Raymond Poulidor

Raymond Poulidor (15 April 1936 - 13 November 2019), nicknamed "Pou-Pou", was a French professional cyclist whose career overlapped with those of Jacques Anquetil and Eddy Merckx. He became known as "The Eternal Second": he never won the Tour de France, finishing second three times and third five times, the last of them in his final Tour at the age of 40, and never wore the yellow jersey in his 14 Tours, 12 of which he completed. He did win one Grand Tour, the 1964 Vuelta a España, and finished in the top ten in fifteen of the eighteen Grand Tours he rode. The son of small farmers near the hamlet of Masbaraud-Mérignat, where the Creuse meets Haute-Vienne east of Limoges, he left school at 14 to work on the farm. His underdog standing made him a public favourite.