Charly Gaul

Charly Gaul (8 December 1932 – 6 December 2005) was a Luxembourgish professional cyclist.

He was a national cyclo-cross champion, an accomplished time triallist and superb climber.

By the finish, he had moved from 37th to third.

He was on his way to winning the next day as well, when he crashed descending in the rain.

He attacked again when the race reached the Pyrenees, winning stage 17 from (Toulouse to Saint-Gaudens) ahead of the eventual overall winner, Louison Bobet.

He won the mountains competition and finished third in Paris.

By then, he had already won more than 60 races as an amateur having started racing in 1949.

They included the Flêche du Sud and the Tour of the 12 Cantons.

He won a stage up the climb of Grossglockner during the Tour of Austria when he was 17, setting a stage record.

It was his first race outside Luxembourg.

His first professional race was the Critérium de la Polymultipliée, which he finished eighth.

Gaul worked in a butcher's shop and as a slaughterman in an abattoir at Bettembourg before turning professional on 3 May 1953 for Terrot, at the age of 20.

His first professional win was in 1953 in Luxembourg, in the national cyclo-cross championship.

He came second the same year in the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré stage race.

Gaul rode his first Tour de France in 1953 but abandoned on the sixth stage.

The following year he was second in the Luxembourg road championship (which he won six times), won a stage in the Dauphiné Libéré, and won a bronze medal in the 1954 world championship.

He also started the 1954 Tour but again abandoned before the finish.

He came to the 1955 Tour after winning the mountainous Tour de Sud Ouest and finishing third in the Tour of Luxembourg.

He conceded a lot of time on the opening flat stages, not helped by being in a weak team.

His fight back started in the Alps, where the first stage was from Thonon-les-Bains to Briançon.

He attacked and dropped the Dutch climber, Jan Nolten.

Crossing the col du Télégraphe, he had five minutes on his chasers; by the top of the Galibier he had 14m 47s.

He also won the Giro d'Italia in 1956 and 1959.

Gaul rode best in cold, wet weather.

In later life, he became a recluse and lost much of his memory.

Gaul was a fragile-looking man with a sad face and disproportionately short legs.

As one writer put it, he had "a sad, timid look on his face, marked with an unfathomable melancholy [as though] an evil deity has forced him into a cursed profession amidst powerful, implacable riders."

After a hard-fought victory in the 1956 Giro d'Italia (in which he took three stages, including an eight-minute victory in the Dolomites stage from Meran to Monte Bondone, near Trento), Gaul was almost half an hour down after six days' racing in the 1956 Tour de France, but he was confident he could close the gap in the mountains.

Gaul started the 1957 Tour but abandoned after two days with no stage wins.

His ability earned him the nickname of Angel of the Mountains in the 1958 Tour de France, which he won with four stage victories.

Gaul returned to the Tour in 1958.

Third in that year's Giro, he started dominantly and won four stages, three of them time trials, including the ascent of Mont Ventoux.

His time of 1h 2m 9s from the Bédoin side, which in those days was cobbled in the first kilometres and poorly surfaced to the summit, stood as a record until Jonathan Vaughters beat it 41 years later in the Dauphiné Libéré.

On the last day in the Alps, his manager, Jo Goldschmidt looked at the rain falling and woke Gaul with the words: "Come on soldier... This is your day."

Gaul woke delighted at the cold rain and angry at the memory of how he had been denied the Giro the previous year, when he was attacked as he stopped by the roadside.

A lot of riders took advantage of his halt but he most blamed Bobet, a man as refined and diffident as Gaul was coarse and brusque.

Historian Bill McGann said his feelings for Bobet had turned to "flaming hatred."

He sought out his Tormentor before the stage started.

The impact was all the greater because the two had barely spoken to each other since the Giro.

He won the mountains prize again and two more stages, a mountain individual time trial on stage three and stage 18 to Grenoble, but his efforts did little good, and he finished 13th.