially to rumours that he had been caught doping, but the team was quick to reveal th decision had been made due to "behavioural problems" (they chose not to expand on this, citing respect for his privacy as the reason) following an accident involving a car that left him with spinal injuries. In November 2011, he signed a two-year contract with Lampre-ISD and remains with them in 2013. In 2010, he became the first Australian to achieve victory in Grand Tour King of the Mountains, winning the competition at the Giro d'Italia.

Other cyclists born on this day: Christian Stahl (USA, 1983); Joanne Kiesanowski (New Zealand, 1979); Jonas Persson (Sweden, 1913, died 1986); Barthélemy Gillard (Belgium, 1935); Kanako Tanikawa (Japan, 1970); Peter Meinert Nielsen (Denmark, 1966); Fernand Saivé (Belgium, 1900, died 1981); Steffen Kjærgaard (Norway, 1973).

Daily Cycling Facts 18.07.2013

Fabio Casartelli
16.08.1970 - 18.07.1995

On this day in 1995, during Stage 15 of the Tour de France, 24-year-old Italian rider Fabio Casartelli lost control of his bike whilst descending the Col du Portet d'Aspet at high speed. Several other riders were also involved in the crash but got away with injuries of varying severity; Casartelli's head struck the low wall running alongside the road. Doctors reached him within ten seconds, but although television cameras showed him lying on the tarmac in a pool of blood for only a second or two it was obvious to fans that he had suffered massive head injuries and was very badly hurt indeed. He died in the helicopter on the way to hospital.

The next day, his Motorola team crossed the finish line together with the other riders following slowly behind them. Prizes were handed out as normal, then all recipients pooled them and donated them to Casartelli's family. Lance Armstrong, also with Motorola, dedicated his Stage 18 to him and there is now a memorial at the spot where he fell. Since 1997, the Youth category at the Tour has been known officially as the Souvenir Fabio Casartelli.

Amy Gillett
09.01.1976 - 18.07.2005

Today is also the anniversary of the death of Amy Gillett, who was born in Adelaide in 1976. Originally a world-class rower, Amy had been identified as a track and road cyclist with enormous potential and was predicted to win medals at the 2006 Commonwealth Games but was killed in Germany when a driver lost control of his car and ploughed into a group of cyclists with whom she was training in 2005. Five of her team mates were seriously injured, two sufficiently so that it was thought they also might die. Amy was 29 when she died and was studying for a PhD. She had been married for less than a year and a half.

The Amy Gillett Foundation was set up in her honour, an organisation that aims to cut cyclist fatalities on the road to zero by encouraging safer cycling and increasing awareness of cyclists among other road users as well as funding two scholarships per annum, one to a young female athlete and one to a researcher whose work will assist in reducing cyclist deaths on the roads. You can learn more about their work here.


Gino Bartali
Often, we describe Tour de France winners as heroes - which to cycling fans they are, but to the rest of the world all they've done is won a bike race. Gino Bartali, however, truly was a hero. Born in Pont a Ema on this day in 1914, he was the third child of a farmer and was raised in a poor household. His family were deeply religious, and his Catholic faith shaped his life every bit as much as his powerful physique and natural talent on a bike.

Gino Bartali, who was said to have "looked like a boxer but
climbed like an angel"

At the age of 13 he began racing after being encouraged by colleagues in a local bike shop where he worked to support his family. Success as an amateur brought his first professional contract with Aquilano in 1931, but his career didn't really take off until he joined Frejus in 1935 - in his first year with them he won a number of one-day races, the Tour of the Basque Country, one stage and the overall King of the Mountains at the Giro d'Italia and the National Road Race Championship. At the Giro the following year he won three stages, the King of the Mountains and the General Classification but almost gave up cycling forever when his brother Giulio was killed in a crash while racing. However, he was convinced to continue, and in 1937 he won another National Championship and the Giro's King of the Mountains for the third time and General Classification for a second time.

Bartali entered the Tour de France for the first time in 1937 and won Stage 7, but on Stage 8 he was in a collision on a narrow wooden bridge and fell three metres into a river where he was very nearly swept away by the current - thankfully, Francesco Camusso was nearby and managed to grab hold of him and haul him out. He continued, but lost significant time in the next stages and abandoned in Stage 12. Having been brought up to be respectful, he went to Tour director Henri Desgrange before publicly announcing his decision to leave and Desgrange was touched that he did, because no other rider had ever thought to do so before: "You are a good man, Gino," he told the rider. "We'll see one another again next year, and you will win."

