HE WAS 91 YEARS OLD. Farewell Van Looy, the first to hit the mark in all the classics

On the threshold of 91 years, which he would have celebrated tomorrow, Rik Van Looy, a Belgian cycling legend, has passed away. He was the oldest living cycling champion and the first Cannibal in history. There are still those who consider him the strongest ever in road races: in addition to winning two consecutive world road championships, he was the first to win all the monument classics, as only his compatriots Merckx and De Vlaeminck would later manage: three times the Paris-Roubaix, twice the Flanders, once the Sanremo, the Liège and the Lombardy.

He was also the only one to complete the collection of 'original' major one-day races, winning Flèche Wallonne, Paris-Brussels and Paris-Tours.

Born in Grobbendonk, Flanders, Hendrik Van Looy was nicknamed Rik the Second to distinguish him from the other Belgian champion Van Steenbergen, but he soon became known as the Emperor of Herentals, the city where he lived, where he was also president of the football team and where a three-meter-high bronze statue was erected in his honor. In his twenty-year career he faced all the strongest, from Coppi to Baldini, from Koblet to Van Steenbergen, from Anquetil to Gaul up to Merckx, the only one to do better than his 367 victories. A specialist in the classics, very strong in the sprint, due to his size he was not suited to the grand tours, where he won 37 stages (7 in the Tour, 12 in the Giro and 18 in the Vuelta), also managing to finish third in the Spanish race and fourth in the pink one.

In addition to winning a couple, he was a protagonist in two other world championships: the one in 1963, on the home roads of Renaix, where he was beaten in the sprint by his gregarious Beheyt, to whom he did not speak for years, and the one in 1968 in Imola, where he started the breakaway from afar that Vittorio Adorni would then complete triumphantly. Angelo Costa