Youth
Joaquim Francisco Agostinho was born in a small village "Brejenjas" near Torres Vedras. He lived for several years in Casalinhos de Alfaiata. Out for a ride as a youth, he encountered Sporting Clube de Portugal's cycling team on a road near Casalinhos de Alfaiata - Torres Vedras. He began an impromptu race; the team could did not catch him, even though Agostinho was riding a standard steel bicycle.
Agostinho fought for three years with the Portuguese army in Angola and Mozambique during the Portuguese Colonial War of 1961-1974. Jean-Pierre Douçot, who became his mechanic as a professional, said:
"It was his captain during the war in Mozambique who discovered him. When he carried messages on a heavy bike, he took two hours to ride 50km when the others took five."
Read more about this topic: Joaquim Agostinho
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, “the sweet seriousness of sixteen,” the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,—we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In my youth I studied for ostentation; later, a little to gain wisdom; now, for recreation; never for gain.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A Youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown,
Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.”
—Thomas Gray (1716–1771)