Freddy Maertens

28 June 1981. Stage Three: Martigues to Narbonne

232km. Flat

As first encounters go, it couldn’t have been less auspicious. It was May 1987 and Freddy Maertens was the star name in a race being held in an unlikely location: a park in Dunfermline, close to my home city of Edinburgh.

Maertens was thirty-five and had not won a race of note for years. His name meant little to me, but his CV sparkled. He had won some of the great races: Classics, stages of the Tour de France, two world titles. Yet the trajectory of his career was erratic, to say the least. There were gaps that were more like black holes. He was brilliant then terrible, then briefly brilliant again, before he all but disappeared – only to pop up, on a miserably cold day, in Pittencrieff Park in Dunfermline.

Five years after his last flashes of brilliance, this Belgian once-upon-a-time star brought continental allure, even if his star had actually faded to a point where it was barely visible. Even in Dunfermline.

Maertens was hopeless. Humiliated by a bunch of Scottish amateurs, he quickly fell out of contention on the narrow, twisting and rutted park lanes. He failed to finish. But he did pick up his appearance money, courtesy of a local double-glazing magnate, which is why he was there in the first place. He needed the cash.

Two decades later, I encountered Maertens again, once more in curious circumstances, at the 2006 Tour de France. We were in Gap for a stage start, snaking out of town as part of the large convoy of vehicles that precedes the race. The stage was due to start in fifteen minutes. But as our press car jostled with the other vehicles for a place in the line of cars, a figure materialised. He was walking quickly towards the traffic, on the left side of the road, waving his hands, imploring each vehicle to stop. He looked frantic, manic and dishevelled. Everybody ignored him. But as we got closer he began to seem familiar, the face, in particular the lips, unmistakable. It was the rider known cruelly as ‘Fat Lips’ – Freddy Maertens.

We slammed on the brakes, to a cacophony of horns from the vehicles behind, and Maertens jumped into the back seat, expressing gratitude and relief in a thick Belgian accent. He explained that he was there as a guest of one of the Tour’s sponsors, but his vehicle had left without him. He didn’t know how to get in touch with the driver. He phoned his wife, Carine, who clearly had experience of bailing her husband out before.

For the rest of the journey, Maertens leant forward, like a little boy, and talked earnestly, and compellingly, about his strange career. He seemed a sad but sympathetic figure; boy-like, with a friendly, open face and a remarkable facility with languages – he was fluent in about five.

Seven years later, after our encounter at the 2006 Tour, I meet Maertens for a third time, this time by prior arrangement, in the Flanders Centre. It’s a large, modern visitor attraction in Oudenaarde that, in a sign of how fervent Flandrians are about their cycling, is entirely dedicated to the Ronde van Vlaanderen, the Tour of Flanders. It is where Maertens now works.

We are supposed to meet at eleven, but there is no sign. ‘Where’s Freddy?’ I ask at reception. The girl doesn’t know, so she phones a colleague: ‘Where’s Freddy?’

The colleague appears, shrugging. She asks another colleague, ‘Where’s Freddy?’

‘Where’s Freddy?’ is a refrain that might echo around the Flanders Centre on an hourly basis. It would perhaps have made a fitting title for his autobiography. Instead it is called Fall from Grace, which is also apt. Because that, certainly, is what Maertens did.

* * *

The town of Narbonne, nestled in the wine-rich Languedoc-Roussillon region in the south of France, is a place of faded glory, but it is close to the Mediterranean beaches that stretch for kilometres. It was a stage – stage three of the 1981 Tour – which hugged that coastline after heading west from Martigues, 40km north-west of Marseille; a stage, finishing on Narbonne Plage, that was made for sprinters. ‘It was five or six kilometres, along the beach, a straight line,’ Maertens says. He knew it well. And he liked it. ‘Because it was by the sea. And I was born by the sea, in Nieuwpoort, so it was special to me.’

Being born and living by the sea also, says Maertens, made him an outsider, even an outcast. He believes that he didn’t receive an official reception from the King of Belgium after either of his world titles, ‘because I came from the coast, while Eddy Merckx was from Brussels’.

