He never won the Tour de France or any other major cycling race.

And yet in the past week the death of Robert Marchand triggered a flood of accolades, not only in France, which are otherwise only usual with the stars of the scene.

One wouldn't even be surprised if a spot in cycling heaven was reserved for Marchand among the greats.

After all, no heart beat longer for the French’s favorite sport.

Marchand died at the fabulous age of 109.

At 105 he had celebrated his last world record. In January 2017, at the Vélodrome National near Paris, he placed it in class 105 plus with 22.574 kilometers within an hour, a class that the international cycling federation UCI had only recently included in its regulations. Marchand, who is surprised, has remained the only starter in this Methuselah cycling classification to this day. Incidentally, he holds the hour record for people over 100 with 26.952 kilometers. A record of the century this too.

Marchand was born on November 26, 1911 in Amiens in the north of France.

His life was as colorful as it was adventurous.

In the thirties of the last century he worked as a firefighter in Paris.

After the Second World War, he first lived in Venezuela and Canada, he was a woodcutter, worked on sugar cane plantations, and on his return to France he was a shoe seller and wine merchant.

And athletes, of course.

He was a gymnast, boxer - and cyclist.

His greatest success on the bike?

As a young man, he once finished seventh in the Grand Prix des Nations, an individual time trial over 140 kilometers.

1.52 meters tall and 50 kilograms in weight

Marchand then temporarily put the bike in the corner, and did not start training again until the late 1970s. He rode L'Ardéchoise twelve times, a demanding cycling marathon in the Ardèche department, on the route of which in 2011 even a pass was named after him. At the age of 86, he was still driving the everyone's version of the 250-kilometer legendary Paris – Roubaix race.

Marchand set another spectacular record in 2012 at the age of 100 in the Velodrome of Lyon, when he drove 100 kilometers in 4:17:27 hours, which corresponds to an average speed of 23.3 kilometers per hour. To celebrate his 104th birthday, he drove 20 kilometers on the Ardèche in 2016 on the time trial track of the 13th stage of the Tour de France, which Tom Dumoulin won at the time. Marchand, who was only 1.52 meters tall and 50 kilograms, mixed up the cycling scene at regular intervals as he got older. It was not until 2016, at the age of 105, that he ended the hunt for further records after his last record run. The doctors had suggested it to him.

Marchand died in a nursing home in Mitry-Mory, a town near Paris. The little man, who was a trade unionist and a member of the Communist Party PCF for many decades and was involved in numerous social projects, was not only appreciated by sport, but also by politics. Or at least tried to. In 2009 he was to receive the gold medal for youth and sport from Minister of Health Roselyne Bachelot. He refused. He did not want to have anything to do with representatives of the conservative UMP party, which has been calling itself Les Républicains since 2015.

He would have had no objection to the words with which Charlotte Blandiot-Faride, the communist mayor of Mitry-Mory, said goodbye. “Robert was a great champion,” she wrote. “A champion who made us dream and still kept his head on his shoulders. He was a friend, someone who was involved in the trade unions and was politically left. He was the figurehead of our city. ”And maybe it is even more than that: a figurehead of cycling.