Marcel Kint

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.