International Peace Tour 1954

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Postage stamp of the GDR 1954

The International Peace Tour 1954 (Course de la paix) was an international stage race that took place for the seventh time and was held in Poland , the GDR and Czechoslovakia from May 2nd to 17th, 1954. The winner of the individual classification was the Dane Eluf Dalgaard , and Czechoslovakia won the team classification.

Attendees

At the start in Warsaw the field of drivers consisted of 114 athletes from 18 teams. Trieste , which started with a full team last year, was only represented by Giordano Dreossi this time. The Soviet Union and exotic India took part for the first time , compared to the previous year, there were no drivers from Austria in 1954 . The teams came from the following countries.

The GDR was represented by Benno Funda , Lothar Meister I , Erich Schulz , Gustav-Adolf Schur , Georg Stoltze and Bernhard Trefflich .

Route

Route

The seventh peace cruise was 2051 kilometers long and was divided into 13 stages. During the first two-thirds of the time, the route led mainly through flat terrain. Only from the ninth stage did drivers have to deal with mountain stages. There the route initially ran through the Ore Mountains , with the last three stages of climbs in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands . The longest part of the day from East Berlin to Leipzig was 204 kilometers, while the initial stage “Around Warsaw” was the shortest at 105 kilometers. The border crossing from Zgorzelec in Poland to Cottbus 95 kilometers away was done by train.

Race course

Mieczysław Wilczewski (Poland), two-time stage winner

At first it seemed as if the Pole Mieczysław Wilczewski was heading for a certain overall victory. After victories on the first two stages, he had already gained a lead of 2:14 minutes, which he was able to expand to 4:55 minutes after four stages. After that, however, his lead shrank, after the sixth segment of the day he was only 1:15 minutes ahead of Dane Eluf Dalgaard . On the seventh stage, Wilczewski finally lost the overall leader's yellow jersey when he missed catching up with a top group of nine. Dalgaard rode in this group, and a seventh place was enough for him to take Wilczewski over ten minutes and, in turn, to take the lead in the overall standings. In the last stages a duel developed between Dalgaard and the Belgian René Van Meenen , who won the yellow jersey on the eleventh stage. Dalgaard did not give up, however. Again he drove away from the peloton together with eight other drivers on the final stage and had lost 9:38 minutes to Van Meenen in ninth place. Dalgaard finally won the overall standings with a lead of 2:58 minutes over Czechoslovak Vlastimil Ružička. The star in the peloton, however, was the Indian Dhana Singh, who caused a sensation with his turban until his premature retirement after a fall in Pardubice. In order to be able to treat him in the hospital, an interpreter had to be flown in. Giordano Dreossi from Trieste also attracted a lot of sympathy, who made it through the race to the end without any team support and, as 75th, left two other drivers behind him. 37 drivers had to end the peace trip early.

The GDR team was unlucky throughout the tour. Erich Schulz had to retire on the eighth stage after a fall, Georg Stoltze gave up on the seventh part of the day with stomach problems. But the other four GDR drivers could not keep up with the pace of the field and were also held up by defects and falls. In the final accounts, Gustav-Adolf Schur was the 22nd best of his team, 50 minutes behind.

Due to the poor individual performance, the GDR team was unable to defend its previous year's victory in the team classification. This time the blue jerseys were won by the drivers of Czechoslovakia with a lead of 32:04 minutes over Poland. With a gap of over two hours, the GDR team only finished seventh. The exotic ones from India only brought one player to Prague and were the only team not to make it into the team ranking.

Stage overview
stage Start finish Stage
length		 Stage winner Time (h) km / h
01. Around Warsaw 105 km Mieczysław Wilczewski (Poland) 2:29:28 42.0
02. Warsaw - Łódź 130 km Mieczysław Wilczewski (Poland) 3:08:10 41.4
03. Łódź - Katowice 173 km Władysław Klabiński (Poland) 4:35:24 37.6
04th Katowice - Wroclaw 185 km Vlastimil Ružička (ČSR) 4:28:39 41.0
05. Wroclaw - Zgorzelec 171 km Eluf Dalgaard (Denmark) 4:52:09 35.1
06th Cottbus - East Berlin 182 km René Van Meenen (Belgium) 5:04:27 35.8
07th East Berlin - Leipzig 204 km Jan Veselý (ČSR) 5:32:28 36.8
08th. Leipzig - Karl-Marx-Stadt 144 km Edward Klabiński (France-Poland) 3:52:51 37.1
00. Karl-Marx-Stadt - Bad Schandau 114 km Edward Klabiński (France-Poland) 3:00:01 38.1
10. Děčín - Pardubice 186 km Stanisław Królak (Poland) 4:58:12 37.1
11. Pardubice - Brno 137 km Fernand Picot (France) 3:39:38 37.2
12. Brno - Tábor 160 km René Van Meenen (Belgium) 3:50:22 41.6
13. Tábor - Prague 160 km Vlastimil Ružička (ČSR) 3:51:11 41.2

Final results

Individual evaluation
driver team time
01. Eluf Dalgaard Denmark 53:59:11 h
02. Vlastimil Ružička Czechoslovakia + 02:58 min
03. René Van Meenen Belgium + 07:43 min
04th Fernand Picot France + 09:04 min
05. Henk van der Broeck Netherlands + 11:57 min
06th Stanislaw Królak Poland + 13:43 min
07th Mieczysław Wilczewski Poland + 19:32 min
08th. Jan Kubr Czechoslovakia + 19:35 min
09. Helge Hansen Denmark + 22:18 min
10. Willem Rusman Netherlands + 25:40 min
0 ...
22nd Gustav-Adolf Schur GDR + 50:00 min
30th Benno Funda GDR + 1:12:21 h
33. Lothar Master I. GDR + 1:31:33 h
55. Bernhard Trefflich GDR + 3:30:39 h
0 ...
77. Supravat Chakravati India + 19:00:16 h
Team ranking
team time
01. Czechoslovakia 161: 45: 41 h
02. Poland + 32:04 min
03. Denmark + 49:08 min
04th Belgium + 50:26 min
05. Netherlands + 1:07:18 h
06th Soviet Union + 1:12:57 h
07th GDR + 2:37:33 h
08th. England + 3:13:21 h
09. Bulgaria + 3:30:15 h
10. France-Poland + 4:16:17 h
11. France + 4:16:44 h
12. Romania + 5:25:33 h
13. Sweden + 5:43:57 h
14th Finland + 11:36:03 h
15th Norway + 13:18:46 h
16. Hungary + 13:22:49 h
17th Albania + 27:54:04 h
eliminated:
India

Others

The Leipzig Peace Tour Memorial was unveiled on the occasion .

literature

  • Klaus Ullrich. Every time in May , Sportverlag Berlin, 1987, pp. 204–209, ISBN 3-328-00177-8 .
  • Warsaw-Berlin-Prague 1954. Sport im Bild, Berlin 1954, 32 pages

Web links

Commons : 7. Friedensfahrt 1954  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Manfred Hönel, Olaf Ludwig: 100 Highlights Peace Trip . Sportverlag, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-328-00717-2 , p. 21 .