Felice Gimondi

Lore & Background

In the late 1960s, the Tour de France belonged to a handful of giants, and Felice Gimondi was among them. His 1965 victory came at the age of twenty-three, a young man from the hills above Bergamo who attacked on the mountains with a patience and precision that left rivals gasping. He did not sprint to the line; he simply made the mountain his own and rode away, often alone, in a way that felt almost premeditated. The French public, who had long admired Italian climbers, adopted him with a warmth that bordered on reverence.

His rivalry with Eddy Merckx in the early 1970s is one of cycling's great narratives. Where Merckx was the all-conquering, relentless engine, Gimondi was the surgical climber who could find a single, devastating attack on a narrow alpine road and never look back. Their duels in the Alps and Pyrenees drew crowds to the roadside who had come to watch a war of styles: brute force versus feline grace.

Gimondi's legacy in the Tour is not merely the yellow jersey of '65. It is the image of a rider who could hold a group of the world's best on a sustained gradient, who could time-trial with the smoothness of a metronome, and who rode with a quiet, almost secretive confidence that made the peloton uneasy. He died in 1999, but in the memory of anyone who watched the 1960s and '70s on a small television set, the Cat is still climbing.

In Their Own Story

The road to the summit of the Col du Galibier was empty of spectators, the kind of high, thin air where the only sound is the creak of a chain and the rasp of breath through clenched teeth. Gimondi sat at the back of a reduced group of six, his head low, his hands still on the drops. He had been watching them for twenty kilometres, the way a cat watches a bird through glass. Then, at the first sharp left, he moved. No shout, no warning. Just a shift of weight, a click of the chain, and a steady, inexorable acceleration that peeled the others away one by one. By the time the last rival could see his back, it was already small, a dark shape against the grey sky, climbing as if the road were flat and the air were water. In the village below, a woman who had been selling chestnuts all day simply stopped chewing and watched, because you do not look away from a man riding like that.

Reader's Guide

In the villages along the Italian and French Alps, there is a tradition of lining the roadside with homemade banners, hand-painted signs, and even small shrines to the climbers who pass through. Gimondi, more than any other rider of his generation, became the subject of this devotion. In Bergamo and its surrounding valleys, families would set out chairs on the narrow cobbled roads and wait for hours, not for a sprinter, but for the moment the peloton hit the first sustained gradient and the Cat began his slow, inevitable separation.

What made this different from watching a sprinter is the patience required. A climb in the Tour can take forty, fifty minutes. The crowd doesn't cheer in bursts; they murmur, they lean forward, they hold their breath. The rider up front is doing something almost invisible—managing cadence, managing effort, managing the geometry of the road. To the people on the roadside, that is a kind of prayer. They are watching someone hold still while the world moves around them.

This tradition shapes how the Tour is experienced in the mountains. It is not a spectacle of speed; it is a spectacle of endurance, of a single human body negotiating a relationship with stone and air. And in the memory of the people who live those roads, Gimondi is not a name in a results column. He is the reason they put the chairs out in the first place.

Did You Know?

• Gimondi's nickname 'Il Gatto' (The Cat) referred to his watchful, patient riding style—he would sit quietly at the back of a group on a climb before launching a single, decisive attack.
• His 1965 Tour de France victory made him one of the few Italian riders to win the race in the 1960s, a period dominated by Belgian and French contenders.
• Gimondi was a three-time Grand Tour winner in a single season (1969: Giro, Vuelta, and a strong Tour campaign), a feat of consistency that underscored his all-around dominance.
• His rivalry with Eddy Merckx in the early 1970s produced some of the most memorable alpine stage duels in Tour history, with both riders trading attacks on narrow mountain roads.