Bartali in 1938

Desgrange was correct - in 1938, the Italian was able to defeat terrible weather and a very strong Belgian team, winning the toughest stage by a margin of 5'18" and finishing up with an advantage of 18'27". Georges Briquet, a radio commentator at the race, remembered: "These people had found a superman. Outside Bartali's hotel at Aix-les-Bains, an Italian general was shouting 'Don't touch him - he's a god.'"

Back in Italy a public subscription fund was started to reward him, the first man to donate money to it being Mussolini. Bartali's feelings about that haven't been recorded, but it's likely that it was a problem for him because, as he would later show, he was very much opposed to the Fascist leader's policies: it was known after the war that he had assisted in efforts to save the lives of Jewish Italians, but it's only comparatively recently that just how far he was willing to go to rescue a fellow human being from almost certain death has become known - not only did he courier information and fake documents around the Italian countryside, he personally transported Jewish refugees in a specially-designed trailer towed behind his bike across the Alps and into neutral Switzerland (if stopped by police, he explained that the trailer was deliberately constructed to be heavy and that towing it over the mountains was part of his training regime. If stopped, he'd almost certainly have been summarily executed or sent to a concentration camp). He was, therefore, a man whose courage went far beyond anything required in a bike race, as he proved when he was arrested and questioned by officers from the notorious SS secret service the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS and would tell them nothing other than that he did what he felt was the right thing to do.

It's estimated that he was responsible for saving more than 800 people, yet Bartali never asked for reward nor even recognition, stating years later that "One does these things, and that's that" and insisting that the only medal he expected for what he had done was the one he wore upon his heart. In 2012, Israel's Yad Vashem announced that it was gathering further information in preparation for declaring him Righteous Among The Nations, an honour bestowed upon those who helped defend and save Europe's Jews from Fascist attempts to exterminate them.

When Bartali returned to the Tour in 1948, he found that the riders he'd known in the past had either been killed or injured in the war or were now too old to compete so he memorised the names of several other entrants in order to be able to talk to them during the race. Prior to traveling to France, the Italian team had argued before the race over whether Bartali or Fausto Coppi, who had already won two Giri d'Italia, should be team leader. The Tour organisers wanted both men in the race and even permitted a second Italian team so they could both lead, but eventually Coppi decided to sulk and refused to take part at all. Bartali was no longer a young man and whilst the war had taken its toll on everyone, he especially didn't look to be in good shape. He won the first stage, but then began to struggle and Louison Bobet had little trouble in gaining the overall lead and keeping it - though he collapsed after Stage 11, he recovered in time to win the next day.

After finishing Stage 12 with an overall disadavantage of 20', Bartali told his team mates that he was going to abandon; but they persuaded him to sleep on it and see how he felt the following day. He did so, but during the night was woken by a phonecall from Alcide De Gasperi - the prime minister of Italy. De Gasperi told him that Palmiro Togliatti, chairman of the Communist Party, had been assassinated. Could Bartali try his very best to win the next day, he asked, in the hope that such good news might prevent the populace rising up and thrusting the country into civil war?

Bartali with Fausto Coppi

Bartali assured him that not only would he win the stage, he would win the race - and he kept both promises. Stage 13 was won with a 6'13" lead after he took on and beat no less a rider than Briek Schotte, reducing the gap between himself and Bobet to 1'06". Then he won Stages 14 and 15 too, which gave him an overall lead of 1'47" - and, more importantly, united Italy in their support for him. He finished 32" behind stage winner Edward van Dijck in Stage 16, but because his rivals lost significant time his overall lead grew to 32'20" and from that point onwards. Ten years after his first Tour victory, he had won another - the longest period between two wins by any one individual in the history of the race. What he may have achieved had the War not interrupted his career and stolen his best years can only be guessed at.

Considering the eras in which he raced, it's remarkable that Bartali appears to have never resorted to doping. However, he was convinced that Coppi did (with good reason: Coppi later admitted it) and took a dim view of it, which led him to try to find evidence to support his suspicions. During the 1946 Giro he saw Coppi drink the contents of a small glass phial which he then threw into the undergrowth at the side of the road, so he stopped his bike and retrieved it. Later, he gave it to his doctor to investigate but it turned out to have contained a legal tonic. He then began closely monitoring his rival and, while he could never prove anything conclusively, became something of an expert in Coppi's habits and was able to predict how he would ride the following day:

"The first thing was to make sure I always stayed at the same hotel for a race, and to have the room next to his so I could mount a surveillance. I would watch him leave with his mates, then I would tiptoe into the room which ten seconds earlier had been his headquarters. I would rush to the waste bin and the bedside table, go through the bottles, flasks, phials, tubes, cartons, boxes, suppositories – I swept up everything. I had become so expert in interpreting all these pharmaceuticals that I could predict how Fausto would behave during the course of the stage. I would work out, according to the traces of the product I found, how and when he would attack me."

