Daily Cycling Facts 27.09.2014

Clara Hughes

Hughes at the Thüringen Rundfahrt, 2012

Born in Winnipeg, Canada on this day in 1972, Clara Hughes - in common with so many other riders - began her career as an athlete in speed skating, which she took up at the age of 16 after seeing Gaétan Boucher win gold at the 1988 Olympic Games. A year later she started cycling; only three years later, in 1992, she became National Road Race Champion. In 1994 she won the Women's Challenge, one of the hardest and most prestigious events in the sport, then in 1995 she was fourth overall at the Tour de France Féminin and won the National Individual Time Trial Championship and in 1996 she won bronze medals in the Road Race and the Individual Time Trial at the Olympics.

Hughes took a hiatus from cycling and returned to speed skating as the 1998 Winter Olympics approached, concentrating on it for several years and winning more Olympic medals - she thus became the second woman and one of only four athletes to have won medals in both the Summer and Winter Games, and in 2006 became the only athlete to have won more than one medal at both Games. In 2005, she set a new 10,000m World Record at 14'19.73" - it has since been beaten, but remains a Canadian record at the time of writing. Following the 2006 Winter Games, she took inspiration from fellow speed skater Joey Cheek who had donated his gold medal to Right To Play and gave $10,000 of her own money to the humanitarian organisation.

Hughes at the 2012 Olympics

At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Hughes worked as a cycling commentator for CBC. This inspired her to make a return to cycling, which she did in 2010; less than a year later at the PanAmerican Games she won the Road Race with an advantage of 1'18" and the Individual Time Trial with 28", then the National Individual Time Trial Championship by 28". She also won the Tour of the Gila and La Visite Chrono du Gatineau, then came fifth at the World Individual Time Trial Championship, but for many fans her most impressive achievement was her long solo breakaway at the World Road Race Championship, enlivening a race that many found otherwise boring. Having won La Flèche Wallonne and another National ITT Championship in 2012, Hughes qualified for the Olympics and was fifth in the Individual Time Trial.

Alongside Cindy Klassen, another speed skater from Winnipeg, Hughes is the joint most successful Canadian Olympian of all time. In recognition of her athletic achievements and humanitarian activities she has been awarded the Order of Manitoba, is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has two honourary degrees from the Universities of Manitoba and New Brunswick.

Wouter Weylandt

Wouter Weylandt, 27.09.1984 - 09.05.2011

Born in Ghent, Belgium on this day in 1984, Wouter Weylandt scored some good results prior to 2004, then that year came third at the Under-23 Paris-Roubaix and earned himself a trainee contract with QuickStep-Davitamon. In 2005, riding with a full professional contract from the same team, he won the GP Briek Schotte after starting the season with mononucleosis; then in 2006 the Points competition at the Tour of Poland. In 2007 he won seven races and in 2008, having been third at Gent-Wevelgem, he rode the Vuelta a Espana - his first Grand Tour, where he won Stage 17. The following year started with a tragedy when his close friend Frederiek Nilf, aged just 21, died of a heart attack while he slept between stages at the Tour of Qatar; later in the season Weylandt nearly repeated his earlier Vuelta success when he was second on Stage 4 but he left the race after Stage 16, then in 2010 he won Stage 3 at the Giro d'Italia.

He was, in the opinion of his fellow riders and fans, a rider destined for greatness; if not a Grand Tour victory, at least a Grand Tour Points competition. When he signed for 2011 to LeopardTrek - a new team consisting of some of the most promising young riders in the world, including Andy Schleck who was hotly tipped to win the Tour de France that year, some of the established greats including Fabian Cancellara, and some highly experienced older riders such as the legendary Jens Voigt - it seemed that there really couldn't be a better place for a rider such as him to develop his talents and learn the fine art of winning bicycle races.

On the 9th of May, at the Giro d'Italia which just one year previously had been disrupted when riders protested against poor safety conditions, he was killed as he descended the Passo del Bocco at 80kph. According to Manuel Antonio Cardoso, who was behind him at the time, Weylandt had looked over his shoulder to see if other riders were catching him and lost control, hitting a guardrail before being catapulted 10m across the road and landing heavily on his face. The race's chief medical officer was nearby in a car and saw the accident take place: "he was already and clearly dead upon impact. I had never seen such a thing before, such a sudden death," he later told reporters. The impact when he hit the wall would have been sufficient to end his career even had he have fallen there - an autopsy found that his left leg had been so badly damaged it would have required amputation. His death was attributed to skull and facial injuries and massive damage to his internal organs - it was noted that the impact when he hit the road had stopped his heart instantaneously and there would not have been time for him to suffer. His girlfriend, An-Sophie, was five months pregnant when he died.

Pedro Horrillo
It's often said - with some truth - that academic qualifications are few and far between in the men's professional peloton (the same is very much not true among the women: since few female cyclists will ever make a living from their sport, few ever considered it as a future occupation and only took it up while at university). Pedro Horillo, born in Eibar on this day in 1974, is a retired Basque cyclist and an exception: he had already earned a degree in philosophy from Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, the Basque national university, when he became a professional rider with Vitalicio Seguros-Grupo Generali in 1998 and after his retirement he became well-respected for his intelligently-written articles on cycling and doping.

Horrillo at the 2009 Tour of California

Horrillo spent his first three years with Vitalico Seguros and, in his second, rode in the Tour de France for the first time and scored a handful of decent stage finishes for a debutant, including 18th on Stage 1, then came 135th overall. In 2001 he went to Mapei-QuickStep and finished four stages at the Vuelta a Espana in the top ten; then in 2002, with the same team, he won Stage 2 at Paris-Nice and was third on Stage 13 at the Vuelta. The following year he went to Rabobank, with which he would spend the remainder of his career; he won Stage 3 at the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya that year and Stage 1 at the Sachsen Tour the next. While he had many more good results (and rode the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta in 2007), they would be the final victories of his career.

He retired in 2009 following a horrific crash at the Giro in which he hit a railing and plunged over it into a ravine, falling 60m and suffering a broken neck, knee and thigh as well as a punctured lung. He was unconscious when the medics got to him, then awoke while in the ambulance and was placed in an induced coma. The following day - when riders mounted a protest at safety conditions in the race, just as they would the following year and again following the death of Wouter Weylandt in 2009 - he was brought back to consciousness for scans which, thankfully, revealed no brain injuries. He spent the next five weeks in hospital, then made a full recovery but never took part in another race, finding that he was no longer able to perform at his previous level. However, he still follows cycling and is especially keen on the Hell of the North, Paris-Roubaix: ""If I could only have ridden one race as a pro, that would have been it - and if possible, in the rain because that's the real Roubaix when it rains," he says.

Beth Heiden
Elizabeth Lee Heiden Reid, known as Beth Heiden, was born in Madison, Wisconsin on this day in 1959 and is probably the only World Road Race Champion who wasn't really a cyclist. She played tennis and soccer while at school, then also took up running in 1975 and set a national record for her age group that same year. She was also a speed skater and, the following year, qualified for the Olympics where she was 11th in the 3,000m. In 1979, she became World Speed Skating Champion after winning all four of the constituent races.

