The first President of the Union Cycliste Internationale UCI), Emile De Beukelaer, died on January 23, 1922, just a few months after creating the UCI Road World Championships.
It was a rainy Thursday in Antwerp (Belgium) at the end of January 1922. A cloud of black umbrellas offered protection from the deluge for those gathered in front of the church of Saint-Laurent then within the cemetery of Kiel. Under these dark skies, the crowd ignored the weather. Both the anonymous and high dignitaries gathered to pay tribute to Emile De Beukelaer, an icon of Antwerp and the first President of the Union Cycliste Internationale, who died of the flu a few months after the first UCI Road World Championships, whose centenary we celebrated in Flanders (Belgium) in 2021.
Emile De Beukelaer was only 54 years old when illness took his life but his influence had already been guiding Belgian and then world cycling for several decades, creating a legacy that’s still very much alive a century later.
The pioneer had been a rider himself, three-time Belgian Champion i(1885, 1887 and 1888), and was a visionary and committed activist. “He had understood, from the advent of cycling, what considerable importance this means of locomotion was going to take on, not only in the practice of sport, but in the field of tourism, road improvements, international relations and from the point of view of national industry,” said Oscar Rémy, who succeeded De Beukelaer as President of the Belgian Cycling League.
"It is unquestionably one of the noblest figures in sport who is disappearing," added the Brussels newspaper L'Illustration Sportive, displaying on the front page a portrait of the late UCI President, arms crossed, moustache erect, and hair brushed.
"The good Antwerp Giant"
The same illustration, emblematic of the man who was also co-founder of the Antwerp Bicycle Club in 1881, was used by the UCI to salute Emile De Beukelaer on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the creation of the body, recorded on 14 April 1900 in Paris (France). Half a century later, journalist Victor Breyer, himself a delegate of the National Cycling Association (USA) when the UCI was created, recalled:
“The debates continued all day, interrupted only by a pleasant lunch offered by Riguelle [Alfred Riguelle, Vice-President of the French Cycling Federation]. They took place in an atmosphere devoid of passion and most cordial, complete agreement having never ceased to reign between the participants, both on the goal to reach and on the means of achieving it. The time lacking to draw up detailed statutes […] only the main lines of the UCI chart were adopted, and in the first place the principle governing the relations of the Federations between them, which proclaimed the sovereignty of each for all questions of interior administration.”
Breyer added what seemed to be self-evident to him: “The post of president went to the good Antwerp giant Emile De Beukelaer, who was to keep it until his death in 1922.”
The creation of the first UCI Road World Championships
The six signatories of the UCI founding minutes also settled on the dates of the World Championships on 12, 16 and 19 August in Paris. The event, on the track of the Parc des Princes in Paris, then consisted of sprint and motor-paced events, for amateurs and professionals alike. Cycling was enjoying an international golden age and these track Worlds highlighted its growth until the 1914 edition in Copenhagen, which was interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War.
The first post-War UCI World Championships returned to Antwerp in 1920 and Emile De Beukelaer naturally presided over the Organising Committee, in the velodrome which he’d founded himself nearly 30 years earlier. International cycling was back, and the President of the UCI had new projects to carry out.
A few weeks earlier, the leaders of the UCI had met again in Paris, 20 years after the creation of the body. De Beukelaer then made this historic announcement: “On this day of April 14, 1920, on the occasion of our Congress, it was almost unanimously decided to create the first UCI Road World Championships. The race will take place in one year, in 1921, in Copenhagen, Denmark.”
The Swede Gunnar Sköld would enter the history books by becoming the first winner of the road race. An opportunity for which he and his successors could thank Emile De Beukelaer.