Racing bike. And go. To unload and recharge, to escape and chase, to think and dream, to pedal and plan. Enough to be nominated Monsieur Velo, Mr. Bicycle, title attributed not as a tribute or in honor or in memory, but with concrete objectives and urgent tasks: to coordinate, between various ministries and not only the Environment Ministry which had established it, the development of the use of the bicycle in France. Mission accomplished.
Haroun Tazieff, 110 years since his birth, tomorrow. Son of a Tatar prince, a medical officer killed on the front of the First World War in Russia, and of a teacher of Chemistry and Natural Sciences, as well as a painter and communist, Haroun was born in Warsaw a couple of weeks before the outbreak of the First World War and grows up in Georgia. At the October Revolution, 1917, mother and son fled to Belgium. The mother gets a professorship at the University of Liège and meets another manthe poet Robert Vivier, who acts as Haroun’s father.
Having received Belgian citizenship, Tazieff enrolled at university and graduated in Agronomy. It is in this period that he rides a bike and becomes passionate about cycling, it is in this period that he begins to play rugby, it is in this period that he also dedicates himself to boxing, it seems that he has a record of 51 victories in 52 matches, he is even selected to participate in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, those of Jesse Owens , those of Ondina Valla, but also those of Adolf Hitler, and it is precisely “so as not to find myself forced to extend my arm in front of Hitler” that Tazieff renounces. However, during the Resistance he did not give up on blowing up the Liège station. Once the war was over, and he also graduated in Geology, he accepted a job offer as a mining engineer in Katanga, in the Belgian Congo. And this is where life explodes in him. On March 1, 1948, a telegram arrived in his office: “Kituro volcano erupted. Stop. Go to the location and report. Stop”. His baptism of fire.
Tazieff looks, sees, is enchanted, falls in love, photographs, films. If as a child her sign was water and her dream was to explore the ice, now her sign is fire and his dream is to observe volcanoes. Etna, Stromboli, Nyiragongo in Congo, Fujiyama in Japan, Andes, Iceland… The international scientific scene is split: Tazieff is self-taught. And he himself is, by nature, volcanic. In his free time he climbs, plays rugby (he plays a match between volcanologists in asbestos suits on Etna, he is part of an Old team and calls it Sherpas) and rides a bicycle.
On the internet, among videos that portray him on Etna or Stromboli, even inside the craters, there is one (https://www.ina.fr/ina-eclaire-actu/video/cpb7805616501/portrait-d- haroun-tazieff) in which “the swallower of lava”, “the wanderer of volcanoes”, “the poet of fire” he also rides a bicycle, his racing bike. And it tells the beauty (and importance) of cycling. Before him, that role of coordinator had been assigned by Monsieur Vélo to the actor Jean Carmet and the skier Jean-Claude Killy, after him, Madame Vélo, to the actress Stéphane Audran. Exploring, there is also an issue of the magazine “Vélo”, it is number 135 from 1979, Tazieff on the cover, standing on the pedals, walking like a “grimpeur”, the report is entitled “How Tazieff chooses the good bicycle!”. And by browsing, you discover how in Tazieff, France, bicycle parking has been dedicated, scientific high schools with bicycle parking and streets with bicycle parking have been dedicated.
Tazieff died in 1998, he was 84 years old, and is buried in the Passy cemetery, Paris. On his tomb, a pre-Columbian work. Tazieff, especially as a senior, had a beautiful runner’s face. And isn’t that fire inside him the same one that burns in the riders at the Giro d’Italia?
