The forgotten founder of the Tour of Flanders

As with many of the other great events on the cycling calendar, the Tour of Flanders emerged from a desire to promote a newspaper, in this case Sportwereld. The race’s official history describes how the key moment in the race’s foundation came in the summer of 1912, just a few days after Odile Defraye had become the first Belgian rider to win the Tour de France. In early August, print company owner August de Maeght met with young sports journalist Karel Van Wijnendaele, then working for a publication called Sportvriend, to gauge his interest in working for Sportwereld, which was about to be launched.

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Peter Cossins has written about professional cycling since 1993 and is a contributing editor to Procycling. He is the author of The Monuments: The Grit and the Glory of Cycling's Greatest One-Day Races (Bloomsbury, March 2014) and has translated Christophe Bassons' autobiography, A Clean Break (Bloomsbury, July 2014). 

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