Left to right: Sara Doctor, Connie Carpenter, Beth Heiden

Many cyclists have competed in speed skating in the past, with Marianne Vos and Clara Hughes being perhaps the two most famous examples; but invariably they concentrated on cycling after discovering their proficiency at it. Heiden did not: she took up cycling as part of her cross-training preparation for the speed skating events at the 1980 Winter Olympics and never fell in love with the bike, nor became a true cycling, like Vos and Hughes did - in fact, when she became the first ever American to win the UCI World Road Race Championships in 1980, beating Greg Lemond by three years, she did so almost as an afterthought. Having done so, she returned to speed skating, then took up cross-country skiing and never went back to cycling again. Who knows what she might have achieved if she had done?


Born in Australia on this day in 1974, Nigel Barley fell three metres from a roof and landed on a hammer; aged 26, he was a paraplegic. After spending a year learning what he could do - and techniques to do what he couldn't - he decided to take up handcycling, then two years later set a new handcycle World 24-hour record when he covered 462km; three years after that he rode the 4,437km between Perth and Sydney. In 2009 he won the Road Race and the Individual Time Trial at the National Championships. Silver and bronze at the 2011 World Cup and several good results during the first half of 2012, as part of the World Cup and the Paracycling Tour, qualified him for the Paralympic Games in London, where he won silver in the Individual Time Trial.

Alfred Haemerlinck, the most successful
rider you've never heard of

Alfred Haemerlinck, born in Assenede, Belgium on this day in 1905, won Stages 1 and 6 at the Tour de France in 1931, which earned him the maillot jaune for a single day. Those two stages were the most prestigious victories of his decade-long professional career, but he is chiefly remembered for the enormous number of smaller, less-well-known races that he entered and won: according to some apparently reliable estimates, as many as 493 - higher than some estimates for Eddy Merckx.

Benoni Beheyt, born in Zwijnaarde, Belgium on this day in 1940, won Gent-Wevelgem and the World Road Race Championship in 1963 and Stage 22a at the Tour de France, the General Classification at the Ronde van België and the National Road Race Championship in 1964.

Ángel Casero, born in Albalat dels Tarongers on this day in 1972, was Spanish Road Race Champion in 1998 and 1999. In 2000 he was second overall at the Vuelta a Espana, then in 2001 he won it.

Giovanni Fidanza, born in Bergamo, Italy on this day in 1965, won the overall Points competition at the Giro d'Italia and Stage 20 at the Tour de France in 1989, then Stage 2 at the Giro in 1990.

Heinz Wengler, born in Germany on this day in 1912, shared victory for Stage 17b (a 37km road race) at the 1937 Tour de France with the Adolph Braeckeveldt. His nickname was Herr Schmal on account of his diminutive stature and five years later, when he was 30, he was killed in action on the Eastern Front.

Enrico Zaina, born in Brescia on this day in 1967, won Stage 17 at the Vuelta a Espana in 1992, Stage 11 at the Giro d'Italia in 1995 and Stages 9, 20 and second place overall at the 1996 Giro.

Other cyclists born on this day: Raúl Saavedra (Colombia, 1969); Cosme Saavedra (Argentina, 1901, died 1967); Chartchai Juntrat (Thailand, 1951); Alexey Kolessov (Kazakhstan, 1984); Mauno Uusivirta (Finland, 1948); Rebecca Henderson (Australia, 1991); Mitsuteru Tanaka (Japan, 1971); Michael Andrew (Malaysia, 1943); Kris Gerits (Belgium, 1971).

Daily Cycling Facts 24.02.2014

Vilma Rimšaitė

Vilma Rimšaitė

Vilma Rimšaitė, born in Lithuania's fourth largest city Šiauliai on this day in 1983, seemed destined for a life in music during her childhood when she earned a place at a specialist music school and won awards for her singing. At the age of six, she began to ride BMX and, spurred on by her BMX enthusiast father, soon demonstrated she was equally as talented at that - just three years later she took part in the European Championships, the continent's most prestigious BMX competition.

She spent the late 1990s and early years of the 21st Century concentrating on her academic studies, graduating from high school before taking a place at Šiauliai University and completing a degree in Business Management. Her studies done, she was free to return to BMX competition and was given a place on her nation's Olympic team with whom she rode in the 2008 Games in Beijing. In 2009, she won a bronze medal at the UCI BMX World Championships.



Bradley McGee
Bradley McGee was born in Sydney, Australia on this day in 1976 and became his nation's most successful male cyclist alongside Cadel Evans. His long string of wins began in 1993 with four Junior and Under-19 National titles followed by another six, two Commonwealth Games gold medals and an Under-19 3000m World Record (3'19.878") the next year. In 1995, competing at Elite level, he took two more National and one World Championship titles on the track.

Bradley McGee, 2005 Tour de France
(image credit: GSL CC BY-SA 2.5) 

More National titles came in 1997 along with a new Australian Hour record at 50.052km, then two more Commonwealth Games golds in 1998. In 1999, he began to make a name for himself in stage races by winning the prologue at the Tour de Normandie and the prologue and Stage 10 at the Tour de l'Avenir. In 2002, he won the Points Competition at the Critérium du Dauphiné, the World Individual Pursuit Championship, another Commonwealth gold and Stage 7 at the Tour de France. He won the prologue of the Tour a year later and wore the yellow jersey for three days.

2004 saw him win his first Olympic gold, having won bronze in 1996 (2) and 2000 (1), along with 1st place overall at the Route du Sud and 8th overall at the Giro d'Italia, in which he won the prologue and wore the maglia rosa for three days. He won the Points Classification at the Tour de Suisse in 2005 and wore the race leader's golden jersey for four days at the Vuelta a Espana. His last major victory was a gold medal in the Team Pursuit race at the UCI Track Cycling World Cup Classics, then he retired at the end of the season.


Jan Ghyselinck, born on this day in 1988 in Tielt, Belgium, is a rider who showed enormous promise as an amateur when he won the Giro della Toscana Juniors, Ronde van Vlaanderen Juniors, U23 Ronde van Vlaanderen, two Junior and one Under-23 National Time Trial Championships. He then turned professional with HTC-Highroad, a team with a reputation for seeking out and developing future stars, in 2010. Originally signed up as a neo-pro, wins at Mandel - Leie - Schelde in 2010 and a string of good results earned him a full professional contract with the team for 2011. Highroad folded at the end of the 2011 season due to problems with sponsorship, causing the riders to look to other teams - Cofidis confirmed that they had signed him in September that year, and early in 2012 he finished fourth at the Dwars door Vlaanderen. He remained with the team through 2013, but his contract was not renewed for 2014 and he has moved to the Pro Continental Wanty-Groupe Gobert outfit.

Clara Hughes
(image credit: Tabercil CC BY-SA 2.0)

On this day in 2010 Clara Hughes - the only Canadian athlete to have won medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics and one of the most successful Canadian cyclists of all time - announced her retirement from speed skating. She remains a professional cyclist and, at the age of 38, won countless new fans with a fantastic solo breakaway at the 2011 World Road Race Championship in Copenhagen, considered by many to have been the highlight of the competition.


Stefan Steinweg, born in Dortmund, Germany on this day in 1969, won his first World Championship in 1989 in the Points Race. The next came in 1991 with the Amateur Team Pursuit and was followed by a gold medal in the same event at the Olympics the following year. Since then, he has won two World Madison Championships riding alongside Erich Weispfennig and won ten criterium races on the road.