When the Tour visited Narbonne in 1981, Maertens had done his homework. ‘I had studied the finish.’ He had been there a few weeks earlier, having failed to finish the Midi Libre – one of many races he failed to finish in 1981 – when it used the same finish by the beach. ‘I sat on a terrace bar studying events closely,’ writes Maertens in his book.

On that day, weeks before the Tour started and with his own place in the team far from certain, Maertens watched as the riders appeared, noting that the road widened and narrowed, observing the wind direction, and that the sheer length of the finishing straight confused riders, tricking some into making their effort too early.

It is a powerful and arresting image: Maertens sitting on the terrace of a bar – if anyone spotted him it would have fuelled rumours that he had a drink problem – and studying the road below, looking to the outside world like the fallen star everybody thought he was.

To understand why Narbonne in 1981 meant so much to Maertens, you have to understand what he went through to get there.

* * *

It was so different in 1976, Maertens’ first Tour. His was a long-awaited, much-anticipated début. Maertens had been brought up by his father, Gilbert, to be a cyclist. Gilbert took his obsession with his son’s career to ridiculous extremes: on one occasion, when he caught his teenaged son walking hand-in-hand with a girl, he raced home and took a saw to his bike, cutting it in two. But perhaps, as Maertens acknowledges today, his father needed to be strict. He had a boyish sense of mischief, loved pranks and had a general air of haplessness. At least two of these traits are still evident today.

Throughout his career, Freddy was guided, or kept in check, by father figures. After his own father it was Lomme Driessens, who became his directeur sportif at the Flandria team in 1976, in time for his Tour début. Known by some as ‘Lomme the Liar’, he ‘lived in a fantasy world’, says Maertens, though it was true that Driessens had directed Merckx (he had also worked with Fausto Coppi, and another great Belgian, Rik van Looy). The cigar-smoking Driessens hitched his wagon to Maertens just in time. According to Maertens, ‘he could motivate like nobody else. Even when you felt terrible because you were riding badly, he could almost make you believe you were the best rider in the race.’

Driessens was overbearing, and a constant presence in Maertens’ life, visiting his home and standing over Carine as she cooked, telling her what she should be making her husband; specifically how she should prepare Freddy’s minestrone soup, which Driessens believed to be the staple of a cyclist’s diet. The impression formed of Driessens is that he was all – or mainly – bluster. Maertens and the team-mates to whom he was closest, Michel Pollentier and Marc Demeyer, behaved like unruly children at a boarding school, with Driessens in the role of strict but hapless headmaster. On one occasion they trapped him in a sauna for an hour, until he ‘looked like a boiled lobster’; on another they put crushed sleeping pills in his beloved minestrone soup; and on another they cut the legs off his suit trousers as they lay draped over a chair.

Maertens, Pollentier and Demeyer called themselves ‘The Three Musketeers’. They trained together most days, practising lead-outs; Maertens was an impressive all-rounder – he could time trial, he could climb – but his most powerful weapon was his sprint finish. There is a belief, in some quarters, that the first lead-out ‘train’ was Jean-Paul van Poppel’s Superconfex ‘green train’ in the late 1980s, copied by Mario Cipollini’s Saeco ‘red train’ a decade later, and perfected by Mark Cavendish and his HTC team another decade later. Maertens laughs at the idea. ‘I wasn’t even the first sprinter to have a lead-out,’ he says. ‘Van Looy did, too.

‘For sprints, we talked about it and we trained for it, too,’ Maertens continues. ‘They think now they are the first to have a lead-out train! Ha ha ha! There is nothing new. We trained almost every day together, me, Pollentier and Demeyer. We did this in training, many times in each ride. And at the finish of a race, the lead-out was first Pollentier, then Demeyer, then me. Demeyer was bigger, which was good for me. Michel was a good climber, but very strong on the flat as well. We trained hard. If we were training for the Tour of Flanders, which was 280 kilometres, we went out for 310 to 320 kilometres. For the Tour de France we raced a lot: Midi Libre, Tour of Switzerland, and then the Tour.’

