Godefroot was the man who killed Eddy Merckx from even more victories and in epojears led team with champions

You must have been an extraordinary cyclist if you also have the cobblestone classic Paris-Roubaix in addition to Liège-Bastogne-Liège (in 1967) and the Tour of Flanders (in 1968 and ’78, at the age of 34). It is an even greater achievement if you have done that in classics in which the very best rider – at least that of the last century – was at the start, Eddy Merckx, ‘De Kannibaal’. Walter Godefroot was one of the greatest rivals of Merckx two years younger, who crossed the line in Roubaix in Hell of the North in 1969 – more than two and a half minutes after his countryman.

“Paris-Roubaix was made for me,” said Godefroot in 2000 in an interview with NRC Handelsblad. “I saw riders with gloves and blisters on their hands. Even without gloves I never had problems with that. You are a type for Paris-Roubaix or not. We were also raised here on the cobblestones. When I rode with the youth, Flanders was full of it.”

Godefroot also applies as the ‘discoverer’ of the Koppenberg, the illustrious climb he knew from training rides and which was included in the Tour of Flanders in 1976, after he had alerted the friendly course builder.

On Monday, the Belgian who knew a second cycling life as a team leader, including Tour winners Bjarne Riis and Jan Ullrich, and sprint cannon Erik Zabel, although it was in the years that Doping (EPO) was in the Wielersport commonplace, also with his team Deutsche Telekom (later Telekom, then T-Mobile). Godefroot, born in Ghent, had Parkinson’s in recent years. The Louis van Gaal of cycling, such as the Belgian journalist and NRC-Columnist Hugo Camps called him in an interview was 82 years old.

Device gymnastics

His father was a truck driver and cyclist (and just not a professional), his mother worked in a textile factory. Just before Walter Godefroot started cycling, he became champion of East Flanders in the device gymnastics. “I would rather do gymnastics than cycling, that was real love,” he said in NRC Handelsblad. Yet he followed the advice of an uncle to start races. A day after that incentive, he rode his first game, in Zevergem, “on a bike from my father and with pants and a sweater from acquaintances.” The young Godefroot initially worked during the day as a carpenter and trained in the evenings. He was proud of his simple descent – it kept him modest for his life.

At the age of 21 he broke through, with bronze in the road race at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo, Merckx became twelfth there. A year later, he became a first -year profit champion of Belgium, by beating Neoprof Merckx and his brother -in -law Tuur Decabooter. Soon he got the mark from Flandrien Printed, a geuzen name for a driver. In 1972 he once again became Belgian champion, again for Merckx.

“Walter was certainly a big rider, he was a little faster than me, but above all a complete rider,” said 80-year-old Merckx on Monday on the website of the Belgian TV channel Sporza. “A big champion has left us.” For Merckx, Godefroot also meant a lot because he had given his son Axel the opportunity to become cycling pro, in 1994 at Team Deutsche Telekom, the team that grew under his leadership into the strongest team in the peloton.

Champs-Elysées

At the end of the previous Tour de France, when the Belgian Wout van Aert crossed the line on the Champs-Elysées as the winner, after being driven away at the Tadej Pogacar geltruidrager Pogacar, the Belgian TV commentators also dropped the name of Walter Godefroot. Fifty years ago on the Champs-Elysées was the finish line of the Tour for the first time and Godefroot won the mass sprint there.

In addition to one ride in the Giro and two in the Vuelta, Godefroot won ten stages in the Tour (and the green jersey, in 1970, for number two Merckx) for the best sprinter, but he was not a good climber and therefore not a rider. In France, however, he participated for years around the overall victory as a team boss, at the time that almost the entire peloton was on the forbidden blooddoping agent EPO, also with his Telekom team.

Zoom in

With the Dane Bjarne Riis as the final winner in 1996 and a year later the German Jan Ullrich in yellow on stage in Paris. Later both acquainted that they had used doping at that time.

Godefroot has always denied that he knew of systematic doping use in his team, an accusation that the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel in June 1999, under the headline “Those illegal schools,” But he had more than the appearance. In 2007, Jef d’Hont, the Belgian caretaker at Telekom from 1992 to 1996, pointed in his book Memoirs of a cycling carer Godefroot as the organizer of systematic doping use. The team leader went to court and after he had ruled that Godefroot was aware of doping use but had not actively participated in it, the caretaker had to pay him a substantial compensation.

Naive

Godefroot, in his own words, delegated the medical matters to the team doctors, as was customary in many teams, and he always assumed that they were acting in the interest of the health of the riders. Godefroot claimed that he had stepped to chairman Hein Verbruggen of the International Cycling Union UCI in 1996, because he “suspected that things happened that were harmful to the health of the riders.” A year later, the UCI introduced hematocrit checks. Riders who had too high a hematocrit value (so too thick blood) were given a starting ban.

Although he knew that EPO was used in his team, Godefroot refused to consider it a confession of guilt, he said in 2007, when he was a consultant to the Kazakh team Astana: “I don’t stay innocent, but we don’t live in an ideal world. I could only do my best to protect the health of the riders. I am naive.” To be portrayed as unscrupulous, he said visibly emotional at a press conference, “that hurts.”

Shortly thereafter, Walter Godefroot, who, despite that doping with a respected figure, withdrew from cycling. What remained was the bicycle trade that he started in his hometown Deurle after he stopped cycling. Cycling Godefroot is run by two of his three sons.

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