Triple Worlds winner since last Sunday, Spain's Oscar Freire joins a select
band of legendary heros.
Whilst every rider Dreams of wearing the ``Maillot Arc en Ciel'', the
``Rainbow Jersey'' that sets the current owner above and apart from his
contemporaries, few are the men who have earned this privilege.
And few and far between have been the Champions who have repeated the feat in
a subsequent year.
But there are men, superhuman perhaps, who have won three World Championship
jerseys.
Italy's Alfredo Binda, who led fellow Italians Costante Girardengo and Domenico
Piemontesi home for an all Italian podium in Nurburgring, Germany in the very
first Worlds back in 1927 after two thirds of the field had called it a day
due to the freezing rain and wind squalls that buffeted the course, and the
soul destroying 20 percent Hedwigshohe climb that had to be tackled
eight times, was, fittingly enough, the first to earn three Worlds Jersey's
with victories in 1927, 1930 and 1932.
Then came that Belgian superstar of the Road and Track, Rik van Steenbergen, a
prolific winner and one of the All Time Greats who won in 1949, 1956 and 1957.
Then another Belgian, the man Universally proclaimed as Greatest rider of All
Time, Eddy Merckx, managed the triple in 1967, 1971 and 1974.
But then came Oscar Freire some 30 years later to carve his name into the
History Books with his dramatic third win last Sunday in Verona.
Welcome to the Club, Oscar.
--
le Vent a Dos, Davey Crockett
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