Jo de Roo

Jo de Roo after a stage win on the Tour of the Netherlands in 1960

Johan "Jo" de Roo (born July 5, 1937 in Schore , today in Kapelle ) is a former Dutch cyclist .

In addition to cycling, he was also a successful speed skater , who as a teenager was able to win several titles over 500 meters and 1500 meters. For him, ice skating remained a complement to cycling. Jo de Roo was a professional from 1958 to 1968. During this time he won the classic Flanders Tour , Paris – Tours and Lombardy Tour as well as three stages of the Tour de France and one of the Vuelta a España twice . He has a total of 46 wins.

In 1957 de Roo had his first successes as an amateur, the following year he turned professional and drove for five years in the same team as Jacques Anquetil . In 1959 he won the six-day race in Antwerp with Jean Palmans , and in 1960 the Giro di Sardegna .

1962 was his most successful year, in which he won Paris – Tours, the Giro di Lombardia and Bordeaux – Paris . After the Paris – Tours race , he was awarded the yellow ribbon ("Ruban Jaune") because he had exceeded the highest average speed previously achieved in the classics. In the Lombardy Tour he defeated the Italian Livio Trapè , whom he caught up after he had a lead by pushing Italian spectators at the Murro di Sormano . In the same year he also received the Dutch Gerrit Schulte trophy as the best Dutch road rider and at the end of the season won the overall ranking of the Super Prestige Pernod for the best rider of the season in the most important cycle races of the season.

In 1963, de Roo repeated his successes in the autumn classics Paris-Tours and the Giro di Lombardia. In 1964 and 1965 he was Dutch road champion and in 1965 won the Ronde van Vlaanderen and the Omloop Het Volk . In his last two active years he drove in the same team (Willem II-Gazelle) as Peter Post and Rik Van Looy . In 1968 he resigned.

After the end of his active cycling career, de Roo opened three shops for luxury household goods in Goes and Vlissingen , but went bankrupt . This broke up his family.

In 2015 the book Jo de Roo, wielerheld (author: René van den Berge) was published. On the occasion of the book presentation, the now 77-year-old said in an interview: "I wasn't a top rider [...] worse, sometimes I was really bad." In the same year, 300 cyclists and Jo de Roo himself were in Goes , who comes from nearby Schore and now lives in Biezelinge , has opened a 114-kilometer long-distance cycle path specially for racing cyclists, which is called Jo de Roo-fietsroute and leads from Goes to 's-Heer Hendrikskinderen . De Roo himself trains several times a week on the bike.

literature

• Peter Cossins: The flying, climbing Dutchman . In: Procycling (German edition) . October 2015, p. 68 ff .

Web links

Commons : Jo de Roo  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Jo de Roo in the Radsportseiten.net database
• Jo de Roo in the Tour de France database(French / English )

Individual evidence

1. ^ Association of German cyclists (ed.): Radsport . No. 45/1962 . German sports publisher Kurt Stoof, Cologne, p. 2 .
2. ↑ Jo de Roo Wielerheld. In: marbergmedia.nl. July 5, 2015, accessed February 5, 2016 . 
3. ↑ Jo de Roo ontroerd door boekpresentatie. In: Omroep Zeeland. March 29, 2015, accessed February 5, 2016 (Dutch). 
4. ↑ Oud-wielrenner Jo de Roo: 'Ik was geen topcoureur'. (No longer available online.) In: Provinciaal Zeeuwsche Courant. March 27, 2015, archived from the original on February 5, 2016 ; Retrieved February 5, 2016 (Dutch). 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.  
5. ↑ Driehonderd racefietsers open the Jo de Roo route. In: Omroep Zeeland. June 28, 2015, accessed February 5, 2016 (Dutch).