Talk:Jean Robic

A fact from Jean Robic appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 5 November 2008, and was viewed approximately 4,620 times (disclaimer) (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that Jean Robic, winner of the 1947 Tour de France, was so light that at mountain summits he was handed lead and mercury-ballasted drinking bottles for gravity-assisted descents?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2008/November.

Wikipedia

Biography: Sports and Games

	Biography portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography, a collaborative effort to create, develop and organize Wikipedia's articles about people. All interested editors are invited to join the project and contribute to the discussion. For instructions on how to use this banner, please refer to the documentation.BiographyWikipedia:WikiProject BiographyTemplate:WikiProject Biographybiography articles
	Sports portal This article is supported by the sports and games work group.

France Low‑importance

	France portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject France, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of France on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.FranceWikipedia:WikiProject FranceTemplate:WikiProject FranceFrance articles
Low	This article has been rated as Low-importance on the project's importance scale.

Cycling: Tour de France

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Cycling, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of cycling on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.CyclingWikipedia:WikiProject CyclingTemplate:WikiProject Cyclingcycling articles
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the project's importance scale.
	This article is supported by Tour de France task force.

It is requested that an image or photograph of Jean Robic be included in this article to improve its quality. Please replace this template with a more specific media request template where possible.
The Free Image Search Tool or Openverse Creative Commons Search may be able to locate suitable images on Flickr and other web sites.

Upload

The Hobgoblin of the Brittany Moor

I'd like to initiate a discussion of Robic's supposed nickname "The Hobgoblin of the Brittany Moor" ("le farfadet de la lande bretonne").

René de Latour might normally be considered a reliable source for information of this sort. However, no French-language source that I've been able to find supports his claim that this nickname was applied to Robic. Robic's sometime team-mate Jean-Marie Goasmat, nicknamed "le farfadet de Pluvigner", was also small, slight, and had big ears. Pluvigner is a village in Morbihan, Brittany. My personal view is that it's likely Latour has confused the two.

The *only* French-language example of the use of the phrase in a cycling context that I've been able to find is in reference to Goasmat:

tinyurl k278ofe

All English-language online sources appear to derive from the Wikipedia edit of October 2008 quoting Latour:

tinyurl pb2nvs2 (1990-2008)

tinyurl k4utmd4 (2008-2014)

My feeling is that the reference should be removed unless it can be corroborated from a French-language source. At very least, it seems to me that the claim should be given less prominence than it currently has: three instances in the article including the first paragraph.

94.11.236.215 (talk) 19:00, 17 November 2014 (UTC)[reply]

He may well have confused the two. I have it in a cutting from a British magazine, Sporting Cyclist, for which he wrote. But, knowledgeable though he was, he frequently made mistakes, as we're all prone to do. He was also fond of playing jokes on his innocent British readers. I remember he said that Jean Graczyk's nickname of Popof was because of his "habit of popping off down the road." I've seen that repeated many times, without any query of why a Frenchman would have such a complicated play on words in English. De Latour knew, but his readers wouldn't, that Popof in French is slang for a Pole.

Please do go ahead and delete the hobgoblin reference. I won't sulk.

happy days

léo

Les may not sulk, but I will, a tad. René de Latour is considered a reliable source, so we should preserve his description and the very well argued caveat above as an inline note, thus we preserve and present a clear picture with historic integrity - not just an edited view. I will start the Note structure now, and other editors are free to further refine the text. I won't sulk about that. :) Chienlit (talk) 14:41, 9 December 2014 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 3 external links on Jean Robic. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.radiofrance.fr/reportage/dossiers/tour_2003/histoire/legende.php
Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20090215231055/http://memoire-du-cyclisme.net/dossiers/dos_cyclismag_robic_credo.php to http://www.memoire-du-cyclisme.net/dossiers/dos_cyclismag_robic_credo.php
Corrected formatting/usage for http://www.memoire-du-cyclisme.net/dossiers/dos_buc_1947.php

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 14:31, 20 April 2017 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified one external link on Jean Robic. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:

When you have finished reviewing my changes, you may follow the instructions on the template below to fix any issues with the URLs.

This message was posted before February 2018. After February 2018, "External links modified" talk page sections are no longer generated or monitored by InternetArchiveBot. No special action is required regarding these talk page notices, other than regular verification using the archive tool instructions below. Editors have permission to delete these "External links modified" talk page sections if they want to de-clutter talk pages, but see the RfC before doing mass systematic removals. This message is updated dynamically through the template {{source check}} (last update: 5 June 2024).

If you have discovered URLs which were erroneously considered dead by the bot, you can report them with this tool.
If you found an error with any archives or the URLs themselves, you can fix them with this tool.

Cheers.—InternetArchiveBot (Report bug) 12:16, 17 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]