Bartali remained a competitive rider until he was 40, when a road accident ended his career. By that time he had given much of his money away to deserving causes and lost most of what remained in ill-advised investments. Fortunately, his fame was so great that he could earn a living from it, becoming the acerbic host of a popular television show and making a few cameo appearances in films. In old age he developed heart problems (not helped at all by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle - Miguel Indurain's manager once warned the five-time Tour winner to avoid being "like Gino Bartali" in his post-racing life) and underwent bypass surgery in 2000; but the operation was not successful. He was given the last rights and died ten days later, after which an official two-day period of mourning was declared throughout Italy. To this day, historians are still discovering the extents of his heroism - as recently as 2010 new evidence came to light proving that he had concealed a Jewish family in the cellar of his home, saving them from death at the hands of the Fascists he detested so much.

Bartali wins the Tour, 1948

Russell Mockridge
Russell Mockridge was born in Melbourne on this day in 1928 and started his career with the Geelong Amateur CC, where he was nicknamed Little Lord Fauntleroy on account of his accent. Then he began winning races - a lot of races - and people called him The Geelong Flyer instead.

Two years later he rode in the Olympics, but his race was ruined by two punctures; at the British Empire Games two years after that he won two gold medals and a silver. Mockridge was selected for the 1952 Olympic team but initially said he would turn down the invitation due to a requirement that athletes on the team remained amateur for two years - no less a figure than Hubert Opperman personally saw to it that the rule was reduced to one year, and Mockridge won another pair of gold medals. He did indeed turn professional a year later and in 1955 came 64th at the Tour de France - one of only 69 riders from 130 starters to finish the race.

Mockridge died on the 13th of September 1958 when he collided with a bus some 3.2km from the start of the Tour of Gippsland. He was only two months past his birthday and left behind his wife and three-year-old daughter.


On this day in 1947, Federico Bahamontes entered his first race - and won it. On this day in 1959, he won the Tour de France.

Leandro Faggin, born in Padua in this day in 1933, won two Olympic gold medals and held three World Championship titles over the course of his career. He died at the age of 37 of cancer on the 6th of December 1970, and since 2000 is frequently included on lists of probable dopers.

Other cyclists born today: Rafał Furman (Poland, 1985); Martin Stenzel (West Germany, 1946); Sergey Kucherov (Russia, 1980); Joseph Racine (France, 1891, died 1914); Stephen Hodge (Australia, 1961); Michael Neel (USA, 1951); José Velásquez (Colombia, 1970).

Daily Cycling Facts 24.05.2013

The Giro d'Italia started on this date five times - in 1914, 1922, 1947, 1950 and 1992.


The Epic 1914 Giro

1914. The stage isn't known and the rider isn't named,
but he looks like Giuseppe Azzini.

1914 was the last edition before the outbreak of the First World War and the first to decide the eventual winner on overall time rather than points, the same system having been used at the Tour de France the year before (the 1903 and 1904 Tours had also been decided in this way). Whilst the parcours was comparatively short at 3,256km (some sources put it even shorter at 3,162km), the race consisted of only eight stages which meant, as was common in those times, stages far longer than riders today face - though we should be fair to modern riders and remember that early Grand Tours had many more rest days. Five stages were more than 400km, Stages 1 and 8 were 468km (some sources say 428km; either way they began at midnight) and the shortest stage, 5, was 328km; for which reason it's considered by many historians to have been the hardest Giro of all time. Stage 3, 430km in length, took longer than any other stage in Giro history to be completed with Costante Girardengo first over the line after 19h20'47".

Costante Girardengo

As if the distances weren't bad enough, the riders also faced severe weather, incompetent officials who supplied them with incorrect directions on numerous occasions and widespread cheating by other riders, many of whom drafted behind cars, and fans who spread nails over the roads to slow down riders they didn't like. It's perhaps unsurprising, therefore, that the average speed of 23.375kph was the lowest ever and only eight out of 81 starters finished - another record. Among those to fail was Giuseppe Azzini, leader of the General Classification for one stage after winning Stages 4 and 5 - he went missing during Stage 6 and couldn't be found anywhere. Organisers discovered the next day at a farmhouse, fast asleep in bed.


