Victor Breyer

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Victor Breyer (1898)
Breyer (r.) With racing drivers George A. Banker (l.), Harrie Meyers (center) and Gian Ferdinando Tomaselli (seated) on a trip to the USA (around 1900)

Victor Breyer (born September 27, 1869 in Southwold , United Kingdom , † February 20, 1960 in Montmorency or Paris ) was a French sports journalist and official. Alongside Henri Desgrange and Robert Coquelle , he was one of the busiest and most imaginative cycling officials in France for decades and was also involved in boxing and other sports.

Victor Breyer initially worked for the French cycling magazine Le Vélo . When two entrepreneurs from Roubaix , Theo Vienne and Maurice Pérez, turned to Breyer's editor-in-chief, Paul Rousseau , and asked him for help in organizing a bike race from Paris to Roubaix, Breyer sent his sports editor Breyer to test the route. He drove to Amiens with a colleague in the car, and continued by bike the next day. When he got to Roubaix he was so dirty and frozen that he thought about canceling the race. But after a bath and a good dinner he changed his mind, it is reported, and the first edition of Paris – Roubaix was held in 1896. When choosing the route, Breyer tried to avoid cobblestone passages , known as blocks in Belgian , because they wanted to run an "easy" race - "easy" in contrast to the previous "monster races" over several hundred kilometers, such as Bordeaux– Paris .

As the official representative of the American National Cycling Association , Breyer was one of the founders of the Union Cycliste Internationale, the world cycling association . Four of the UCI founding fathers were French - representing other national associations - and Breyer was publicly pleased that the first president, Emile De Beukelaer, was a Belgian and therefore a "Latin". After Le Vélo was hired in 1904, he went to Desgrange's L'Auto magazine , where he was also involved in organizing the Tour de France , and wrote for other publications such as the lavishly illustrated magazine La Vie au grand air . He carried out many of his activities with his friend and colleague Robert Coquelle, such as jointly published books or a detailed, widely acclaimed report on the Wright brothers in 1909. He also managed cyclists, such as the US sprinter Major Taylor , to whom he was responsible Started in France, and was director of the Buffalo Velodrome . He also arranged and escorted starts for French racing drivers in North America. In 1921, Breyer organized the Trophée des Grimpeurs race together with the Audax Club Parisien , which had already been held twice before the war.

In 1910, Victor Breyer stood as a representative of the sick Henri Desgrange together with his Luxembourg colleague Alphonse Steines on the Col d'Aubisque , which was crossed for the first time in the Tour de France , and was won over by the completely exhausted drivers, above all the future overall winner Octave Lapize , insulted as a “murderer”: “Vous êtes des assassins! Oui, des assassins! ”- a saying that went down in cycling history. Breyer later moved to the magazine L'Echo des Sports , a competitor of L'Auto, as editor .

During the First World War, Henri Desgrange glorified the war as a "grand match". Breyer contradicted this view in L'Echo des Sports : "I was close enough to the front to know that this war is not a sport." He wrote the book Les Flandres en khaki on the warfare of the British army in France ; notes de guerre d'un interprète français à l'armée britannique . After the war he went on a bike tour with cyclist Eugène Christophe through the battlefield ravaged landscape of Flanders and coined the term Hell of the North - initially as a name for this destroyed stretch of land. The term was later used to refer to the Paris – Roubaix race .

In 1903, Victor Breyer also co-founded the French boxing federation Fédération Française de Boxe as well as referee and was - together with Rousseau - as president of the Société Française de Propagation de la Boxe Anglaise - the idea generator for the establishment of the International Boxing Union in 1913, which up to 1946 existed. He organized the first boxing matches in France and was one of the three referees in the spectacular boxing match between Georges Carpentier and Battling Siki in 1922. For several years he was responsible for the official boxing yearbooks Annuaire du ring . Breyer was also interested in car races and initiated events in Bologna , Dieppe and Le Mans .

From 1940 to 1948 Breyer was General Secretary of the Association Internationale de la Presse Sportive (AIPS) under the Belgian President Victor Boin .

