Joseph Magnani

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Joseph Magnani Road cycling
To person
Date of birth July 15, 1911
date of death November 30, 1975
nation United StatesUnited States United States
discipline Road / train
Most important successes
UCI Road World Championships
1947 7th place - road race
Last updated: January 4, 2016

Joseph Magnani (born July 15, 1911 in LaSalle , † November 30, 1975 in Chicago ) was an American cyclist.

Joseph Magnani grew up in Mount Clare as the second oldest of eight children of an Italian family; the father worked as a miner . In 1928, at the age of 16, he and a sister were sent to live with relatives in Cap-d'Ail in the south of France because the family was in financial difficulties. There he joined a local amateur team. From 1935 to 1948 he rode for various French and Italian cycling teams and was evidently the only American to race against Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali .

In the following years Magnani won several races in France, such as 1935 Marseille - Nice , in which Alfredo Binda had previously won, and 1938 Marseille - Toulon - Marseille . On the cycling track of Nice, he presented 42 kilometers on a new hour record. In 1939 he started near Paris-Nice and finished ninth in the overall ranking.

In 1940 Joseph Magnani won a stage of the Grand Prix de la Côte d'Azur and posed in the winning photo together with his French fiancé Mimi, whom he had met at a young age as a neighbor of his relatives in Cap-d'Ail; the couple married in late 1941. During the German occupation of France in World War II , he was arrested in February 1942 and deported to a camp in northern France. He was released after the Allies landed in June 1944; At that time, the 1.80 meter tall man still weighed 44 kilograms. After two years of imprisonment, he saw his wife again, and in 1945 a son was born together.

In 1946 he was hired by Giuseppe Olmo for his team Olmo-Fulgor and took part in the Giro d'Italia in the same year to support the captain Fermo Camellini . This made him the first American to start a Grand Tour . However, he had a hard crash and had to give up the race. He competed a total of six times in the Tour de Suisse , most recently in 1948. At the UCI Road World Championships in Reims in 1947 , he finished seventh and last in the road race, around ten minutes behind the winner : 24 drivers had due to the heat of 31 started, including well-known names such as Fausto Coppi , did not finish the race.

The following year Magnani returned to the USA and started for the Schwinn Bicycle Company in several six-day races . After a fall at the Buffalo Six Days , he ended his cycling career and took up a job at Schwinn in Chicago; he collected Schwinn bikes and also worked as a trainer. Among other things, he trained his son Rudy.

In 1998 Joseph Magnani was inducted into the United States Bicycling Hall of Fame .

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Joseph Magnani: Joseph Magnani Inducted in 1998 for Veteran Road & Track Competitor (Pre-1945) US Bicycling Hall of Fame. (No longer available online.) In: usbhof.org. Archived from the original on January 4, 2016 ; accessed on January 4, 2016 . 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 / www.usbhof.org
  2. ^ A b Pioneers in the Peloton: The unknown American. In: VeloNews. February 15, 2005, accessed January 4, 2016 .
  3. ^ Presumably it was the internment camp Frontstalag 122 , which was part of the Royallieu concentration camp near Compiègne .
  4. ^ Peter Joffre Nye: The Six-Day Bicycle Races. America's Jazz Age Sport . Van der Plas / Cycle Publishing, San Francisco 2006, p. 199 .
personal data
SURNAME Magnani, Joseph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cyclist
DATE OF BIRTH July 15, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH LaSalle
DATE OF DEATH November 30, 1975
Place of death Chicago