1921 winner Giovanni Brunero was favourite to win in 1922, but he faced stiff competition from Girardengo and Gaetano Belloni. He finished the first stage with a good lead, but was then docked 25 minutes for cheating. Rather than giving up, he redoubled his efforts and mounted some long-distance solo breakaways which, bit by bit, enabled him to claw his way back into contention. He then won Stage 7 with a time good enough to take the General Classification leadership, which he retained for the remaining three stages. He took 119h43' to complete the 3,095km - neither Girardengo nor Belloni finished.

1947 covered 3,843km in 19 stages and saw Fausto Coppi finally exert his dominance over Gino Bartali, who had taken what would prove to be his last Giro victory the previous year - but the old warhorse wasn't ready to let the younger man go without a fight just yet. They spent the first stage sizing one another up and allowed Renzo Zanazzi to win (Zanazzi, who few remember now, had won Stage 10 the previous year, would also win Stage 5b and finished a stage in third place in 1948, 1950 and 1952 - at the time of writing, he's still alive), but Bartali attacked hard in Stage 2 and finished with a 1'41" advantage. Coppi was the better man in the mountains from Stage 4, but he wasn't quite good enough to prevent his rival taking the General Classification on that same stage and then keeping it all the way through to Stage 15. However, in Stage 16 Bartali finally cracked on the Passo di Pordoi, at 2,239m the highest paved road in the Dolomites - and Coppi beat him to the finish by 4'24". From that points onwards, his victory was as good as decided and he rode less aggressively, keeping himself out of harm's way and won the race with a 1'43" advantage.

Hugo Koblet

Bartali raced again in 1950, when the race consisted of 18 stages over 3,981km, and looked a likely contender when Coppi broke his pelvis in Stage 9 - but now he also faced problems from the Swiss Hugo Koblet who, having won Stages 6 and 8, realised that he too stood a good chance in Coppi's absence. A rider as clever as he was famously handsome, Koblet rode wisely and effectively and led the General Classification from that point onwards; eventually beating the Italian by 5'12" and becoming the first foreigner to win a Giro.

The 1992 edition covered 3,835km in 22 stages. Miguel Indurain gained an early lead in the time trial, but it was on Stage 9 - the first summit finish that year - that he really got the upper hand when he dropped all his main rivals and gained a 30" advantage over Claudio Chiappucci. When he then dominated the final time trial, he secured his winning time of 103h36'08", 5'12" ahead of Chiappucci who took second place. Later that year, he would become the sixth man to achieve the Giro-Tour double when he also won the Tour de France (and the next year, he would become the only man to have achieved two Giro-Tour doubles in consecutive years).

Sean Kelly
John James "Sean" Kelly is frequently listed as the most successful Irish cyclist in history, but he was much more than that - alongside Bernard Hinault, he was one of the most successful cyclists anywhere in the world and remained so for much of the decade.

One of cycling's most iconic images - Sean Kelly
at Paris-Roubaix

Born in Waterford on this day in 1956 to John and Nellie, who made their living from a 48-acre farm, Sean (the name was chosen to prevent confusion at home) has never been much of a talker. Friends at school believed him unintelligent (or believed that he thought he was, at least) and, while he appears the type who may have turned out to be a genius at maths or physics had a teacher ever have been able to discover such a latent talent, he never got the chance to prove it and they never got the chance to find it - aged just 13, he was taken out of school and went to work on the farm. His older brother Joe, still at school, obtained a bike at about the same time to cycle to and from classes every day and Sean got a bike of his own so that they could go for rides together. When Joe began racing (and winning), Sean followed him once again: his very first race was an eight-mile handicap on the 4th of June 1960. Setting out three minutes ahead of the more experienced riders, he remained three minutes ahead at the halfway point and then increased his lead on the return journey to win the race. Two years later, he was National Amateur Champion; a title he held for two years.

In 1975, Kelly travelled with a certain Pat McQuaid and his brother Kieron (coincidentally, Kelly shares his birthday with Pat and Kieron's cousin John McQuaid, who represented Ireland at the 1988 Olympics) to South Africa, where they planned to use the Rapport Tour as part of the preparation for the upcoming Olympics. Aware that the country was being boycotted due to the government's refusal to end apartheid, they entered under false names; however, they were caught and banned from competition for six months by the Irish Federation and then from the Olympics for life. Though this seemed a disaster, it would prove advantageous for Kelly who would, in all likelihood, have found himself outclassed by the top European cyclists at the Games; instead, he entered the 1976 Tour of Britain where he faced opponents closer to his own level and won Stage 6, then came second on Stage 7. This earned him an invitation to join a club based in Metz, which offered him a salary equal to £25 a week, four francs (40p) for every kilometre of every race he won and free bed and board - he accepted, then paid the club back by winning 18 of the 25 races he entered with them, including the amateur version of the Giro di Lombardia.

