Tony Marchant

Tony Marchant

To person
Full name	Anthony John Marchant
Date of birth	August 28, 1937
nation	Australia
discipline	Track cycling
Most important successes
Olympic Summer Games Olympic champion tandem race 1956
Last updated: September 20, 2015

Anthony John "Tony" Marchant (born August 28, 1937 in Chelsea , Victoria ) is a former Australian cyclist. At the Olympic Games in Melbourne in 1956 , he won the gold medal in tandem with Ian Browne .

Cycling career

Tony Marchant, called Tippy , was one of eight children. His father, a member of the Royal Australian Navy , died early and the mother had to raise the children alone. Tony Marchant was the only one of the siblings to be very athletic and initially worked as a boxer . As a teenager, he fought 25 boxing matches for the Chelsea Youth Club and won his school's boxing championship. Encouraged by his friends, he turned to cycling at the age of 16. He earned his first bike as a messenger, later he received a real racing bike from his first trainer. He began his cycling career at Chelsea Amateur Cycling Club and won several titles in 1955 at the Australian Junior Championships in track cycling .

From the beginning of 1956 Marchant drove together with Ian Browne tandem races; the older Browne had chosen Marchant as a partner because of his sprint qualities.The two men formed an opposing pair: Marchant was 1.70 meters tall and 65 kilograms of rather light stature, while Browne was 1.86 meters tall and 86 Kilograms tall and strong. After only a few joint training runs, the duo became Australian champions on the tandem in 1956, with Browne in front. Her supervisor was former cyclist Billy Guyatt . Only a short time later won Browne and Marchant in front of his home crowd in Melbourne gold medal in the tandem race after they twice a repechage had to exist. When Marchant returned home, several thousand schoolchildren met him and held a public reception in his honor.

After the Olympics

A year after the Olympics, Tony Marchant surprisingly gave up cycling to play Australian football . The reason he gave was that he wanted to do the same sport as his friends again. But after a year he returned to cycling and became a professional . He traveled to Europe with Ron Murray and Alan McLellan to compete there. The trip was unsuccessful, among other things because Marchant had n't taken his track bike with him because he had ordered a new one in Italy, which he never received. In 1961 he ended his cycling career.

Marchant was a trained shoemaker . After retiring from the sport, he worked in the shoe industry and designed Imps and Cadets women's shoes . He married in 1962 and had two children.

In 2010 Tony Marchant was inducted into the Sport Australia Hall of Fame with Ian Browne .

literature

• Max Howell : Aussie Gold . Brooks Waterloo , Albion, Queensland 1986, ISBN 0-86440-680-0 (English).
• Harry Gordon : Australia and the Olympic Games . University of Queensland , St Lucia, Queensland 1994, ISBN 0-7022-2627-0 (English).
• Malcolm Andrews : Australia at the Olympic Games . ABC Books , Sydney, New South Wales 2000, ISBN 0-7333-0884-8 (English).

Web links

• Tony Marchant in the Radsportseiten.net database
• Tony Marchant in the Sports-Reference database (English; archived from the original )
• Australian track cyclists Ian Browne and Tony Marchant after their win in the second semi-final of the tandem event, Melbourne, December 5, 1956 [picture]. In: nla.gov.au. September 20, 2015, accessed September 20, 2015 . 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Howell, Aussie Gold , p. 130.
2. ^ Andrews, Australia at the Olympic Games . Pp. 66-67.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Howell, Aussie Gold , p. 131.
4. ^ Sport Australia Hall of Fame - Member Profile. In: sahof.org.au. Retrieved September 20, 2015 .