Maertens wasn’t overawed by the Tour when he finally made his début in 1976. He wasn’t particularly impressed, either. Asked what he remembers of his début, he screws up his face: ‘Everything. A lot of the time we slept in school. French schools with dormitories. The food was the same every day. Mashed potatoes, haricots verts, and little bits of meat. Steak, but not good steak. The potatoes came out of boxes, already mashed. But every day was the same. Breakfast was the same: bread and honey. The caterer travelled with the race. When you saw the food, you said: “It’s better at home.” But [despite that] the Tour was good for me from the start …’

Maertens won the prologue time trial in Saint-Jean-de-Monts in the Loire. Next day, he won the first stage to Angers. He wore the yellow jersey for ten days, into Belgium, and won stages in Le Touquet–Paris-Plage (a 37km time trial: his favourite of his eight stage wins in 1976), Mulhouse, Langon, Lacanau, Versailles and another time trial, into Paris, on the final day. He was eighth overall and won the green points jersey. But it was his eight stage wins that marked his début and put him in the company of just two other riders: Charles Pélissier in 1930, and Maertens’ countryman, Merckx, in 1970 and 1974.

‘It should have been nine,’ Maertens says. ‘I gave a stage to Jacques Esclassan.’ It was stage eight, Valentigney to Divonne-les-Bains; a flat 206km, made for sprinters. Made for Maertens. ‘I was winning a lot of stages,’ he explains, ‘and Peugeot [Esclassan’s team] didn’t win anything. They came to ask me for help. Peugeot were going to stop their sponsorship, and so the evening before, in Mulhouse, they came, Maurice De Muer and the boss of Peugeot, to see Driessens and me. Pollentier was there too. I didn’t want to speak alone. And we made an agreement.’

For money? ‘No, for friendship,’ says Maertens, who senses my scepticism because he repeats: ‘Really, friendship.’

Maertens’ penultimate stage win in the 1976 Tour was extraordinary, even by his standards. It was a 145km road stage from Montargis to Versailles. It was bucketing down, and he attacked with another Belgian, Ferdinand Bracke. ‘I was attacking to get on the podium, because that was still possible. I could still finish third, though [Lucien] Van Impe had won, more or less.’

If Maertens was still in contention for the podium, why was he allowed to escape? ‘Because it was raining and we had our rain jackets on,’ he says. ‘And the rain jackets of the ’70s are not the rain jackets of now. You couldn’t see what jersey you were wearing, or what number you were. And there were no radios. So nobody knew I was away. At a certain moment in the race they said our numbers, the others realised and started to chase, but by then we were 15km from the finish …

‘Anyway, Bracke and I were away, but suddenly, on a corner, Bracke’s wheel slips, I touch it, and I go down. My chain was off and I had to wait for the car with my other bike. I waited, the peloton raced past, I got my other bike and then I caught the peloton again. I still won the stage. It was a sprint. But if I had stayed away with Bracke, if I hadn’t crashed, I would have had four or five minutes.’

* * *

‘Deals, doping and near-death experiences’ might also have been the title of Maertens’ autobiography. Sometimes they were wrapped up together. As a baby, he had a lung infection that saw him hospitalised for six months. The nurses injected medicine into his bottom. ‘I suppose you could say that was my first experience of doping,’ is his wry observation on page two of his book.

It wasn’t the last. ‘Anyone who says they can do it naturally is a liar,’ says Maertens, meaning racing without drugs. He used amphetamines in kermesses, ‘but never in the Classics or Tours,’ though he lost the Tour of Belgium in 1974 after testing positive. He also tested positive in some big races in 1977, the season after his great year: at the Flèche Wallonne, Tour of Flanders and Tour de France. In those days it didn’t result in expulsion, far less suspension, far less disgrace: the standard punishment was a time penalty, usually of ten minutes.

There was one doping scandal that did provoke a sense of outrage, and Maertens was closely linked to it. It was his great friend, fellow musketeer and room-mate, Pollentier, who, during the 1978 Tour, was caught trying to cheat a drugs test. It was at the summit of l’Alpe d’Huez, where Pollentier had won the stage and taken the yellow jersey. As he went to give his sample, the drugs-tester became aware of some apparatus: a length of tubing containing (‘clean’) urine, which Pollentier was holding alongside his penis.

