Rik van Looy (90) passes away - Belgian rider won all five monuments, won in all Grand Tours and was twice a World Champion
Cycling
The cycling world has suffered an irreplaceable lost today. At age 90, former rider Rik van Looy has passed away after a period of extended illness. We remember some of his biggest features as a rider and one of Belgium's best ever to get on a bike.
Van Looy was born in 1933 and turned pro in 1953. Over a 17-year long career, he became one of the very best in his generation and the truth is that he cemented his name in the sport's history. At the top of his palmarès are his two consecutive world titles in the 1960 and 1961 in Hohenstein-Ernstthal and Bern. He has raced 45 monuments over his career and won five: Milano-Sanremo in 1958; Tour of Flanders in 1959&1962; Il Lombardia in 1959, Paris-Roubaix in 1961&1962&1965 and Liège-Bastoge-Liège in 1961. He is one of the very few riders to ever win all monuments.
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Throughout his career he also won 7 stages at the Tour de France, 12 at the Giro d'Italia and 18 at the Vuelta a España. A rider whose quality surpassed a 'specialty', and its only a few of the wins he obtained throughout his career where he could count on over 160 triumphs.
CyclingUpToDate would like to extend it's condolences to family and friends of Rik.
🇧🇪 Rik Van Looy, winner of multiple Monuments and GT stages, passed away today. 🕊️
— Domestique (@Domestique___) December 18, 2024
R.I.P. Rik 💫 pic.twitter.com/aizxdbiwRz
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- WC hardly counts. - You couldn’t be further away from the truth.
UltimateOpportunist18-12-2024 - Well said! It's true, even for those of us who are older and slower now.leodis18-12-2024
- Is the BBC really so important?leodis18-12-2024
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- There are billions of people globally who have never heard of the BBC and never will, let alone follow their “influencing”, it’s about time preconditioned citizens realised how insignificant some institutions really are. We are all biased from our environment growing up, there us much for adults to reset in their heads if they are to understand the order of things in the big world and realise what are real and perceived problems and injustices.Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- Exactly, most cycling fans are also active riders, another difference with many sports, we can actually associate with these people and experience many of the same feelings.Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- Especially now that they claim to be stopping CO treatment, but what else have they (and others) been trying, before banning it starts to be discussed?Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- The article gives a lot of food but lacks much thought. Cycling was PERMANENTLY damaged by one guy’s quest for invincibility and lost a lot of followers that were helping to make it more mainstream. The days of British glory (track, Sky, Wiggins. Froome, Ineos) which were also permitting Anglo media (the dominant form for global influence) to sell the sport as mainstream, are also dead. Many sports don’t have a season’s worth of events to report on, the media focuses on one huge event WC/Olympics and that’s sll that counts, cycling is the opposite, the WC hardly counts whereas traditional races are considered more noteworthy and riders pick and choose races according to a personal agenda, there is no single culminating event and each is more important to some and most important to a few, how is a general reporter to make sense of comparisons in such an individualistic structure? Awards are usually consensus based and there are just not enough people following cycling for it to score high across the board. Sometimes there is not a single or simple reason for things, it is just the cumulative effect of many effects influencing things and in this case, there are dozens. In most countries’ media a sport like cricket or darts or rugby or even the whole Commonwealth results would be completely overlooked too, this may not be the case in the UK or at the Beeb but it does highlight how different perceptions are from different places and people, sumo or wrestling, kayak, judo, karate, have any of these ever even been considered? I don’t know but probably boxing has. A sport has to be commercially popular enough to count, the problem with cycling is, it SEEMS popular but isn’t that just a bias because it’s kind of free? How many fans would really remain if you had to pay a 50€ entrance fee to look from the sidelines, and that’s the thing, the majority of people don’t really watch the SPORT, they enjoy being part of the event and moment and know very little about things. True followers are very rare as the number of commentators on websites such as this one show. Riders also just aren’t interesting enough personalities to interest mainstream media, they have very few newsworthy incidents and even when, the murdering of a wife remained largely internal to the cycling media. It seems as if the cycling powers that be don’t promote cycling news to the outside world, perhaps from lack of budget to persuade general media to report (and we know some sport federations have huge budgets to convince media and reporters to make space for them, look how many pages of national newspapers were dedicated to lower league sports results or even horse racing compared to cycling, gambling companies also influence this as they obviously have more interest in promoting data their clients are likely to be interested in. Anyway, these are just some more aspects the cycling federations should reflect on before ordering an expensive audit to understand why we can’t pull our weight on the global sport scene.Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- Tadej, unlike Armstrong, does not have cancer. Whenever they found something strange about Armstrong, he and his complice system, explained that they were innovative procedures for cancer, which is why he was able to fool around for so many years.
maria2024202418-12-2024 - Oh, Always this frustrated hater present, poor soul, his happiness is defame with falsely rational arguments, pure cheap sophistry. Calm down, go to holidays, maybe you could obtain a genuine moment of happiness.maria2024202418-12-2024