Gold medalist in the team pursuit in London in 1948, Charles Coste was the world’s oldest Olympic champion: he died Thursday at the age of 101, French Sports Minister Marina Ferrari announced on Sunday.
After having long occupied an anonymous place in the memory of French sport, it emerged from the shadows during the 2024 Games in Paris, for its 100th anniversary.
The vast majority of French people got to know him in front of their screens on July 26, 2024, during the opening ceremony, when the centenarian track rider transmitted the Olympic flame in a wheelchair to the last torchbearers, Teddy Riner and Marie-José Pérec.
Since the death in January 2025 of Hungarian gymnast Agnès Keleti, Charles Coste, born February 8, 1924, was the oldest living Olympic champion.
“My mother said that at ten to twelve years old, I said that I would be a general or an Olympic champion”he reported in January 2024. He was therefore Olympic champion. In a sport, cycling, which he had discovered as a child. Under the windows of his father’s wine estate, in Ollioules (Var), his idols of the time paraded every summer: Antonin Magne, Georges Speicher and André Leducq, successive winners of the Tour de France in the early 1930s.
A “forgotten” person in French sport
After promising initial successes in regional races, the outbreak of war forced him to put aside his ambitions for a time: his parents enrolled him as an apprentice fitter at the Toulon arsenal. After the Liberation, Charles Coste joined the legendary Vélo Club de Levallois, which was a hotbed of French cycling in the interwar period, and discovered the joys of the track in the velodromes of the Paris region.
In 1947, he won his only French champion title, in pursuit, and postponed his move to the pros to participate a year later in the London Games – the first since those organized in Berlin in 1936 under the Nazi regime –, reserved at the time for amateurs.
Designated captain of the French pursuit team, he crossed the Channel by ferry and lodged, with his gang, « ABCD » (initials of Pierre Adam, Serge Blusson, Charles Coste and Fernand Decanali), within a US Air Force training camp, in a London suburb still disfigured by bombing. After eliminating the British, favorites in the semi-final in front of their home crowd at the Herne Hill velodrome, the French won gold by beating Italy.
“At the time, there was a very small podium. And you were given the medal in a box, not around your neck like today. What disappointed us a little was that we were given a bouquet and then we were told: well there won’t be the Marseillaise because we couldn’t find the record! »he laughed.
On his return to Paris, he was received at the Élysée like all the medalists by Vincent Auriol, then President of the Republic. But he had to wait until 2022 to receive his Legion of Honor, the decoration of Olympic medalists having only been established in 1964 by General de Gaulle, for the Innsbruck Winter Games. “I was the only Olympic champion who did not have the medal”affirmed the man who has long seen himself as “a forgotten one” French sport.
After the Games, he signed his first professional contract and won the 1949 Grand Prix des Nations – a prestigious time trial event that has since disappeared – against his « ami » Fausto Coppi, “the greatest” cyclist of all time. “Unfortunately for him, he was tired that day and I won”he said, modestly.
It was the greatest victory of his professional career – which also included a Paris-Limoges in 1953 – during which he did not shine in the Grand Tours, with two retirements from the Tour de France (1952, 1957) and four participations in the Tour of Italy without a stage victory.