In reports at the time, and since, it was said that the tubing was connected to a bulb in his armpit. But Maertens corrects that now, when I ask him if it was a trick he ever pulled: having ‘clean’ urine in a bulb – often a condom – in his armpit. ‘It was not there,’ Maertens says. ‘No, it was here,’ and he points to his behind. The urine was in a condom in Pollentier’s bottom? ‘Yes.’ And did Maertens himself ever do this? ‘In kermesses, yes. When the police did the controls, no. There were a lot of people who did that. But not in the Classics; not in the Tour. It wasn’t possible.’

After Pollentier’s expulsion, he and Maertens spent the night in their room, trying to keep the press at bay. Pollentier was concerned about how he would be received back home in Belgium. He needn’t have worried. As Maertens recalls: ‘During his suspension, when he appeared at criteriums to give the start signal, it was not unusual for him to receive more applause than any of the riders.’

Maertens’ own problems were just over the horizon. With Pollentier having departed, he was unhappy with his Flandria team in 1979, sensing a plot against him, suffering with an injury to his wrist, and only winning two minor races. He had fallen a long way from his eight stage wins and world race title of 1976. Three years later, he could barely finish races: ‘Depression was looming just around the corner.’ On the advice of his team boss, Paul Claeys, he travelled to the USA, to the school of medicine in Philadelphia, for tests. He claims he almost died before he even got there. Throughout his flight across the Atlantic, he was disturbed by a strange noise from the engine on the left wing. When he mentioned it to his companion, his companion told him to shut up.

Maertens disembarked in New York, and the plane, an American Airlines DC-10, took off for Chicago. From Chicago it took off for Los Angeles, but moments later one of the engines – on the left wing – came off. The plane crashed, killing 273 people. Until the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was the worst air disaster in American history.

Maertens stayed in Philadelphia for several weeks. He was under the care of a Dr Fischer, who ran a series of physical and psychological tests. In Belgium, the rumour was that he had been committed to a mental hospital. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, all the tests were clear: Maertens was told there was nothing physically wrong with him, although Dr Fischer did suggest that his psychological problems were due to ‘the problems he has had in relation to drugs’. He added: ‘Though I suspect he will be tempted to use stimulating drugs when he is under competitive pressure, I think he has the inner strength to resist the temptation.’

Still Maertens could not rediscover his old form. Still he struggled to finish races; winning was out of the question. The rumours intensified: he was an alcoholic; a drug addict; he had a nervous breakdown. It was none of these things, Maertens says now. It was all a big misunderstanding. He did have a problem, and it completely derailed his career. It was financial. The taxman was after him. ‘Nineteen seventy-seven was good,’ he says, ‘and ’78 was OK, but then began the problems with the taxes. It was the biggest problem I had in my career. But in the winter of 1980 my wife and I talked. She said, “You have to do it like you did it before.”’ She meant training: focusing solely on cycling. ‘She said, “When it comes to speaking to the accountant, the lawyer, the court, I will do it. You have to train and nothing more.”’ Carine shielded her husband, intercepting mail, phone calls and even visits from the taxman.

At the start of the 1981 season, Maertens had a new team, Boule d’Or, and, with Pollentier and Demeyer no longer by his side, he had two new musketeers: Ronald De Witte and Alain De Roo. He was also reunited with his old director, Lomme Driessens, who had been sacked after the 1977 season. But a return to his previous form seemed impossible. Although still only twenty-nine, Maertens was seen as a spent force. Whatever his problems, he had shone too brightly, too young, and burnt out.

* * *

Maertens wishes to correct one point. ‘I was not an alcoholic. The problem is that when they see you drinking one beer, people think you are an alcoholic.’

He did use alcohol, though. He used it as a performance aid. But only champagne. ‘It was Lomme who said to try it. Seventy-six was the first time; you have to try it in training, not racing. That was the mistake Pollentier made. He tried it before the Baracchi Trophy and his legs were like that’ – Maertens shakes his legs and they wobble like jelly. ‘Everything new, you have to try it in training.

‘Once you know it works, then the fortnight before, you do not drink alcohol. No! Or the champagne has no effect. When the legs weren’t good, I didn’t drink it. But in big races I left the bottle in the car.’

A whole bottle of champagne? ‘No, no, no – half a bottle. In a cool box. A team-mate went to get it for me at 30km from the finish.’ Who? ‘Normally it was Herman Beyssens who went back, because he would have a drink also.’ By the time it reached Maertens, with Beyssens having had his share, it was ‘more like 33 centilitres’.

