The first 3-time winner of the Tour de France, Philippe Thys was born in Anderlecht on the 8th of October 1889.
He won the first Belgian cyclo-cross championship (1910) and some road stage races before he turned professional. Also, he was the best independent rider at the Tour de France in 1911.
Philippe Thys won the Tour de France first time in 1913 when he was 22 years and 9 month old. He repeated his success next year, but for his third victory, he had to wait for 6 more years, till he triumphed in 1920 again. The reason for this 6-year hiatus was obvious: World War I. As Henri Desgrange wrote about Thys: if the war wouldn’t have disrupted the career of the Belgian rider, he might have win five or six editions of Tour de France.
During the war, Thys served in the French Aircraft and was much more luckier than his cyclist colleague, the Tour de France winner and 3-time Paris-Roubaix champion Octave Lapize, who lost his life during the fights.
Philippe Thys won the Giro di Lombardia and Paris-Tours in the same year, in 1917. Only 3 other riders managed to repeat the “Autumn double”: Rik van Looy in 1959, Jo de Roo in 1962 and 1963 and Philippe Gilbert in 2009.
After his retirement from professional cycling Thys’s interest turned to archery.
He died on the 16th of January in 1971.
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