How to Wear A Cycling Cap: Fred De Bruyne

Wear one when you are all in.

"Look at his feet, look at his feet" (check CyclingNews to find what that means).

Let me be frank for a minute - in a rather short period of time (a span of eight years) Belgian Fred De Bruyne kicked butt, stomping his competition, and winning many of the biggest races of the time. Those wins started in 1954 when he won three stages of the Tour de France. Two years later he won another three stages, in addition to Paris-Nice, Milan-San Remo, and Liege-Bastogne-Liege. In 1957 he added the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, and Paris-Tours to his, now stellar list of Classics victories. 1958 brought second wins in both Liege-Bastogne-Liege and Paris-Nice, and then in 1959 De Bruyne claimed a third win at Liege. He capped an already impressive career palmares with a 1961 win in Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. If those road wins were not enough to make him one of the most prolific "big-race" champions of the era he also, as did many road racers in those days, take his talent to the track where he won the Six Days of Ghent in both 1957 and 1959. For three straight years 1956 to 1958 De Bruyne won the year-long Desgrange-Colombo point competition.

De Bruyne kept close to the sport following his retirement - he became a team manager, a team spokesman, a commentator, and wrote the biographies of Rik Van Steenbergen, Rik Van Looy,  Patrick Sercu, Peter Post, and the memoirs of his own career.