Frans Slaats
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| Frans Slaats (1945) | |
| To person | |
|---|---|
| Full name | Laurentius Johannes Slaats |
| Nickname | De Brabantse Locomotief |
| Date of birth | June 11, 1912 |
| date of death | April 6, 1993 |
| nation |
 Netherlands
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| discipline | Track cycling |
| Driver type | Endurance rider |
| To the team | |
| Current team | End of career |
| function | driver |
| Most important successes | |
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| Last updated: October 31, 2014 | |
Laurentius Johannes "Frans" Slaats (born June 11, 1912 in Waalwijk ; † April 6, 1993 ibid) was a Dutch track cyclist .
At the request of his parents, Frans Slaats, the third of twelve children, did an apprenticeship as a butcher , although he wanted to become a cyclist from an early age . He delivered goods on a bicycle, and on Sundays he drove to Tilburg on the local cycling track . He secretly saved money to buy a racing bike , became a member of the Tilburgse wielerclub Vitesse and was soon successful in his first races. In 1932 he started as an amateur at the Road World Championships in Rome , but was unable to place further forward due to a tire damage. In 1933 a cycling track was opened in his hometown Waalwijk, where Slaats was the local hero. Two of his brothers also started cycling.
From 1934 to 1947 Frans Slaats was a professional cyclist. He drove almost exclusively races on the track, mainly two-man team driving and a total of 27 six-day races , of which he won seven. Most of the six-day races he contested with Jan Pijnenburg , with whom he fell out in 1937, and then with Kees Pellenaars .
On September 29, 1937, Frans Slaats set a new hour record of 45.485 km on the Vigorelli Railway in Milan , thus improving the one-year-old record of the French Maurice Richard by 160 meters. By 2014 he was one of two Dutch people to set this record, the second was Jan van Hout (1933). In his hometown, Slaats was then celebrated with a grand ceremony by being led by eight torchbearers from his parents' house to the town hall through a line of enthusiastic people.
When the Second World War broke out , Slaats was on the occasion of a six-day race in Buenos Aires , where he stayed until the end of the war, like other European racing drivers, including the Italian Raffaele Di Paco , with whom he won the six-day race in the Argentine capital in 1944. When he returned to the Netherlands after the war, he learned that four of his brothers had perished during the German occupation : After an attack on the NSB , they had been arrested by the security service , although they were supposedly uninvolved. Two brothers were brought to the Neuengamme concentration camp via the Amersfoort transit camp , where they perished, another brother died in the Meppen camp and the fourth in February 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . One sister died in a monastery during the war years.
After the end of his cycling career, Frans Slaats worked as a representative in the bicycle and later in the car industry. For several years he was a member of the sports committee of the Dutch cycling association Koninklijke Nederlandsche Wielren Unie (KNWU) and of the committee that voted for the cyclist of the year . He went on bike tours himself well into old age .
Palmarès
- 1936
- Six day race Amsterdam (with Adolphe Charlier )
- Six days in Copenhagen (with Jan Pijnenburg )
- 1937
- Six days of Antwerp (with Jan Pijnenburg )
- Six days of Copenhagen (with Kees Pellenaars )
- 1938
- Six days of Gent (with Kees Pellenaars )
- Prix Houlier-Comès (with Kees Pellenaars )
- 1939
- Six days of Brussels (with Kees Pellenaars )
- 1944
- Six days of Buenos Aires (with Raffaele Di Paco )
Web links
- Frans Slaats in the Radsportseiten.net database
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Slaats, Frans |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Slaats, Laurentius Johannes |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch track cyclist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 11, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Waalwijk |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 6, 1993 |
| Place of death | Waalwijk |