Talk:Jean Robic

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)


 * 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)

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