‘It was in a bidon, mixed with some sugar and some caffeine.’ He would drink it in three or four gulps. And the effect was like dynamite. Comparable to amphetamines? ‘Yes,’ nods Maertens. ‘Like amphetamines, yes. It was like a legal high.’

What happened to the rest of the champagne? ‘Lomme finished off the bottle while driving the team car.’

But in 1981 even the champagne didn’t seem to be working for Maertens. Nor did his renewed partnership with Driessens, who was back standing over Carine, telling her how to make minestrone soup. Maertens says that he over-trained at the start of the season. Then he crashed, breaking two fingers in his hand. He came back but kept crashing. He fell off in virtually every race he rode in the spring; plus, despite Carine’s reassurance, the tax problems weighed on his mind. He became ‘apathetic’ about racing. ‘Psychologically, I was at a low ebb.’ In May he went to the Midi Libre, run in ‘tropical heat, and which had never been one of my favourite races,’ and climbed off on the second stage.

He elected, however, not to go home. Instead, he stayed with the team. He rode each stage ahead of the race. And for the stage that finished at Narbonne Plage he sat on the balcony of a seafront bar and waited for the finish. And studied the long stretch of road, knowing that stage three of the Tour de France would also finish there – and that it would almost certainly end in a bunch sprint.

Maertens insists now that his habit of not finishing races was all part of a grand plan. ‘I stopped races because I was preparing for the Tour de France and world championships.’ He was confident? ‘Sure. I didn’t finish the race, but then I rode in the car for a bit, then stepped out and rode 100 or 120 kilometres on the bike. Nobody knew I was doing that. But that was my plan.’

Not that Maertens’ selection for the Tour was guaranteed. In fact, it looked as though he would be left out, until he made a pleading phone call to Driessens’ wife, Maria, who always had a soft spot for Maertens and ‘mothered’ him (it isn’t difficult to imagine; even now in the Flanders Centre, where he works, his colleagues seem protective of Maertens). Maria Driessens convinced her husband that he should pick Maertens. Driessens relented, but Maertens went to the Tour as a team member, with no ‘privileged status’.

While warming up for the prologue time trial in Nice, he crashed into a woman who was crossing the road. He was late to the start house and finished 66th. ‘The press had a good snigger about that,’ Maertens writes in his book.

But the next day, over hilly and wet roads around Nice, the first road stage burst into life with an attack from Bernard Hinault, who escaped with Jean-René Bernaudeau and one of Bernaudeau’s Peugeot team-mates, Charly Bérard. Hinault’s companions slid on a corner and both fell; then Hinault fell, and then Bernaudeau fell a second time, and with that all momentum was lost. They were caught, and the stage came down to a sprint.

It was a short stage, just 97km, but the rider who emerged at the front surprised everybody. It was Maertens, who came off Sean Kelly’s wheel to win his first stage in three years. ‘I have always said that I would bring Freddy back,’ said Driessens, basking shamelessly in the reflected glory, trying to claim as much credit as possible, even telling the journalists that he had stopped Maertens drinking.

‘Very satisfying,’ says Maertens of his win in Nice. ‘It was hilly, short, and before the race all the journalists laughed at me because my weight was a bit over – only one or two kilogrammes. They said I was lucky.’

Many remained sceptical, and unconvinced that the old Maertens was back. It had only been 97km – hardly a real road stage. It was a one-off, a fluke, a brief flash of the old genius. As one journalist put it, when the race got properly underway, with the 232km third stage from Martigues to Narbonne, ‘Maertens will be ridden into the ground.’

* * *

The stage began in the ‘Venice of Provence’ in lashing rain and wind as the riders cut up from Martigues and headed north-west, through the Camargue, where cross-winds can play havoc. The wind whipped across plains populated by white horses and flamingoes, but it was too early in the stage for the race to split into echelons. They skirted Montpellier, heading for Béziers via a detour to the north, to Roujan, and into more rain. The race sparked into life. Ludo Peeters went clear after an intermediate sprint and was joined by Phil Anderson, the Australian poised to become the revelation of this Tour, as well as Daniel Willems, Gerrie Knetemann and Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke: a dangerous quintet, all strong rouleurs, threatening to rule out a bunch sprint.