Leon Vandaele was born on this day in 1933 in Ruddervoorde, Belgium. As a rider who excelled in one day races, his greatest results were victories at the Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne in 1954 and 1961, the Omloop van het Houtland in 1956, the Kampioenschap van Vlaanderen in 1956, 1957 and 1958 and, greatest of all, Paris-Roubaix in 1958. He died on the 30th of April, 2000.


On this day in 2008, Matt Manger-Lynch was killed when he collided with a car during the Tour da Chicago alleycat race. His death, which sparked several discussions on radio, television and the Internet, was partly responsible for bringing alleycat racing - unofficial urban events - to widespread attention, having previously been known only to the bike messengers who originally organised them and to a few "underground" cycling clubs.


Other births: Frank Brazier (Australia, 1934); Héctor Mellado (Chile, 1925); Vera Hohlfeld (Germany, 1972); Bernardo Alfonsel (Spain, 1954); Fujio Ito (Japan, 1945); Helge Hansen (Denmark, 1925); John Watters (Australia, 1955).

Daily Cycling Facts 27.09.2013

Clara Hughes

Hughes at the Thüringen Rundfahrt, 2012

Born in Winnipeg, Canada on this day in 1972, Clara Hughes - in common with so many other riders - began her career as an athlete in speed skating, which she took up at the age of 16 after seeing Gaétan Boucher win gold at the 1988 Olympic Games. A year later she started cycling; only three years later, in 1992, she became National Road Race Champion. In 1994 she won the Women's Challenge, one of the hardest and most prestigious events in the sport, then in 1995 she was fourth overall at the Tour de France Féminin and won the National Individual Time Trial Championship and in 1996 she won bronze medals in the Road Race and the Individual Time Trial at the Olympics.

Hughes took a hiatus from cycling and returned to speed skating as the 1998 Winter Olympics approached, concentrating on it for several years and winning more Olympic medals - she thus became the second woman and one of only four athletes to have won medals in both the Summer and Winter Games, and in 2006 became the only athlete to have won more than one medal at both Games. In 2005, she set a new 10,000m World Record at 14'19.73" - it has since been beaten, but remains a Canadian record at the time of writing. Following the 2006 Winter Games, she took inspiration from fellow speed skater Joey Cheek who had donated his gold medal to Right To Play and gave $10,000 of her own money to the humanitarian organisation.

Hughes at the 2012 Olympics

At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Hughes worked as a cycling commentator for CBC. This inspired her to make a return to cycling, which she did in 2010; less than a year later at the PanAmerican Games she won the Road Race with an advantage of 1'18" and the Individual Time Trial with 28", then the National Individual Time Trial Championship by 28". She also won the Tour of the Gila and La Visite Chrono du Gatineau, then came fifth at the World Individual Time Trial Championship, but for many fans her most impressive achievement was her long solo breakaway at the World Road Race Championship, enlivening a race that many found otherwise boring. Having won La Flèche Wallonne and another National ITT Championship in 2012, Hughes qualified for the Olympics and was fifth in the Individual Time Trial.

Alongside Cindy Klassen, another speed skater from Winnipeg, Hughes is the joint most successful Canadian Olympian of all time. In recognition of her athletic achievements and humanitarian activities she has been awarded the Order of Manitoba, is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has two honourary degrees from the Universities of Manitoba and New Brunswick.

Wouter Weylandt

Wouter Weylandt, 27.09.1984 - 09.05.2011

Born in Ghent, Belgium on this day in 1984, Wouter Weylandt scored some good results prior to 2004, then that year came third at the Under-23 Paris-Roubaix and earned himself a trainee contract with QuickStep-Davitamon. In 2005, riding with a full professional contract from the same team, he won the GP Briek Schotte after starting the season with mononucleosis; then in 2006 the Points competition at the Tour of Poland. In 2007 he won seven races and in 2008, having been third at Gent-Wevelgem, he rode the Vuelta a Espana - his first Grand Tour, where he won Stage 17. The following year started with a tragedy when his close friend Frederiek Nilf, aged just 21, died of a heart attack while he slept between stages at the Tour of Qatar; later in the season Weylandt nearly repeated his earlier Vuelta success when he was second on Stage 4 but he left the race after Stage 16, then in 2010 he won Stage 3 at the Giro d'Italia.

He was, in the opinion of his fellow riders and fans, a rider destined for greatness; if not a Grand Tour victory, at least a Grand Tour Points competition. When he signed for 2011 to LeopardTrek - a new team consisting of some of the most promising young riders in the world, including Andy Schleck who was hotly tipped to win the Tour de France that year, some of the established greats including Fabian Cancellara, and some highly experienced older riders such as the legendary Jens Voigt - it seemed that there really couldn't be a better place for a rider such as him to develop his talents and learn the fine art of winning bicycle races.

On the 9th of May, at the Giro d'Italia which just one year previously had been disrupted when riders protested against poor safety conditions, he was killed as he descended the Passo del Bocco at 80kph. According to Manuel Antonio Cardoso, who was behind him at the time, Weylandt had looked over his shoulder to see if other riders were catching him and lost control, hitting a guardrail before being catapulted 10m across the road and landing heavily on his face. The race's chief medical officer was nearby in a car and saw the accident take place: "he was already and clearly dead upon impact. I had never seen such a thing before, such a sudden death," he later told reporters. The impact when he hit the wall would have been sufficient to end his career even had he have fallen there - an autopsy found that his left leg had been so badly damaged it would have required amputation. His death was attributed to skull and facial injuries and massive damage to his internal organs - it was noted that the impact when he hit the road had stopped his heart instantaneously and there would not have been time for him to suffer. His girlfriend, An-Sophie, was five months pregnant when he died.

Pedro Horrillo
It's often said - with some truth - that academic qualifications are few and far between in the men's professional peloton (the same is very much not true among the women: since few female cyclists will ever make a living from their sport, few ever considered it as a future occupation and only took it up while at university). Pedro Horillo, born in Eibar on this day in 1974, is a retired Basque cyclist and an exception: he had already earned a degree in philosophy from Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, the Basque national university, when he became a professional rider with Vitalicio Seguros-Grupo Generali in 1998 and after his retirement he became well-respected for his intelligently-written articles on cycling and doping.

Horrillo at the 2009 Tour of California

Horrillo spent his first three years with Vitalico Seguros and, in his second, rode in the Tour de France for the first time and scored a handful of decent stage finishes for a debutant, including 18th on Stage 1, then came 135th overall. In 2001 he went to Mapei-QuickStep and finished four stages at the Vuelta a Espana in the top ten; then in 2002, with the same team, he won Stage 2 at Paris-Nice and was third on Stage 13 at the Vuelta. The following year he went to Rabobank, with which he would spend the remainder of his career; he won Stage 3 at the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya that year and Stage 1 at the Sachsen Tour the next. While he had many more good results (and rode the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta in 2007), they would be the final victories of his career.