Unsurprisingly, bosses from professional teams began to take note; among them the legendary Cyrille Guimard and Jean de Gribaldy. De Gribaldy had in fact made him an offer previously but was turned down as Kelly then wished to remain an amateur - this time, though, wanted him so much that he made hasty preparations to go to Ireland to track the rider down, despite having no idea where he lived and not even being sure he's recognise him if he saw him. He did know, meanwhile, where Kelly's parents' farm was located, roughly at least; so, taking an English-speaking rider to act as translator, he flew to Dublin and took a taxi to Curraghduff - a distance of 164km. Eventually, they tracked down the farm only to be told that their quarry was out in the fields somewhere on a tractor and so they ordered the taxi driver to cruise around the lanes looking for him. When they found him, they went to his brother-in-law's house where de Gribaldy offered him £4,000 a year with bonuses - more than three times what the Metz club had been paying him. But, being a simple country boy, Kelly felt loyal to his old club and asked for time to think things over, to which de Gribaldy agreed. Metz offered him more money but couldn't match what de Gribaldy could offer. Kelly, feeling guilty for considering turning his back on the team that had given him his first opportunity, asked de Gribaldy for £6,000, certain the Frenchman would turn his back and walk away. De Gribaldy wrote up a new contract on the spot and Flandria-Velda, at long last, had its great new hope.

The Cavendish of his day, Kelly
was a devastatingly fast sprinter

Now loyal to de Gribaldy, Kelly remained with Flandria for two seasons. However, Flandria was really two outfits: the A team, who raced in the top events around Europe; and the B team which remained confined to smaller, local races in France where they were used as little more than an advertising gimmick for Flandria's mopeds and bikes - while Kelly even to this day is a country boy at heart, he'd glimpsed cycling's upper echelons now and knew that he could get there. The chance to do so appeared to come at the end of 1978 when Michel Pollentier, who had been thrown out of the Tour de France that year when the doctor in charge of taking samples discovered that the rider in front of him in the queue was attempting to fill the jar via a tube connected to a condom filled with somebody else's urine hidden under his armpit demanded that he lift his jersey to prove that he too wasn't using such a device (he was, but later redeemed himself by being one of the first riders to warn others of the dangers of doping when he admitted he'd needed treatment for drug addiction when his racing career came to an end), left to set up his own team. Freddy Maertens, another ex-Flandria rider, wanted him too, as did several other teams that had been hovering around, but when Pollentier secured sponsorship from the very generous Splendor bicycle manufacturer he was able to offer the Irishman a better salary than his rivals.

Unfortunately, Pollentier was not cut out for team management and his new squad faced serious problems - among others, the bikes they rode were of such low quality that they couldn't enter Paris-Roubaix in their first year. Kelly responded by doing what he'd done at school, withdrawing into himself and getting on with things, even winning a few races - including two stages at the Vuelta a Espana (Stage 1 and 8a, 1979) - and, in time, things began to improve as team logistics were ironed out. Meanwhile, Splendor had been joined by Wickes and EuropDecor as sponsors and money was plentiful, Pollentier easily matching offers made by other teams as they tried to lure Kelly away. In 1981, he was paid £30,000 plus bonuses - an astonishingly high figure at a time when the average annual salary in Britain was just over £8,500. However, when Pollentier brought another sprinter - Eddy Planckaert - into the team, Kelly began to wonder what his role was and when he heard that de Gribaldy was assembling a new team decided to find out more.

De Gribaldy had long been known as a rather unconventional manager with a tendency to pick up riders nobody else wanted. More often than not, they'd let him down; but from time to time he'd discover an overlooked diamond. Kelly was of course not overlooked, his results to date had been far too good for that, but he was viewed in a very similar way to Mark Cavendish today - get him in the right position for the final sprint of a race and he was all but unbeatable, but if you wanted a rider who could win stage races look elsewhere. De Gribaldy thought differently - he believed that Kelly had the potential to be more than a sprinter, and this time he signed him up as team leader. Other managers no doubt assumed this was just another de Gribaldy eccentricity, but that year the Irishman won Paris-Nice. Then, he won the Points competition at the Tour de France. The year after that, he won Paris-Nice again, and the Points competition again too. And the Tour de Suisse, and the Critérium International. When he won the Giro di Lombardia, beating Francesco Moser, Hennie Kuiper and Greg LeMond, he proved himself capable of doing battle with the best riders in the world.

