2015: The End of a a Long Life’s Journey for a Champion Cyclist

January 30, 2015

Only a dozen days after his 92^nd birthday, road cyclist Gerardus “Gerrit” Petrus Voorting died at his home in the municipality and town of Heemskerk in the Netherlands. Voorting, who had been born in the Dutch municipality of Velsen, began his cycling career in 1947. His younger brother Adrianus “Adri” Voorting (1931-1961) also competed in cycling races.

Gerrit Voorting’s notable accomplishments while pedaling a bicycle included being awarded a silver medal in the individual road race at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London. As a professional racer, Voorting won the fourth stage of the 1953 Tour de France and the second stage of the 1956 edition of that road cycling race.

Voorting retired from competitive cycling altogether by the early 1960s and, at least for a little while, owned and operated a bicycle shop in the Dutch city and municipality of Roosendaal. “His cycling career never really ended,” reported the Dutch media platform at the time of Voorting’s death. “He loved to talk about it; he was part of the legend. He continued cycling, and hard, well into old age.”

Photo Credit: Eric Koch (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Photographs_by_Eric_Koch) for Anefo; licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/nl/deed.en

For more information on Gerrit Voorting, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrit_Voorting