He retired in 2009 following a horrific crash at the Giro in which he hit a railing and plunged over it into a ravine, falling 60m and suffering a broken neck, knee and thigh as well as a punctured lung. He was unconscious when the medics got to him, then awoke while in the ambulance and was placed in an induced coma. The following day - when riders mounted a protest at safety conditions in the race, just as they would the following year and again following the death of Wouter Weylandt in 2009 - he was brought back to consciousness for scans which, thankfully, revealed no brain injuries. He spent the next five weeks in hospital, then made a full recovery but never took part in another race, finding that he was no longer able to perform at his previous level. However, he still follows cycling and is especially keen on the Hell of the North, Paris-Roubaix: ""If I could only have ridden one race as a pro, that would have been it - and if possible, in the rain because that's the real Roubaix when it rains," he says.

Beth Heiden
Elizabeth Lee Heiden Reid, known as Beth Heiden, was born in Madison, Wisconsin on this day in 1959 and is probably the only World Road Race Champion who wasn't really a cyclist. She played tennis and soccer while at school, then also took up running in 1975 and set a national record for her age group that same year. She was also a speed skater and, the following year, qualified for the Olympics where she was 11th in the 3,000m. In 1979, she became World Speed Skating Champion after winning all four of the constituent races.

Left to right: Sara Doctor, Connie Carpenter, Beth Heiden

Many cyclists have competed in speed skating in the past, with Marianne Vos and Clara Hughes being perhaps the two most famous examples; but invariably they concentrated on cycling after discovering their proficiency at it. Heiden did not: she took up cycling as part of her cross-training preparation for the speed skating events at the 1980 Winter Olympics and never fell in love with the bike, nor became a true cycling, like Vos and Hughes did - in fact, when she became the first ever American to win the UCI World Road Race Championships in 1980, beating Greg Lemond by three years, she did so almost as an afterthought. Having done so, she returned to speed skating, then took up cross-country skiing and never went back to cycling again. Who knows what she might have achieved if she had done?


Born in Australia on this day in 1974, Nigel Barley fell three metres from a roof and landed on a hammer; aged 26, he was a paraplegic. After spending a year learning what he could do - and techniques to do what he couldn't - he decided to take up handcycling, then two years later set a new handcycle World 24-hour record when he covered 462km; three years after that he rode the 4,437km between Perth and Sydney. In 2009 he won the Road Race and the Individual Time Trial at the National Championships. Silver and bronze at the 2011 World Cup and several good results during the first half of 2012, as part of the World Cup and the Paracycling Tour, qualified him for the Paralympic Games in London, where he won silver in the Individual Time Trial.

Alfred Haemerlinck, the most successful
rider you've never heard of

Alfred Haemerlinck, born in Assenede, Belgium on this day in 1905, won Stages 1 and 6 at the Tour de France in 1931, which earned him the maillot jaune for a single day. Those two stages were the most prestigious victories of his decade-long professional career, but he is chiefly remembered for the enormous number of smaller, less-well-known races that he entered and won: according to some apparently reliable estimates, as many as 493 - higher than some estimates for Eddy Merckx.

Benoni Beheyt, born in Zwijnaarde, Belgium on this day in 1940, won Gent-Wevelgem and the World Road Race Championship in 1963 and Stage 22a at the Tour de France, the General Classification at the Ronde van België and the National Road Race Championship in 1964.

Ángel Casero, born in Albalat dels Tarongers on this day in 1972, was Spanish Road Race Champion in 1998 and 1999. In 2000 he was second overall at the Vuelta a Espana, then in 2001 he won it.

Giovanni Fidanza, born in Bergamo, Italy on this day in 1965, won the overall Points competition at the Giro d'Italia and Stage 20 at the Tour de France in 1989, then Stage 2 at the Giro in 1990.

Heinz Wengler, born in Germany on this day in 1912, shared victory for Stage 17b (a 37km road race) at the 1937 Tour de France with the Adolph Braeckeveldt. His nickname was Herr Schmal on account of his diminutive stature and five years later, when he was 30, he was killed in action on the Eastern Front.

Enrico Zaina, born in Brescia on this day in 1967, won Stage 17 at the Vuelta a Espana in 1992, Stage 11 at the Giro d'Italia in 1995 and Stages 9, 20 and second place overall at the 1996 Giro.

Other cyclists born on this day: Raúl Saavedra (Colombia, 1969); Cosme Saavedra (Argentina, 1901, died 1967); Chartchai Juntrat (Thailand, 1951); Alexey Kolessov (Kazakhstan, 1984); Mauno Uusivirta (Finland, 1948); Rebecca Henderson (Australia, 1991); Mitsuteru Tanaka (Japan, 1971); Michael Andrew (Malaysia, 1943); Kris Gerits (Belgium, 1971).

Daily Cycling Facts 08.06.2013

Louise Jones
Louise Jones, who was born in Chatham, England on this day in 1963 but competes for Wales on account of her Welsh ancestry, won the very first gold medal ever awarded for a women's cycling event at the Commonwealth Games when she won the Sprint - the first time a women' cycling race was included in the Games.

In 1998, she won a silver medal in the National Road Race Championships. Two years later she retired from racing and took on a new job as a UCI commissaire, having performed the same role for British Cycling since 1994.

Lorne Atkinson
Lorne Charles Atkinson, born in Vancouver on this day in 1921, was the son of a Scottish professional cyclist and coach who encouraged his son to develop an interest in cycling and supported him through the early years of his career. During that era, six-day meets formed the core of North American racing and Lorne earned his nickname - Ace - after a newspaper headlined a report with "City ace triumphs in Province Cup." From 1948, he began to compete internationally and represented Canada in the 1,000 time trial, individual and team road races and Pursuit at the Olympic Games in London that year, coming 15th in the TT at Herne Hill Velodrome.

Lorne Atkinson

After the Second World War when the USA, relatively untouched by the conflict in comparison to Europe, began to rise as the world's dominant superpower; entering a new Golden Age in which housing and motorised transport became cheaper than ever before. Canada took full advantage, and for the first time anybody who wanted a car, and was able to drive one, could have one. North American cycling suffered, and has only began to recover in the last two decades. However, whereas the majority of native cyclists lived out their careers in near-ubiquitous obscurity, Atkinson' passionate championing of the bike and bike sport made him more famous than ever. As races closed down across the continent, he set up new ones; tirelessly badgering potential sponsors and recruiting organisers. To many, he must have seemed a strange eccentric; but it's probably not stretching things too much to say that he personally kept the sport alive in the USA and Canada during the 1950s and 1960s.

Atkinson also supported cycling at a grass-roots, local level - Ace Cycles, the bike shop he set up in Vancouver an ran for sixty years (the company still exists) became far more than simply a place to go and drool over the latest ultra-light European exotica; it was also where young cyclists went to meet others, chat and exchange ideas. Lorne himself was often on hand to give out advice on bikes, components, tactics and cycling in general, and was well-known for his willingness to cut deals with youngsters who showed potential. By doing so, not only did he save North American cycling, he helped feed it with new talent.

Travis Meyer
Travis Meyer, younger brother of Cameron, was born in Viveash, Australia on this day in 1989. Making his race debut in 2005, Meyer won second place in the national Club Championships individual time trial, then from 2006 began adding numerous victories at both the National and World Junior Track Championships and in 2008 won the Tours of Berlin and Wellington on the road. That earned him a place at the Australian Institute of Sport. A year later, having gained a professional contract with Garmin-Transitions, he became National Road Race Champion.

