Video: The cyclist who crashed at 130kph - and came back to go even faster

A video has from British Pathé has been doing the rounds on social media this week showing a cyclist attempting to break the land speed more than half a century ago, and suffering a horrendous crash that almost ended his life. People have been wondering about the back story, so here it is.

The cyclist is José Meiffret, born in Saint-Raphaël on the Côte d'Azur in the south of France in 1913, who lived till a couple of weeks short of his 70th birthday.

The title his 1965 autobiography translates into English as ‘My Date With Death,’ and the video circulated this week shows the aftermath of a crash in 1952 when he was attempting to set a new motor-paced world record on the motor racing circuit at Montlhéry near Paris, nicknamed “the French Indianapolis” on account of its oval layout.

With his skull fractured in five places in that crash, which happened at nearly 130 kph, newspapers announced that his death was imminent, but he pulled through.

However, as this article from French website Le Petit Braquet relates, the following years were difficult and he contemplated suicide.

But the lure of the record proved too much to resist and in 1962 he became the first person to ride a bicycle at more than 200 kilometres an hour, clocking 204.778 kph while slipstreaming a gull-winged Mercedes 300SL on an autobahn in Germany.

This video, with commentary in Italian, is from an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to top 200kph while drafting the same car.

To hit that speed of more than 200kph, Meiffret was pushing an enormous chainring – one with no fewer than 130 teeth – on a bike with wooden rims which is now housed in a museum in Paris.

Among his friends and supporters was Henri Desgrange, the founder of the Tour de France, who once wrote the following words of encouragement to him: “Persevere, don’t despair. If people criticise you, it’s because you are in the right.”

 While Meiffret’s memory lives on, his record was surpassed in 1995, beaten by Dutch cyclist Fred Rompelberg, who set a speed of 268.83kph while drafting a dragster at Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, in 1995.

The British record of 180kph was set in 2013 by Isle of Man TT racer Guy Martin and was featured in an episode of his Channel 4 TV series, Speed with Guy Martin, with expert advice from existing record holder Dave Le Grys, who set his benchmark in 1985.