Marcel Kint

Marcel Kint
Kint after winning stage 19 in the 1936 Tour de France
Personal information
Full nameMarcel Kint
NicknameDe Zwarte Arend (the black eagle)
Born(1914-09-20)20 September 1914
Zwevegem, Belgium
Died23 March 2002(2002-03-23) (aged 87)
Kortrijk, Belgium
Team information
DisciplineRoad
RoleRider
Professional teams
1935Independent (semi-professional)
1936Mercier–Hutchinson
1937Fr. Pélissier
1937–1938Mercier–Hutchinson
1938–1939Fr. Pélissier
1939–1951Mercier–Hutchinson
1950–1951Girardengo
Major wins
Grand Tours
Tour de France
6 individual stages (1936, 1938, 1939)

One-day races and Classics

World Road Race Championships (1938)
National Road Race Championship (1939)
Paris–Roubaix (1943)
Gent–Wevelgem (1949)
La Flèche Wallonne (1943, 1944, 1945)
Paris–Brussels (1938)
Championship of Flanders (1935)
Medal record
Men's road bicycle racing
Representing  Belgium
World Championships
1938 ValkenburgElite Men's Road Race
1946 ZürichElite Men's Road Race

Marcel Kint (20 September 1914 23 March 2002) was a Belgian professional road bicycle racer who won 31 races between 1935 and 1951. His finest year was 1938 when he won the World Cycling Championship, three stages of the Tour de France and the season-long competition equivalent to today's UCI ProTour.

He specialized in one-day classic cycle races and won Paris–Roubaix, Gent–Wevelgem, Paris–Brussels. He was the only three-time consecutive winner of La Flèche Wallonne until 2016 when Alejandro Valverde won his third consecutive race and fourth overall.

Kints honours would have been much bigger but at his sporting peak, his career was halted for a few years by World War II.

The outbreak of the war would make Marcel Kint the longest reigning world champion in the history of cycling. Kint would hold the rainbow jersey until 1946: eight years, and it could have been nine. In the final of the 1946 world championship in Zurich, Kint and Swiss rider Hans Knecht were riding to the finish, when Kint was stopped by fanatical home supporters, causing him to finish second.