1. Joaquim Agostinho was champion of Portugal in six successive years.
23 Facts About Joaquim Agostinho
1. 2.
Joaquim Agostinho rode the Tour de France 13 times and finished all but once, winning on Alpe d'Huez in 1979, and finishing third twice.
3.
Joaquim Agostinho lived for several years in Casalinhos de Alfaiata.
4.
Joaquim Agostinho began an impromptu race; the team could not catch him, even though Agostinho was riding a standard steel bicycle.
5.
Joaquim Agostinho started racing as an amateur at the age of 25 years in some Portuguese races, wearing some borrowed cycling wear lent by Joao Roque.
6.
That year Joaquim Agostinho rode the world professional road championship at Imola and came 16th after initiating the move which brought victory for the Italian, Vittorio Adorni.
7.
Joaquim Agostinho was already 26, a late age to turn professional, he won two stages that year.
8.
Joaquim Agostinho had one of the heavy falls that characterised his career, crashing on the cinder track at Divonne-les-Bains and being carried away with concussion, amnesia and cuts.
9.
Joaquim Agostinho restarted next morning and rode as far as Paris, finishing the race eighth.
10.
Joaquim Agostinho rode 13 Tours de France from 1969 to 1983, came third in 1978 and 1979 and won four stages.
11.
Joaquim Agostinho stayed with de Gribaldy as his teams were successively sponsored by Frimatic, Hoover, and Van Cauter Magniflex.
12.
Joaquim Agostinho was a ball of muscles of out-of-the-ordinary power.
13.
Joaquim Agostinho had a legendary kindness and his only ambition was to be good, gentle Tinho.
14.
Eddy Merckx said in 1969, the year when he and Joaquim Agostinho made their debuts in the Tour de France, that Joaquim Agostinho was the rival who worried him most, indeed the only rival who had worried him at all.
15.
Joaquim Agostinho was Portuguese champion in six successive years, from 1968 to 1973.
16.
Joaquim Agostinho was a gifted climber and a consistent leader in both in the Vuelta a Espana and the Tour de France where he was a winner at Alpe d'Huez.
17.
Joaquim Agostinho might be quiet for days on end, when suddenly the racing fever would grip him, not always in the mountains, and away he went.
18.
Joaquim Agostinho was caught three times in drugs checks: in the Tour of Portugal in 1969 and 1973, and the Tour de France of 1977.
19.
Joaquim Agostinho was leading the Tour of the Algarve at Quarteira in April 1984 when a dog ran into the road a few hundred metres before the finish.
20.
Joaquim Agostinho hit it and fell to the ground, hitting his head.
21.
Joaquim Agostinho remounted and crossed the line accompanied by other riders.
22.
Joaquim Agostinho then went to a hotel, where his head was dressed in ice.
23.
Joaquim Agostinho fell into a coma in the ambulance and subsequently died.