In 2011, Meyer announced that he had signed to the new Australian ProTour team GreenEDGE. With their backing, he's likely to be a fixture in the top echelons of professional cycling for ar least another decade.

Edouard Muller

Edouard Muller
Edouard Muller, who was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on this day in 1919, picked up a few good results as an amateur before the Second World War and earned a contract with Alcyon-Dunlop in 1942. The team was not as strong as it had been before and in the years immediately after the First World War, when it was home to such cycling luminaries as Eugène Christophe, Gustave Garrigou, Henri Pélissier, Louis Trousellier and Jean Alvoine (all of whom were riding for the team in 1912), but it remained powerful and Muller rode alongside Emile Idée, who won both the Critérium International and the GP des Nations that year.

He would remain with them for eight seasons, always a domestique but grabbing a few respectable results along the way, as was the case when he won the Tour de l'Ouest in 1947. In his tenth professional season he beat Hugo Koblet (who, to be fair, didn't really need the stage and was saving himself for the time trial the next day), Fausto Coppi (who was in mourning for his brother and not riding at anything like his usual level) and Gino Bartali (who was getting on a bit) and became the surprise winner of Stage 6 at the 1951 Tour de France, the first year that the race ever climbed Mont Ventoux.


On this day in 2008, it was announced that Clara Hughes would be honoured with a star on the Canadian Walk of Fame in Toronto.

Ben Hermans, born in Hasselt on this day in 1986, became Junior Time Trial Champion of Belgium in 2004; then got on with his career in the time-honoured Belgian way of entering plenty of his nation's infamously races in order to put some iron in his legs. It worked - in 2010, he was offered a contract with RadioShack, and at the end of 2011 he was one of the RadioShack riders to survive the cull that made room for incoming riders from Leopard Trek. In 2012, he was 12th in Stage 12 at the Giro d'Italia.

Ad Tak, born in Nieuwe Gastel on this day in 1953, represented the Netherlands at the Olympics in 1976 and came 70th on the road race. A professional between 1980 and 1986, he got onto the podium at a few criterium races and won a stage at the Zes van Rijn en Gouwe in 1985, the last year it was held. His amateur career had been far more successful with several criterium victories, a stage win at the 1975 Österreich-Rundfahrt, second place for Stage 10 at the Tour of Britain (or the Milk Race, as it was called in those days) in 1976 and, also in 1975, the National Amateur Road Race Championship.

Other births: Guillermo Gutiérrez (Mexico, 1964); Andrey Minashkin (USSR, 1976); Gary West (Australia, 1960); Rubén Priede (Argentina, 1966); Mick Bennett (Great Britain, 1949); Hwang Chang-Sik (South Korea, 1943); Luis Ángel de los Santos (Uruguay, 1926); Joseph Polidano (Malta, 1940); Walter Bucher (Switzerland, 1926); Geoff Skaines (Australia, 1953).

Daily Cycling Facts 24.02.2013

Vilma Rimšaitė

Vilma Rimšaitė

Vilma Rimšaitė, born in Lithuania's fourth largest city Šiauliai on this day in 1983, seemed destined for a life in music during her childhood when she earned a place at a specialist music school and won awards for her singing. At the age of six, she began to ride BMX and, spurred on by her BMX enthusiast father, soon demonstrated she was equally as talented at that - just three years later she took part in the European Championships, the continent's most prestigious BMX competition.

She spent the late 1990s and early years of the 21st Century concentrating on her academic studies, graduating from high school before taking a place at Šiauliai University and completing a degree in Business Management. Her studies done, she was free to return to BMX competition and was given a place on her nation's Olympic team with whom she rode in the 2008 Games in Beijing. In 2009, she won a bronze medal at the UCI BMX World Championships.


Bradley McGee
Bradley McGee was born in Sydney, Australia on this day in 1976 and became his nation's most successful male cyclist alongside Cadel Evans. His long string of wins began in 1993 with four Junior and Under-19 National titles followed by another six, two Commonwealth Games gold medals and an Under-19 3000m World Record (3'19.878") the next year. In 1995, competing at Elite level, he took two more National and one World Championship titles on the track.

Bradley McGee, 2005 Tour de France
(image credit: GSL CC BY-SA 2.5) 

More National titles came in 1997 along with a new Australian Hour record at 50.052km, then two more Commonwealth Games golds in 1998. In 1999, he began to make a name for himself in stage races by winning the prologue at the Tour de Normandie and the prologue and Stage 10 at the Tour de l'Avenir. In 2002, he won the Points Competition at the Critérium du Dauphiné, the World Individual Pursuit Championship, another Commonwealth gold and Stage 7 at the Tour de France. He won the prologue of the Tour a year later and wore the yellow jersey for three days.

2004 saw him win his first Olympic gold, having won bronze in 1996 (2) and 2000 (1), along with 1st place overall at the Route du Sud and 8th overall at the Giro d'Italia, in which he won the prologue and wore the maglia rosa for three days. He won the Points Classification at the Tour de Suisse in 2005 and wore the race leader's golden jersey for four days at the Vuelta a Espana. His last major victory was a gold medal in the Team Pursuit race at the UCI Track Cycling World Cup Classics, then he retired at the end of the season.

Jan Ghyselinck, born on this day in 1988 in Tielt, Belgium, is a rider who showed enormous promise as an amateur when he won the Giro della Toscana Juniors, Ronde van Vlaanderen Juniors, U23 Ronde van Vlaanderen, two Junior and one Under-23 National Time Trial Championships. He then turned professional with HTC-Highroad, a team with a reputation for seeking out and developing future stars, in 2010. Originally signed up as a neo-pro, wins at Mandel - Leie - Schelde in 2010 and a string of good results earned him a full professional contract with the team for 2011. Highroad folded at the end of the 2011 season due to problems with sponsorship, causing the riders to look to other teams - Cofidis confirmed that they had signed Ghyselinck in September that year and he remained with the team as the 2013 season got under way. In 2013, he was fourth at the Dwars door Vlaanderen.

Clara Hughes
(image credit: Tabercil CC BY-SA 2.0)

On this day in 2010 Clara Hughes - the only Canadian athlete to have won medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics and one of the most successful Canadian cyclists of all time - announced her retirement from speed skating. She remains a professional cyclist and, at the age of 38, won countless new fans with a fantastic solo breakaway at the 2011 World Road Race Championship in Copenhagen, considered by many to have been the highlight of the competition.

Stefan Steinweg, born in Dortmund, Germany on this day in 1969, won his first World Championship in 1989 in the Points Race. The next came in 1991 with the Amateur Team Pursuit and was followed by a gold medal in the same event at the Olympics the following year. Since then, he has won two World Madison Championships riding alongside Erich Weispfennig and won ten criterium races on the road.

Leon Vandaele was born on this day in 1933 in Ruddervoorde, Belgium. As a rider who excelled in one day races, his greatest results were victories at the Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne in 1954 and 1961, the Omloop van het Houtland in 1956, the Kampioenschap van Vlaanderen in 1956, 1957 and 1958 and, greatest of all, Paris-Roubaix in 1958. He died on the 30th of April, 2000.

