Walter Lohmann (cyclist)

Walter Lohmann (born July 21, 1911 in Bochum , Germany ; † April 18, 1993 in Sion , Switzerland ) was a German racing cyclist .

Cycling career

Memorial plaque for Germany's oldest road race in Zossen

Walter Lohmann, member of the Bochum RV Sturmvogel 04, was the most popular German stayer from the 1930s to the 1950s. As a teenager he was initially interested in football and athletics; he attended business school and completed a commercial apprenticeship. In 1927 he started driving . As an amateur, he won the races Berlin-Cottbus-Berlin , Bochum-Münster-Bochum and Rund um Dortmund in 1932 and in the same year took sixth place in the World Amateurs Road Championship . Then he switched to the track and won the six-day race in Berlin in 1934 (with Viktor Rausch ); he fell and broke his collarbone in the six-day race in New York . But since 1934 he mainly drove stalker races. He contested his first stand-up race behind the pacemaker Willy Heßlich in a competition for young people in 1934 in Forst .

In 1935 and 1936 he won the Big Christmas Prize of the Stayer in Dortmund . He won gold at the rail world championships in Ordrup near Copenhagen in 1937 and silver in Amsterdam in 1938 . From 1938 to 1953 he was German standing champion ten times. In 1952 he won silver again at the World Championships in Paris . In total, he won more than 600 races in his career.

In February 1954 Lohmann was temporarily banned until June because he boxed down the sports director of the six-day race, Otto Weckerling , who had long felt disadvantaged. In addition, he and Gustav Kilian Weckerling accused of manipulating races. Lohmann was later revoked for two years after a hearing at which the allegations from him and Kilian could not be proven, but this was later shortened to around one year.

On October 24, 1955, Walter Lohmann set two world records behind pacemaker at the age of 44 on the cycling track in the Stadion am Zoo : he needed 1: 03.40 hours for 100 kilometers, and he set a new hour record over 96.016 kilometers. Because of the rain, the record attempts had been delayed into the night, so that the police showed up because residents had complained about the noise. On September 16, 1957, Lohmann drove his farewell race on the stadium track in Frankfurt .

Professional

In the early 1950s, Walter Lohmann acquired a large piece of land in downtown Bochum, where he opened a restaurant; he also owned a gas station. For a few months he worked as the national coach of the stayers, but gave up this activity prematurely due to disputes with the Association of German Cyclists . In the spring of 1962 he founded a standing school in Frankfurt, where he trained young racing drivers like Heinz Staudacher for standing races. In 1979 he fell while skiing and sustained serious injuries. As a result, he became a nursing case, cared for by his wife Irmgard, who died in 2006.

Honors

In 1951, Walter Lohmann was honored by his hometown Bochum as an honored athlete. In 1996 the standing school in Forst was named after him. The Walter Lohmann commemorative trophy has been a reminder of the professional cyclist since 2005 as part of the Sparkassen Giros Bochum .

In 2009, a training route for cyclists in Bochum was christened "Walter-Lohmann-Ring".

literature

• Ernst-Albrecht Plieg: Lohmann, Hasselberg & Co. Bochums cycling between 1889 and 1963 , Bochum 2008, p. 155ff.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Rolf Seyfarth: Radrennfieber . Claus Verlag, Chemnitz 2009, ISBN 978-3-935842-12-9 , pp. 150 .
2. ↑ Velo Gotha , Brussels 1984, p. 287
3. ^ Association of German cyclists (ed.): Radsport . No. 19/1962 . German sports publisher Kurt Stoof, Cologne, p. 5 .
4. ↑ Cyclists ride the Walter Lohmann-Ring. WAZ, September 3, 2009, accessed April 12, 2014 . 

Web links

Commons : Walter Lohmann  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Results of the German Stayer Championships 1892-2005 on stayer.de (PDF file; 92 kB)
• Walter Lohmann on the website of the Sturmvogel Bochum association
• Walter Lohmann in the Radsportseiten.net database