Willy Falck Hansen

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Willy Falck Hansen
Hansen (r.) At the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam in the sprint semifinals against Antoine Mazairac from the Netherlands .

Willy Falck Hansen (born April 4, 1906 in Helsingør , † March 18, 1978 in Rome ) was a Danish cyclist . In 1928 he became Olympic champion in the 1000 meter time trial .

Athletic career

Willy Falck Hansen's father was one of the oldest members of the Dansk Bicycle Club . At the age of five he received his first bicycle from him as a present. In 1918 the family moved to Charlotte Lund , where the nearby velodrome of Ordrup was. When the Dane Henry Brask Andersen became world champion in the amateur sprint there in 1921 , Falck Hansen's desire to become a racing cyclist also grew. In 1922 he won his first competition with the boys' race . The first significant successes came in 1923 when he won his first national title in the sprint as well as the 1000-meter time trial at the Nordic championships.

In 1924, Falck Hansen took part in the Olympic Games in Paris for the first time , where he competed in all four railway competitions. He gave up over 50 kilometers, in the sprint and in the team pursuit (with Erik Kjeldsen , Oscar Guldager and Edmund Hansen ) he reached the quarter-finals. Together with Hansen he reached the finals in tandem driving; the two Danes took second place behind the French Lucien Choury and Jean Cugnot .

Four years later, Falck Hansen started in the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam in the sprint and time trial. In the time trial he won the gold medal in 1: 14.2 minutes, and two days later he won the bronze medal in the sprint. Also in 1928, Falck Hansen won the sprint world championship for amateurs . At the end of 1928, Falck Hansen switched to the professionals .

By 1946 he won the Danish sprint championship title 15 times. At the World Championships for professionals, he reached the quarter-finals in the sprint every year from 1929 to 1939. In 1930 he was fourth, in 1931 he was world champion, in the other years he was eliminated in the quarter-finals. His professional career ended in 1950.

Falck Hansen's 1931 World Championship victory was controversial: In the final run of the sprint race between him and the Frenchman Lucien Michard , the judge Alban Collignon decided on Falck Hansen as the winner and declared him world champion. Although both the driver and himself realized shortly afterwards that this was a wrong judgment, the rules of the time did not allow his decision to be revised. As Collignon was the only target judge, it was decided as a consequence to use several target judges in the future.

Professional

After the end of his career, he stayed in Paris, where he had lived for a long time, and opened a travel agency there .

literature

  • Bodo Harenberg (ed.): The stars of the sport from A-Z . Darmstadt 1970
  • Volker Kluge : Summer Olympic Games. The Chronicle I. Athens 1896 - Berlin 1936. Sportverlag Berlin, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-328-00715-6 .
  • Pascal Sergent, Guy Crasset, Hervé Dauchy: Mondial Encyclopedie Cyclisme . Volume 1 A – F published in 2000 by the UCI ISBN 90-74128-72-6

Web links

Commons : Willy Falck Hansen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Illustrated Radrenn-Sport , December 22, 1929, p. 1440.
  2. ↑ a b Interest group for cycling (ed.): The cycling . No. 1/1950 . Interest group for cycling, Cologne 1950, p. 8 .
  3. ↑ Lucien Michard on lepetitbraquet.free.fr ( Memento from July 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) This rule was originally introduced for pragmatic reasons, in order to avoid endless discussions about the result - as was often the case before. In the rules, however, the case that the target referee corrected himself was not provided for.
personal data
SURNAME Falck Hansen, Willy
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Danish cyclist
DATE OF BIRTH April 4, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Elsinore
DATE OF DEATH March 18, 1978
Place of death Rome