1987

Full names? Race? Year? Bike?

The article didn't declare the surnames of the men:
Velominati ? Anatomy Of A Photo: Front Row Seat At The Gun Show

J.Higgins 

Drawing a blank here, but I sure would like to have legs like that!

eja_ bottecchia

Clearly from the Tour de France (by the race number).

What years did L’Equipe sponsor the Tour?

T-Mar

Assuming this is TdF picture as race number says L'Equipe in top band and jersey is French or Italian national team. Derailleur with bottom bracket chain tensioner places it 1947 -1950. Rider's short's say A. Leducq a French team of the era. Leading candidate would be Gino Sciardis, a Leducq rider who won a stage in the 1948 TdF.

Edit: Looks like he rode the TdF in both 1948 & 1949 while riding outside the TDF for Leducq, so it could be either year.

eja_ bottecchia

Check with the folks at the Horton Collection in San Francisco. They have an extensive collection of vintage cycling photographs. They may know about this one.

FBOATSB 

An image search confirms it.
Gino Sciardis in the 1949 Tour de France.

SamSpade1941 

Agreed ... People comment on my legs from time to time, but they look nothing like that. All that pushing tiny cogs up hills really really made that rider strong.

T-Mar

Muscular legs alone do not a cyclist make.

USAZorro

French flag stripes are vertical. This rider has horizontal stripes, which I believe are from the Netherlands. Start list from 1948 shows Dutch rider Henk de Hoog wearing #12 , which is whom I suspect is pictured here. fwiw, Henk is listed as DNF in 1948.

update: images do seem to confirm Sciardis is the rider. No rational explanation though for why the Italian team would have horizontal stripes in their jerseys though.

delbiker1 

Absolutely correct, but those are some strong looking leg muscles!

stardognine

Thank goodness. Mine are pretty spindly. 😁😉 Still, those kinda muscles would tend to give you a certain advantage. 🙂

T-Mar

Back in the days before sublimation, it was easier to manufacturer jerseys with horizontal stripes than vertical stripes. The national team jerseys used by both France and Italy in the TdF during this era used horizontal stripes.


Did you check the 1949 entry list to see who was assigned #12 ? Henk de Hoog never rode for A. Leducq, so the sponsorship on the shorts would indicate its not him.

T-Mar

They're great on the track and flat terrain but a hindrance when things go uphill for any significant distance..

USAZorro

I attempted to search on Leduc as my first effort, but found nada. I fell back to searching for #12 's with horizontal bands with appropriate colorations (eliminated Belgium), and with the absence of color, distinguishing orange from red and green from blue wasn't really possible. The 1949 start list shows the #12 rider as Sciardis.

1987

Yes, that seems to be correct.
But was the article made up, just to make a great story? Or was Gino also called André’? Confusing.

Funny. I was mostly interested in the whole scene with the loyal mechanic pouring oil (?) over the cogs directly from the bottle. But I agree, Gino had strong looking legs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gino_Sciardis
Photo album Photo album Gino Sciardis

rootboy 

Looks like a waste of good olive oil to me.

Bad Lag

Is it oil? What is going on?
Is this after a ride through water or mud?
Did the mechanic forget to oil the chain after a cleaning?

1987

Yes, of course it could also be water for cleaning of dust etc from those old unpaved roads.

T-Mar

Ironically. there may be an André in photo but it's the bicycle. The Leducq sponsorship on the cyclist's shorts refers to André Leducq, winner of the 1932 and 1933 TdF. In 1934 he started his own team with the bicycles being manufactured by Mercier and sometimes branded as André Leducq or A. Leducq. Given that the Italian team allowed Gino Bartali to ride his Vittoria equipped Bartali and Fausto Coppi to ride his Simplex equipped Bianchi, there's a very good possibility that the subject bicycle is Sciardis' Leducq bicycle from his commercial team.

qcpmsame 

Being that the picture came from the "Velomanati" website, and they have a worship of muscular legs like those shown, its not surprising at all. He does have some impressive "Guns", as the V-Folks tend to call them.

Bill

dddd

That mechanic might only have been pretending to pour oil on the cogs, you can see that the can is positioned so as to possibly push the rider forward for who knows how long.

Some things never change!