Louison Bobet

Louison Bobet (1951)

Street sign in Touquet-Paris-Plage

Paving stone in memory of Bobet's victory at Paris-Roubaix

Louison Bobet (born March 12, 1925 in Saint-Méen-le-Grand , † March 13, 1983 in Biarritz ) was a French cyclist . Bobet was the first driver to win the Tour de France three times in a row. Bobet joined professional drivers in 1947, having previously become the French amateur champion.

Louison Bobet was an excellent classic driver and won almost all the major one-day races , such as Milan – Sanremo (1951), the Tour of Lombardy (1951), the Tour of Flanders (1955) and Paris – Roubaix (1956).

In 1950 Bobet had achieved the mountain prize and third place overall in the Tour de France . But it wasn't until 1953 that he won the overall standings of the Tour for the first time, ending the dominance of Italian ( Gino Bartali , Fausto Coppi ) and Swiss ( Hugo Koblet , Ferdy Kübler ) racing drivers in the world's most famous stage race . Bobet repeated the tour victory in the following years 1954 and 1955. It later became known that Bobet had been doped temporarily without his knowledge during his tour participation; his team manager and carer had admitted this.

In 1954 Bobet became professional world champion at the Road World Championships in Solingen, Germany .

Bobet aroused great admiration in 1956 when, after an operation on his buttocks, he was able to win the longest one-day race Bordeaux – Paris over 552 kilometers.

His racing career ended abruptly on December 15, 1961, when he and his brother Jean survived a serious car accident injured. At his official farewell on the occasion of the criterion in Chateaulin in the summer of 1962, more than 50,000 spectators came to his honor. At the evening ceremony, he received two tons of postcards that had been collected through a campaign by Radio Luxembourg .

He then set up several thalassotherapy centers together with Jean . One day after his 58th birthday, Bobet died of cancer.

Bobet was also a strong table tennis player . He won the championship of Brittany once. He gave up table tennis when he was eliminated in the first round of the French championships around 1942.

In 1953 and 1954 he was voted France's Sportsman of the Year (“ Champion des champions ”) by the sports newspaper L'Équipe . The “Musee Louison Bobet” was opened in his hometown of Saint-Méen-le-Grand.

Web links

• Palmarès - List of achievements and placements
• Louison Bobet in the Tour de France database(French / English )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ralf Meutgens (ed.): Doping in cycling. Delius Klasing, Bielefeld 2007, ISBN 978-3-7688-5245-6 , p. 253.
2. ^ Association of German cyclists (ed.): Radsport . No. 37/1962 . German sports publisher Kurt Stoof, Cologne, p. 20 .
3. ↑ Walter Rottiers: The great cycling stars. Copress, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-7679-0343-1 , p. 51.
4. ^ DTS magazine . 17, 1955, pp. 11 + 13, 1966, p. 35.