On this day in 2008, Matt Manger-Lynch was killed when he collided with a car during the Tour da Chicago alleycat race. His death, which sparked several discussions on radio, television and the Internet, was partly responsible for bringing alleycat racing - unofficial urban events - to widespread attention, having previously been known only to the bike messengers who originally organised them and to a few "underground" cycling clubs.

Other births: Frank Brazier (Australia, 1934); Héctor Mellado (Chile, 1925); Vera Hohlfeld (Germany, 1972); Bernardo Alfonsel (Spain, 1954); Fujio Ito (Japan, 1945); Helge Hansen (Denmark, 1925); John Watters (Australia, 1955).

Daily Cycling Facts 27.09.12

Clara Hughes

Hughes at the Thüringen Rundfahrt, 2012

Born in Winnipeg, Canada on this day in 1972, Clara Hughes - in common with so many other riders - began her career as an athlete in speed skating, which she took up at the age of 16 after seeing Gaétan Boucher win gold at the 1988 Olympic Games. A year later she started cycling; only three years later, in 1992, she became National Road Race Champion. In 1994 she won the Women's Challenge, one of the hardest and most prestigious events in the sport, then in 1995 she was fourth overall at the Tour de France Féminin and won the National Individual Time Trial Championship and in 1996 she won bronze medals in the Road Race and the Individual Time Trial at the Olympics.

Hughes took a hiatus from cycling and returned to speed skating as the 1998 Winter Olympics approached, concentrating on it for several years and winning more Olympic medals - she thus became the second woman and one of only four athletes to have won medals in both the Summer and Winter Games, and in 2006 became the only athlete to have won more than one medal at both Games. In 2005, she set a new 10,000m World Record at 14'19.73" - it has since been beaten, but remains a Canadian record at the time of writing. Following the 2006 Winter Games, she took inspiration from fellow speed skater Joey Cheek who had donated his gold medal to Right To Play and gave $10,000 of her own money to the humanitarian organisation.

Hughes at the 2012 Olympics

At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, Hughes worked as a cycling commentator for CBC. This inspired her to make a return to cycling, which she did in 2010; less than a year later at the PanAmerican Games she won the Road Race with an advantage of 1'18" and the Individual Time Trial with 28", then the National Individual Time Trial Championship by 28". She also won the Tour of the Gila and La Visite Chrono du Gatineau, then came fifth at the World Individual Time Trial Championship, but for many fans her most impressive achievement was her long solo breakaway at the World Road Race Championship, enlivening a race that many found otherwise boring. Having won La Flèche Wallonne and another National ITT Championship in 2012, Hughes qualified for the Olympics and was fifth in the Individual Time Trial.

Alongside Cindy Klassen, another speed skater from Winnipeg, Hughes is the joint most successful Canadian Olympian of all time. In recognition of her athletic achievements and humanitarian activities she has been awarded the Order of Manitoba, is an Officer of the Order of Canada and has two honourary degrees from the Universities of Manitoba and New Brunswick.

Wouter Weylandt

Wouter Weylandt, 27.09.1984 - 09.05.2011

Born in Ghent, Belgium on this day in 1984, Wouter Weylandt scored some good results prior to 2004, then that year came third at the Under-23 Paris-Roubaix and earned himself a trainee contract with QuickStep-Davitamon. In 2005, riding with a full professional contract from the same team, he won the GP Briek Schotte after starting the season with mononucleosis; then in 2006 the Points competition at the Tour of Poland. In 2007 he won seven races and in 2008, having been third at Gent-Wevelgem, he rode the Vuelta a Espana - his first Grand Tour, where he won Stage 17. The following year started with a tragedy when his close friend Frederiek Nilf, aged just 21, died of a heart attack while he slept between stages at the Tour of Qatar; later in the season Weylandt nearly repeated his earlier Vuelta success when he was second on Stage 4 but he left the race after Stage 16, then in 2010 he won Stage 3 at the Giro d'Italia.

He was, in the opinion of his fellow riders and fans, a rider destined for greatness; if not a Grand Tour victory, at least a Grand Tour Points competition. When he signed for 2011 to LeopardTrek - a new team consisting of some of the most promising young riders in the world, including Andy Schleck who was hotly tipped to win the Tour de France that year, some of the established greats including Fabian Cancellara, and some highly experienced older riders such as the legendary Jens Voigt - it seemed that there really couldn't be a better place for a rider such as him to develop his talents and learn the fine art of winning bicycle races.

On the 9th of May, at the Giro d'Italia which just one year previously had been disrupted when riders protested against poor safety conditions, he was killed as he descended the Passo del Bocco at 80kph. According to Manuel Antonio Cardoso, who was behind him at the time, Weylandt had looked over his shoulder to see if other riders were catching him and lost control, hitting a guardrail before being catapulted 10m across the road and landing heavily on his face. The race's chief medical officer was nearby in a car and saw the accident take place: "he was already and clearly dead upon impact. I had never seen such a thing before, such a sudden death," he later told reporters. The impact when he hit the wall would have been sufficient to end his career even had he have fallen there - an autopsy found that his left leg had been so badly damaged it would have required amputation. His death was attributed to skull and facial injuries and massive damage to his internal organs - it was noted that the impact when he hit the road had stopped his heart instantaneously and there would not have been time for him to suffer. His girlfriend, An-Sophie, was five months pregnant when he died.

Pedro Horrillo
It's often said - with some truth - that academic qualifications are few and far between in the men's professional peloton (the same is very much not true among the women: since few female cyclists will ever make a living from their sport, few ever considered it as a future occupation and only took it up while at university). Pedro Horillo, born in Eibar on this day in 1974, is a retired Basque cyclist and an exception: he had already earned a degree in philosophy from Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, the Basque national university, when he became a professional rider with Vitalicio Seguros-Grupo Generali in 1998 and after his retirement he became well-respected for his intelligently-written articles on cycling and doping.

Horrillo at the 2009 Tour of California

Horrillo spent his first three years with Vitalico Seguros and, in his second, rode in the Tour de France for the first time and scored a handful of decent stage finishes for a debutant, including 18th on Stage 1, then came 135th overall. In 2001 he went to Mapei-QuickStep and finished four stages at the Vuelta a Espana in the top ten; then in 2002, with the same team, he won Stage 2 at Paris-Nice and was third on Stage 13 at the Vuelta. The following year he went to Rabobank, with which he would spend the remainder of his career; he won Stage 3 at the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya that year and Stage 1 at the Sachsen Tour the next. While he had many more good results (and rode the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta in 2007), they would be the final victories of his career.

He retired in 2009 following a horrific crash at the Giro in which he hit a railing and plunged over it into a ravine, falling 60m and suffering a broken neck, knee and thigh as well as a punctured lung. He was unconscious when the medics got to him, then awoke while in the ambulance and was placed in an induced coma. The following day - when riders mounted a protest at safety conditions in the race, just as they would the following year and again following the death of Wouter Weylandt in 2009 - he was brought back to consciousness for scans which, thankfully, revealed no brain injuries. He spent the next five weeks in hospital, then made a full recovery but never took part in another race, finding that he was no longer able to perform at his previous level. However, he still follows cycling and is especially keen on the Hell of the North, Paris-Roubaix: ""If I could only have ridden one race as a pro, that would have been it - and if possible, in the rain because that's the real Roubaix when it rains," he says.