Kelly's Paris-Nice record is legendary - having won those first two, he would also win for the following five consecutive years; an achievement unmatched by any rider before or since. This created a sense, especially now that he'd learned climb and ride breaks almost as well as he sprinted, that it was only a matter of time before Kelly won a Tour -  that accolade would escape him, though he finished in the top ten three times with a best result of fourth place. He did win a Grand Tour, however, taking the 1988 Vuelta a Espana with a 1'27" advantage over Raimund Dietzen. He was also a remarkably talented Classics rider, winning nine Monuments (Milan-San Remo twice, Paris-Roubaix twice, Liège-Bastogne-Liège twice and the Giro di Lombardia three times) and came very close to adding his name to those of Eddy Merckx, Roger de Vlaeminck and Rik van Looy, the only men to have won all five Monuments, when he finished the Ronde van Vlaanderen in second place three times.

Kelly today, as rooted in the soil and
unpretentious as he always was

Kelly has been the subject of numerous books on cycling, some of them concerned with his own great achievements and others using his career as a frame work to examine a remarkable period in cycling - when he first raced in Europe, Eddy Merckx was the king. His first Tour de France, 1978, was also the Tour debut of Bernard Hinault. Greg Lemond and Laurent Fignon, Francesco Moser and Robert Millar, Jan Raas and many others all came and went in the time that Kelly was winning races. When he retired in 1994, Miguel Indurain had already won three Tours and was eyeing up his fourth while a young American rider named Lance Armstrong began to show he might one day do well, too.

Today, Kelly works as a cycling commentator for Eurosport and still sounds like a farmer's son from rural Ireland. In 2000, he rode across the USA to raise money for a charity that works with blind and partially sighted people. He created and is still actively involved in the Belgium-based Sean Kelly Cycling Academy, home of the Sean Kelly Racing Team that he also established and which has brought a number of promising new Irish and Belgian riders to the sport. Anyone who has listened to him, following his superb dissection of race tactics and admired his enormous knowledge of cycling history, will be in no doubt that his school friends were very, very wrong about him.

Bo Hamburger
Bo Hamburger, born in Frederiksberg, Denmark on this day in 1970, began his professional career with TVM in 1991 and, in 1994, finished the Tour de France in 20th place after winning Stage 8. He improved in the coming years with 1995, then 13th in 1996 and took the silver medal at the 1997 World Championships. Having switched to Casino-C’est Votre Équipe for 1998 he won La Flèche Wallonne, came fifth at the Amstel Gold Race and then 15th again at the Tour, then had a couple of quiet years before joining CSC and winning the National Championship in 2000.

However, his time with CSC would be short, because at the 2001 Tour the team sacked him after he failed a test for EPO. This was the period before reliable tests for the drug had been developed, meaning that when his B sample proved to be below the minimum level that would have caused suspension from competition, he escaped further charges and returned the following season with Alexia Alluminio. Later, in his autobiography, he admitted to using EPO and growth hormones between 1995 and 1997. He says that he stopped taking EPO in 1997 when he discovered that he had a naturally high haematocrit count which, in the days when the only test for the drug was to count red blood cells in an athlete's sample, would have caused him to fail tests had he continued using it. In 2009, Denmark's Ekstra Bladet newspaper received intelligence that he was involved in a financial pyramid scheme and decided to expose him, later getting a scoop when a hidden camera caught him and an accomplice stealing a journalist's video camera.

Left: Antoine Mazairac. Right: Willy Falck Hansen

Antonius "Antoine" Hendrikus Mazairac, born in Roosendal, Netherlands on this day in 1901, won a silver medal for the Sprint at the 1928 Olympics. He died in Dortmund, Germany, on the 1st of September 1966.

Matthew Lloyd, born in Melbourne on this day in 1983, turned professional with Predictor-Lotto in 2007 and was "released" from the team at the end of 2011. This led initially to rumours that he had been caught doping, but the team was quick to reveal th decision had been made due to "behavioural problems" (they chose not to expand on this, citing respect for his privacy as the reason) following an accident involving a car that left him with spinal injuries. In November 2011, he signed a two-year contract with Lampre-ISD and remains with them in 2013. In 2010, he became the first Australian to achieve victory in Grand Tour King of the Mountains, winning the competition at the Giro d'Italia.

