Walter Godefroot, former cyclist and team leader, died at the age of 82. Belgian media report this on Monday. He suffered from Parkinson’s disease in the last years of his life. The Belgian top athlete achieved great successes in the sixties and seventies. Among other things, he won the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège twice. There are also ten stages in the Tour de France to his name and in 1964 he won a bronze medal at the Games in Tokyo.
“A grim rival of Eddy Merckx” recalls the Belgian news channel VRT Godefroot. The two Belgian cyclists ended up in battle in the sixties and seventies during the big rounds in the sixties and seventies. Godefroot excelled most on ‘slopes and on cobblestones’, while Merckx, also known as ‘the cannibal’, was superior in the big rounds.
“Walter was certainly a big rider, he was a little faster than me, but above all a complete rider. He could more than some people thought. A big champion has left us,” Merckx told the Belgian sports channel Sporza.
After his career, Godefroot was repeatedly asked whether he used doping as a rider. “I don’t wish to answer that question,” Godefroot told in 2013 The Flemish Radio 1. “Look, in the 60s anabolica therapies were commonplace. Until it turned out that it was promoting. Where is the boundary between medical guidance and doping? Where does one end and the other starts?”
Doping scandals
After his career as a cyclist, Godefroot continued as a cycling manager and in the nineties and zero also belonged to the ‘world top’, writes the Belgian newspaper The standard. It is also the dark years of cycling, with the doping scandals that piled up.
The Danish Bjarne Riis and the German rider Jan Ullrich, among others, achieved great successes among Godefroot. But later they confessed to having used doping, including the well -known agent EPO.
Jef D’Hont, former caretaker of Cycling Ploeg Telekom, accused former team leader Godefroot in the book Memoirs of a cycling carer (2007) of involvement in providing doping to riders. The court in Ghent decided In 2010, however, that the former caretaker had to pay 7,500 euros in compensation to Godefroot, because the then team boss “only informed [was] of the doping use and [gebruik] toad […] Without actively cooperating ”.
Former rider Peter Wonen told in 2013 NRC That Godefroot, among other things, rang the bell at Wielerunie UCI in the early days of EPO. “Nothing has been done with that – apart from setting up a hematocrit limit. And now we have a farce of seven tours without a winner.”