Beth Heiden
Elizabeth Lee Heiden Reid, known as Beth Heiden, was born in Madison, Wisconsin on this day in 1959 and is probably the only World Road Race Champion who wasn't really a cyclist. She played tennis and soccer while at school, then also took up running in 1975 and set a national record for her age group that same year. She was also a speed skater and, the following year, qualified for the Olympics where she was 11th in the 3,000m. In 1979, she became World Speed Skating Champion after winning all four of the constituent races.

Left to right: Sara Doctor, Connie Carpenter, Beth Heiden

Many cyclists have competed in speed skating in the past, with Marianne Vos and Clara Hughes being perhaps the two most famous examples; but invariably they concentrated on cycling after discovering their proficiency at it. Heiden did not: she took up cycling as part of her cross-training preparation for the speed skating events at the 1980 Winter Olympics and never fell in love with the bike, nor became a true cycling, like Vos and Hughes did - in fact, when she became the first ever American to win the UCI World Road Race Championships in 1980, beating Greg Lemond by three years, she did so almost as an afterthought. Having done so, she returned to speed skating, then took up cross-country skiing and never went back to cycling again. Who knows what she might have achieved if she had done?


Born in Australia on this day in 1974, Nigel Barley fell three metres from a roof and landed on a hammer; aged 26, he was a paraplegic. After spending a year learning what he could do - and techniques to do what he couldn't - he decided to take up handcycling, then two years later set a new handcycle World 24-hour record when he covered 462km; three years after that he rode the 4,437km between Perth and Sydney. In 2009 he won the Road Race and the Individual Time Trial at the National Championships. Silver and bronze at the 2011 World Cup and several good results during the first half of 2012, as part of the World Cup and the Paracycling Tour, qualified him for the Paralympic Games in London, where he won silver in the Individual Time Trial.

Alfred Haemerlinck, the most successful
rider you've never heard of

Alfred Haemerlinck, born in Assenede, Belgium on this day in 1905, won Stages 1 and 6 at the Tour de France in 1931, which earned him the maillot jaune for a single day. Those two stages were the most prestigious victories of his decade-long professional career, but he is chiefly remembered for the enormous number of smaller, less-well-known races that he entered and won: according to some apparently reliable estimates, as many as 493 - higher than some estimates for Eddy Merckx.

Benoni Beheyt, born in Zwijnaarde, Belgium on this day in 1940, won Gent-Wevelgem and the World Road Race Championship in 1963 and Stage 22a at the Tour de France, the General Classification at the Ronde van België and the National Road Race Championship in 1964.

Ángel Casero, born in Albalat dels Tarongers on this day in 1972, was Spanish Road Race Champion in 1998 and 1999. In 2000 he was second overall at the Vuelta a Espana, then in 2001 he won it.

Giovanni Fidanza, born in Bergamo, Italy on this day in 1965, won the overall Points competition at the Giro d'Italia and Stage 20 at the Tour de France in 1989, then Stage 2 at the Giro in 1990.

Heinz Wengler, born in Germany on this day in 1912, shared victory for Stage 17b (a 37km road race) at the 1937 Tour de France with the Adolph Braeckeveldt. His nickname was Herr Schmal on account of his diminutive stature and five years later, when he was 30, he was killed in action on the Eastern Front.

Enrico Zaina, born in Brescia on this day in 1967, won Stage 17 at the Vuelta a Espana in 1992, Stage 11 at the Giro d'Italia in 1995 and Stages 9, 20 and second place overall at the 1996 Giro.

Other cyclists born on this day: Raúl Saavedra (Colombia, 1969); Cosme Saavedra (Argentina, 1901, died 1967); Chartchai Juntrat (Thailand, 1951); Alexey Kolessov (Kazakhstan, 1984); Mauno Uusivirta (Finland, 1948); Rebecca Henderson (Australia, 1991); Mitsuteru Tanaka (Japan, 1971); Michael Andrew (Malaysia, 1943); Kris Gerits (Belgium, 1971).

Daily Cycling Facts 08.06.12

Louise Jones
Louise Jones, who was born in Chatham, England on this day in 1963 but competes for Wales on account of her Welsh ancestry, won the very first gold medal ever awarded for a women's cycling event at the Commonwealth Games when she won the Sprint - the first time a women' cycling race was included in the Games.

In 1998, she won a silver medal in the National Road Race Championships. Two years later she retired from racing and took on a new job as a UCI commissaire, having performed the same role for British Cycling since 1994.

Lorne Atkinson
Lorne Charles Atkinson, born in Vancouver on this day in 1921, was the son of a Scottish professional cyclist and coach who encouraged his son to develop an interest in cycling and supported him through the early years of his career. During that era, six-day meets formed the core of North American racing and Lorne earned his nickname - Ace - after a newspaper headlined a report with "City ace triumphs in Province Cup." From 1948, he began to compete internationally and represented Canada in the 1,000 time trial, individual and team road races and Pursuit at the Olympic Games in London that year, coming 15th in the TT at Herne Hill Velodrome.

Lorne Atkinson

After the Second World War when the USA, relatively untouched by the conflict in comparison to Europe, began to rise as the world's dominant superpower; entering a new Golden Age in which housing and motorised transport became cheaper than ever before. Canada took full advantage, and for the first time anybody who wanted a car, and was able to drive one, could have one. North American cycling suffered, and has only began to recover in the last two decades. However, whereas the majority of native cyclists lived out their careers in near-ubiquitous obscurity, Atkinson' passionate championing of the bike and bike sport made him more famous than ever. As races closed down across the continent, he set up new ones; tirelessly badgering potential sponsors and recruiting organisers. To many, he must have seemed a strange eccentric; but it's probably not stretching things too much to say that he personally kept the sport alive in the USA and Canada during the 1950s and 1960s.

Atkinson also supported cycling at a grass-roots, local level - Ace Cycles, the bike shop he set up in Vancouver an ran for sixty years (the company still exists) became far more than simply a place to go and drool over the latest ultra-light European exotica; it was also where young cyclists went to meet others, chat and exchange ideas. Lorne himself was often on hand to give out advice on bikes, components, tactics and cycling in general, and was well-known for his willingness to cut deals with youngsters who showed potential. By doing so, not only did he save North American cycling, he helped feed it with new talent.

Travis Meyer
Travis Meyer, younger brother of Cameron, was born in Viveash, Australia on this day in 1989. Making his race debut in 2005, Meyer won second place in the national Club Championships individual time trial, then from 2006 began adding numerous victories at both the National and World Junior Track Championships and in 2008 won the Tours of Berlin and Wellington on the road. That earned him a place at the Australian Institute of Sport. A year later, having gained a professional contract with Garmin-Transitions, he became National Road Race Champion.

In 2011, Meyer announced that he had signed to the new Australian ProTour team GreenEDGE. With their backing, he's likely to be a fixture in the top echelons of professional cycling for ar least another decade.