Other cyclists born on this day: Christian Stahl (USA, 1983); Joanne Kiesanowski (New Zealand, 1979); Jonas Persson (Sweden, 1913, died 1986); Barthélemy Gillard (Belgium, 1935); Kanako Tanikawa (Japan, 1970); Peter Meinert Nielsen (Denmark, 1966); Fernand Saivé (Belgium, 1900, died 1981); Steffen Kjærgaard (Norway, 1973).

Daily Cycling Facts 05.05.2013

The 2012 Giro d'Italia began on this day with an 8.7km time trial in Herning, Denmark. This was the second earliest starting date in the history of the Giro; only the 1939 edition started earlier, on the 28th of April.

Today marks the anniversary of the 20th edition of La Flèche Wallonne, which took place over a 221km parcours between Charleroi and Liège in 1956 - the same start and finish towns as in the previous seven years and the following nine (though they were reversed from 1960 to 1965), but using a different route. The winner was Richard Van Genechten, a climber who one year before had driven himself so hard on Mont Ventoux during the Tour de France that he fell unconscious from his bike and was rushed to hospital. He nearly became the third man to win the Ardennes Double a day after his Flèche victory when he finished in second place behind Fred de Bruyne at Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

Gino Bartali
On this day in 2000, the world lost a man who had it not have been for the Second World War (during which he became an even bigger hero that he did during his cycling career) may have become known as the greatest rider of all time: Il Pio, Gino Bartali. He would win the Giro in 1936 and 1937, the his first Tour de France in 1938 and a second in 1948 - the longest period between victories achieved by an individual rider in the history of the race.

Gino Bartali, a great man on the bike and off

Born in Pont a Ema (the house where he was born still stands, now occupied by a bar), the young Gino began working in a bike shop when he was 13 and was soon encouraged by colleagues to start racing. He then had a successful amateur career before turning professional at the age of 21 and winning the National Championship a year later. He won the Giro's overall King of the Mountains title that same year, then won the General Classification the next year but very nearly gave up cycling forever a year later when his older brother was killed in an accident during a race.

Until they produced a rider capable of dominating the Classics, Italians were widely believed to be useless cyclists when away from their home nation. Having been persuaded to continue racing, this seemed true of Bartali when he entered the Tour de France for the first time in 1937 as he got off to a bad start and lost time; then, perhaps angered by the cliche, he unexpectedly picked up the pace and won the yellow jersey during the mountainous Stage 7 between Aix-les-Bains and Grenoble. However, the very next day he was involved in a crash when Jules Rossi lost control - he plunged 3m off a bridge into a stream, landing on his chest and suffering breathing difficulties that forced him to retire from the race. That evening, he went to visit Tour director Henri Desgrange and apologised for his decision. "You are the first rider to come to see me before dropping out," Desgrange is reputed to have said. "You're a good man, Gino. Next year, we shall see one another again - and you shall win."

It has been known for many years that, during the War, Bartali assisted in efforts to save the lives of Jewish Italians, but it's only comparatively recently become known just how far he was willing to go to  rescue a fellow human being from almost certain death  - not only did he courier information and fake documents around the Italian countryside, he personally transported Jewish refugees in a specially-designed trailer towed behind his bike across the Alps and into neutral Switzerland. It's estimated that he was responsible for saving more than 800 people, yet he never asked for reward nor even recognition; stating years later that "One does these things, and that's that." In 2012, Israel's Yad Vashem announced that it was gathering further information in preparation for declaring him Righteous Among The Nations, an honour bestowed upon those who helped defend and save Europe's Jews from fascist attempts to exterminate them.

Bartali, having won the 1948 Tour

Bartali's career ended with a road accident when he was 40, by which point he had given much of his money away to deserving causes and lost most of what remained in ill-advised investments, later becoming the acerbic host of a popular television show and making a few cameo appearances in films. In old age he developed heart problems (not helped at all by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle - Miguel Indurain's manager once warned the five-time Tour winner to avoid being "like Gino Bartali" in his post-racing life) and underwent bypass surgery but died from a heart attack ten days after receiving the last rights, and a two-day period of official statewide mourning was declared in Italy. Today, many historians believe that had the War not have brought a temporary end to the Grand Tours, Bartali would have topped Lance Armstrong's record of seven Tours de France.