Publications (selection)

  • With Robert Coquelle: La Course classique. Les géants de la route. Bordeaux-Paris. E. Brocherioux, Paris 1899.
  • Les Flandres en khaki. Notes de guerre d'un interprète français à l'armée britannique. L'Édition française illustrée, Paris 1917.
  • Foreword in: Georges Charpentier: Georges Carpentier, champion du monde de boxe, poids milourds. Ma vie de boxeur. Souvenirs et conseils. Roger Léveillard et al. a., Amiens et al. a. 1921.
  • Foreword in: Paul Boucher, Jean Desruelles: La Boxe anglaise. Traité indispensable aux debutants, aux amateurs, aux combattants. Roger Léveillard et al. a., Amiens et al. a. 1921.
  • L'épopée automobile. Grands faits et grands hommes. Société française des pneumatiques Dunlop, Paris 1943.

Web links

Commons : Victor Breyer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Victor Breyer. In: medias19.org. Retrieved November 7, 2015 (French).
  2. ↑ Victor Breyer (1869-1960) - atelier de data.bnf.fr. In: data.bnf.fr. Retrieved November 7, 2015 (French).
  3. ↑ Andrew M. Homan, Life in the Slipstream. Potomac Books, Inc., 2011, ISBN 978-1-597-97768-5 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  4. ↑ Les Woodland: The real Hell of the North. In: Cyclingnews. April 18, 2006, accessed May 22, 2015 .
  5. ↑ Benjo Maso : The Sweat of the Gods. The history of cycling . Covadonga Verlag , Bielefeld 2011, ISBN 978-3-936973-60-0 , p. 279 .
  6. ↑ www.cyclingnews.com - the world center of cycling. In: Cyclingnews. September 10, 2006, accessed November 6, 2015 .
  7. ↑ Hugh Dauncey: French Cycling. Liverpool University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1-846-31835-1 , p. 71 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  8. ^ Page 1 of La Vie et les Inventions des Fréres Wright (Victor Breyer and Robert Coquelle, La Vie au Grand Air, 22 May 1909). In: Library of Congress. May 22, 1909, accessed November 4, 2015 .
  9. ↑ Andrew Ritchie: Major Taylor. JHU Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-801-85303-6 , p. 136 ( limited preview in Google book search)
  10. ^ Feargal McKay: Interview: Peter Joffre Nye. In: podiumcafe.com. May 14, 2015, accessed November 7, 2015 .
  11. ↑ Historic of Audax Club Parisien. In: Audax Club Parisien. November 30, 1904, accessed November 6, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Guy Wr: The original grimpeurs - le grimpeur. (No longer available online.) In: le-grimpeur.net. July 24, 2010, archived from the original on December 8, 2015 ; accessed on November 6, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / le-grimpeur.net
  13. ^ The 1910 Tour de France: Taking on the Pyrenées. In: Freewheeling France. Retrieved November 6, 2015 .
  14. ↑ Arnd Krüger: Times for Heroes - Times for Celebrities in Sports. LIT Verlag Münster, 2014, ISBN 978-3-643-12498-2 , p. 62 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  15. ↑ La Pascale: the Easter race. In: Cycling Art Blog. April 9, 2001, accessed November 6, 2015 .
  16. ↑ Boxing Sanctioning Bodies. In: ibroresearch.com. August 14, 2015, accessed November 6, 2015 .
  17. ^ International Boxing Union. In: - BoxRec. November 6, 2009, accessed November 6, 2015 .
  18. ^ Fédération Française de Boxe. In: ffboxe.com. Retrieved November 6, 2015 (French).
  19. ^ John Lardner: Who Shot Battling Siki? The Life And Murder Of A Prizefighter. In: thestacks.deadspin.com. Retrieved November 6, 2015 .
  20. ^ Tanya A. Bailey: The First American Grand Prix. McFarland, 2014, ISBN 978-1-476-61522-6 , p. 199 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  21. ^ AIPS Web Site. In: aipsmedia.com. January 19, 2010, accessed November 7, 2015 .
personal data
SURNAME Breyer, Victor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French sports journalist and official
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Southwold , UK
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1960
Place of death Montmorency or Paris