Edouard Muller

Edouard Muller
Edouard Muller, who was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on this day in 1919, picked up a few good results as an amateur before the Second World War and earned a contract with Alcyon-Dunlop in 1942. The team was not as strong as it had been before and in the years immediately after the First World War, when it was home to such cycling luminaries as Eugène Christophe, Gustave Garrigou, Henri Pélissier, Louis Trousellier and Jean Alvoine (all of whom were riding for the team in 1912), but it remained powerful and Muller rode alongside Emile Idée, who won both the Critérium International and the GP des Nations that year.

He would remain with them for eight seasons, always a domestique but grabbing a few respectable results along the way, as was the case when he won the Tour de l'Ouest in 1947. In his tenth professional season he beat Hugo Koblet (who, to be fair, didn't really need the stage and was saving himself for the time trial the next day), Fausto Coppi (who was in mourning for his brother and not riding at anything like his usual level) and Gino Bartali (who was getting on a bit) and became the surprise winner of Stage 6 at the 1951 Tour de France, the first year that the race ever climbed Mont Ventoux.


On this day in 2008, it was announced that Clara Hughes would be honoured with a star on the Canadian Walk of Fame in Toronto.

Ben Hermans, born in Hasselt on this day in 1986, became Junior Time Trial Champion of Belgium in 2004; then got on with his career in the time-honoured Belgian way of entering plenty of his nation's infamously races in order to put some iron in his legs. It worked - in 2010, he was offered a contract with RadioShack, and at the end of 2011 he was one of the RadioShack riders to survive the cull that made room for incoming riders from Leopard Trek. In 2012, he was 12th in Stage 12 at the Giro d'Italia.

Ad Tak, born in Nieuwe Gastel on this day in 1953, represented the Netherlands at the Olympics in 1976 and came 70th on the road race. A professional between 1980 and 1986, he got onto the podium at a few criterium races and won a stage at the Zes van Rijn en Gouwe in 1985, the last year it was held. His amateur career had been far more successful with several criterium victories, a stage win at the 1975 Österreich-Rundfahrt, second place for Stage 10 at the Tour of Britain (or the Milk Race, as it was called in those days) in 1976 and, also in 1975, the National Amateur Road Race Championship.

Other births: Guillermo Gutiérrez (Mexico, 1964); Andrey Minashkin (USSR, 1976); Gary West (Australia, 1960); Rubén Priede (Argentina, 1966); Mick Bennett (Great Britain, 1949); Hwang Chang-Sik (South Korea, 1943); Luis Ángel de los Santos (Uruguay, 1926); Joseph Polidano (Malta, 1940); Walter Bucher (Switzerland, 1926); Geoff Skaines (Australia, 1953).

Daily Cycling Facts 24.02.12

Vilma Rimšaitė
Vilma Rimšaitė, born in Lithuania's fourth largest city Šiauliai on this day in 1983, seemed destined for a life in music during her childhood when she earned a place at a specialist music school and won awards for her singing. At the age of six, she began to ride BMX and, spurred on by her BMX enthusiast father, soon demonstrated she was equally as talented at that - just three years later she took part in the European Championships, the continent's most prestigious BMX competition.

She spent the late 1990s and early years of the 21st Century concentrating on her academic studies, graduating from high school before taking a place at Šiauliai University and completing a degree in Business Management. Her studies done, she was free to return to BMX competition and was given a place on her nation's Olympic team with whom she rode in the 2008 Games in Beijing. In 2009, she won a bronze medal at the UCI BMX World Championships.


Bradley McGee
Bradley McGee was born in Sydney, Australia on this day in 1976 and became his nation's most successful male cyclist alongside Cadel Evans. His long string of wins began in 1993 with four Junior and Under-19 National titles followed by another six, two Commonwealth Games gold medals and an Under-19 3000m World Record (3'19.878") the next year. In 1995, competing at Elite level, he took two more National and one World Championship titles on the track.

Bradley McGee, 2005 Tour de France
(image credit: GSL CC BY-SA 2.5) 

More National titles came in 1997 along with a new Australian Hour record at 50.052km, then two more Commonwealth Games golds in 1998. In 1999, he began to make a name for himself in stage races by winning the prologue at the Tour de Normandie and the prologue and Stage 10 at the Tour de l'Avenir. In 2002, he won the Points Competition at the Critérium du Dauphiné, the World Individual Pursuit Championship, another Commonwealth gold and Stage 7 at the Tour de France. He won the prologue of the Tour a year later and wore the yellow jersey for three days.

2004 saw him win his first Olympic gold, having won bronze in 1996 (2) and 2000 (1), along with 1st place overall at the Route du Sud and 8th overall at the Giro d'Italia, in which he won the prologue and wore the maglia rosa for three days. He won the Points Classification at the Tour de Suisse in 2005 and wore the race leader's golden jersey for four days at the Vuelta a Espana. His last major victory was a gold medal in the Team Pursuit race at the UCI Track Cycling World Cup Classics, then he retired at the end of the season.

Jan Ghyselinck, born on this day in 1988 in Tielt, Belgium, is a rider who showed enormous promise as an amateur when he won the Giro della Toscana Juniors, Ronde van Vlaanderen Juniors, U23 Ronde van Vlaanderen, two Junior and one Under-23 National Time Trial Championships. He then turned professional with HTC-Highroad, a team with a reputation for seeking out and developing future stars, in 2010. Originally signed up as a neo-pro, wins at Mandel - Leie - Schelde in 2010 and a string of good results earned him a full professional contract with the team for 2011. Highroad folded at the end of the 2011 season due to problems with sponsorship, causing the riders to look to other teams - Cofidis confirmed that they had signed Ghyselinck in September that year.

Clara Hughes
(image credit: Tabercil CC BY-SA 2.0)

On this day in 2010 Clara Hughes - the only Canadian athlete to have won medals in both the Summer and Winter Olympics and one of the most successful Canadian cyclists of all time - announced her retirement from speed skating. She remains a professional cyclist and, at the age of 38, won countless new fans with a fantastic solo breakaway at the 2011 World Road Race Championship in Copenhagen, considered by many to have been the highlight of the competition.

Stefan Steinweg, born in Dortmund, Germany on this day in 1969, won his first World Championship in 1989 in the Points Race. The next came in 1991 with the Amateur Team Pursuit and was followed by a gold medal in the same event at the Olympics the following year. Since then, he has won two World Madison Championships riding alongside Erich Weispfennig and won ten criterium races on the road.

Leon Vandaele was born on this day in 1933 in Ruddervoorde, Belgium. As a rider who excelled in one day races, his greatest results were victories at the Kuurne–Brussels–Kuurne in 1954 and 1961, the Omloop van het Houtland in 1956, the Kampioenschap van Vlaanderen in 1956, 1957 and 1958 and, greatest of all, Paris-Roubaix in 1958. He died on the 30th of April, 2000.

On this day in 2008, Matt Manger-Lynch was killed when he collided with a car during the Tour da Chicago alleycat race. His death, which sparked several discussions on radio, television and the Internet, was partly responsible for bringing alleycat racing - unofficial urban events - to widespread attention, having previously been known only to the bike messengers who originally organised them and to a few "underground" cycling clubs.

Other births: Frank Brazier (Australia, 1934); Héctor Mellado (Chile, 1925); Vera Hohlfeld (Germany, 1972); Bernardo Alfonsel (Spain, 1954); Fujio Ito (Japan, 1945); Helge Hansen (Denmark, 1925); John Watters (Australia, 1955).