Britain's Lucy Martin was born in Merseyside on this day in 1990. She was spotted and invited to join the Olympic Talent Teamwhen she was 15 and soon selected for the Olympic Academy, a programme reserved for the most promising young athletes. In 2011, she received an offer of a professional trade team racing contract with Garmin-Cervélo where she raced alongside some of the best cyclists in the world including Lizzie Armitstead, Emma Pooley, Jessie Daams and Iris Slappendel, then went with Armitstead, Pooley, Daams and others to AA Drink-Leontien.nl following the demise of the Garmin-Cervélo women's team late in 2011; when AA Drink-Leontien.nl vanished a year later she went with Armitstead and Daams to Boels-Dolmans

Paul Watson, born in Milton Keynes on this day in 1962, had a good amateur career before turning professional in 1987 after performing well for two consecutive years at the Milk Race (as the Tour of Britain was then known). Two years later, he surprised the worldwide cycling scene by somehow coming sixth at no less an event than La Flèche Wallonne, thus inspiring theories that a serious talent had somehow slipped under the radar and was now announcing itself. He entered the Tour de France that year but was woefully unprepared - he was 143rd in the prologue but afterwards managed no better than 191st (Stage 3), then abandoned after coming 202nd - only four riders ahead of the Lanterne Rouge - in Stage 5. He did well at the Milk Race again that year, coming 4th overall, then faded away from cycling and little has been seen of him since.

Nick Nuyens
(image credit Thomas Ducroquet CC3.0)

Another rider who has enjoyed success at the Tour of Britain is the Belgian Nick Nuyens, who was also born on this day but eighteen years after Watson - he was third overall in 2004, then won Stages 1, 5 and the overall General Classification one year later. However, Nuyens is known primarily as one of the strongest Classics riders of his generation, having won or placed well at several of the most important one-day races, In 2011, he won both the Ronde van Vlaanderen and the Dwars door Vlaanderen.

British rowing champion James Cracknell, who was born on this day in 1972, attempted in 2010 to swim, run, row and cycle from Los Angeles to New York in 16 days. On the 20th of July, during one of the cycling sections, he was hit from behind by a truck in Arizona - one of the most dangerous types of accident for a cyclist, and was left with a coup contrecoup injury caused when the brain impacts against the inside of the skull. Cracknell has attributed his survival to the Alpina helmet he was wearing at the time, pointing out that it absorbed enough of the impact to have been broken into two pieces, and has since been a vocal advocate of cycling helmets - especially those made by Alpina, though he insists that there is no commercial agreement between himself and the company. In 2011, British newspaper The Daily Mail published a photograph of a helmetless Cracknell riding a folding bike but stated that he returned home to get one when he realised; his wife told reporters that he has suffered memory loss since his accident.

Lenka Ilavská, who was born in the Slovakian town Liptovský Mikuláš on this day in 1972, won the 1992  Emakumeen Bira, the 1993 Giro d'Italia Femminile and the 1995 Krasna Lipa Tour Féminine.

Mouritius "Maurice" Prosper Peeters was born in Antwerp on this day in 1882 and moved whilst still a child with his family to The Hague, where the Peeters took Dutch nationality. Maurice represented the Netherlands at the Olympics in 1920 and 1924. In 1920, he rode alone in the 1000m Sprint against British stars Thomas "Tiny" Johnson and Harry Ryan, who worked together in an attempt to remove all chances of a Dutch victory. Ryan attacked in the early part of the race, trying to tire his opponent out so that Johnson could cruise to unchallenged victory. However, Peeters proved more than match for the pair of them: Ryan tired and gave up his attacks, then the Dutchman went to work on Johnson, maintaining his lead and taking the gold medal. Four years later, he won the bronze in the 2000m Tandem race.

Leif Mortensen won a series of amateur races in the late 1960s, then turned professional and won a silver medal at the World Road Race Championship in 1970 (held that year in Leicester, Great Britain). A year later, he was sixth overall at the Tour de France and then twelfth in 1972, then he won the Tour of Belgium in 1973 and was 19th at the Tour de France - the palmares of a man who came so close to being a great, but didn't quite have what it takes.

Other cyclists born on this day: Maria Hawkins (Canada, 1962); Kazım Bingen (Turkey, 1912); Andrej Hauptman (Slovenia, 1975); Leif Mortensen (Denmark, 1946); Carlos Miguel Álvarez (Argentina, 1943); Jakob Caironi (Switzerland, 1902); Anton Krijgsman (Netherlands, 1898, died 1974); Elio Bavutti (Italy, 1914 died 1987); Tekeste Woldu (Ethiopia, 1945); José Ollarves (Venezuela, 1953); Syamak Zafarzadeh (Iran, 1964); Alex Van Linden (Belgium, 1952); Mohamed Reza Banna (Iran, 1971); Kevin Kimmage (Ireland, 1967); Bob McLeod (Canada, 1913, died 1958); David Boll (USA, 1953).