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:
“Not the less does nature continue to fill the heart of youth with suggestions of his enthusiasm, and there are now men,—if indeed I can speak in the plural number,—more exactly, I will say, I have just been conversing with one man, to whom no weight of adverse experience will make it for a moment appear impossible, that thousands of human beings might exercise towards each other the grandest and simplest of sentiments, as well as a knot of friends, or a pair of lovers.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For youth is a frail thing, not unafraid.
Firstly inclined to take what it is told.
Firstly inclined to lean. Greedy to give
Faith tidy and total. To a total God.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)