Maertens sat in the bunch, thinking about that long straight at Narbonne Plage. It was tantalising. Should he get his team to work and bring the break back? It was complicated: he wasn’t the leader. And yet he had been promised, by Driessens, support in the finale, if it looked like ending in a sprint. And he had support before that – he sent Alain De Roo back to the team car with 30km remaining to collect the bidon containing his legal drug, his champagne. ‘I knew I needed it,’ Maertens recalls, ‘because I knew it was my stage.’ Maertens’ team did some work at the front, but it was another team that closed down the move. Hinault instructed his Renault squad to chase; they did so with ruthless efficiency. It was back on for Maertens.

The dangerman was Urs Freuler, a moustachioed Swiss better known as a track rider and signed by Peter Post, the director of the TI-Raleigh team, to win bunch sprints on the road. Freuler won the first intermediate sprint on this stage, at Raphele-les-Arles after 34km, from Maertens himself. But Maertens was confident he had the beating of him when it counted, on the long straight by the beach at the end.

When the riders finally appeared on that long, long straight, it was messy, as sprints tended to be. There was no organisation, just chaos. The road was wide, the surface uneven, and there was – contrary to what Maertens tells me – little evidence of any lead-out for him on this occasion. By the final 800 metres, he was on his own. The riders fanned across the road, and then there was a surge down the left, before momentum swung back to the right. All the time, Maertens remained in the middle, hiding in the wheels, holding back, waiting. He remembered his homework: that this straight was longer even than it looked.

Freuler led the charge on the right, Maertens tucked in behind Jos Jacobs, who in the final 200 metres suddenly emerges into clear space. In doing so, he unwittingly provides an effective lead-out for Maertens, who appears late, in the middle, head down. Maertens, short, stocky, with thick, muscular arms and shoulders, sprints like a charging bull. Once in front, he veers from left to right, head still down. He also seems to engage a higher gear: when he kicks again his speed over the closing metres takes him up to Freuler. He draws level. Then he edges in front just centimetres before the line. And he throws his arms up. Maertens always celebrated in the same style: arms flung in the air, elbows locked, palms facing forward, fingers spread; often gurning, too, with his tongue hanging out, leading to some cruel descriptions.

The bunch sprint at Narbonne Plage was, as Cycling Weekly reported, a ‘charge’, or a stampede, but ‘Maertens moved as if on rails, accelerating, gathering speed until he put in that special effort that we thought we had seen the last of. He thundered across the line ... it was a spectacular, dangerous final sprint.’ And it represented a ‘miraculous return to form of former world champion Maertens’.

Phil Anderson had opted out altogether. ‘It was too dangerous for me. I was on Maertens’ wheel when I got stuck behind Sean Kelly, who was giving a sling to Eddy Planckaert.’

Kelly, a former team-mate of Maertens, was becoming one of the fastest sprinters in the world, but Maertens didn’t fear him. Who was faster, him or Kelly? ‘Me,’ he says quickly. ‘Me, me.’

‘This win in Narbonne, it was really the most satisfying,’ he says now. Why? ‘Because Peter Post had taken Freuler to his team to beat me. I also liked winning by the sea ... But that day the whole team arranged for me to arrive at the finish for the sprint. They set it up for a sprint. You don’t see that in the final, but they had done their work earlier. It was a long, long finish – five or six kilometres along the beach. But I knew it very well. And I didn’t fear anybody.’

* * *

Maertens went on to win three more stages, including the final one into Paris, and the green jersey. He also won his second world title later the same year, in Prague. His comeback was the story of the year, and explanations were sought. ‘He’s riding two gears higher than the rest of us,’ one unnamed rider said in a story in a Belgian newspaper. Another rider, Fons De Wolf, pointed to his renewed association with Driessens: ‘Lomme knows how to deal with certain types of people. Remember, he has been with him since October and love can work at once.’

But 1981 was Maertens’ final hurrah. Though he raced another five and a half years, he hardly had a result of note. It is one mystery among many concerning Maertens. The rumours at the time were that he was using a new ‘wonder drug’. ‘Yah, yah, they said I had a new drug,’ he tells me. ‘But as I told you, in cycling, people talk a lot. No, my doctor prepared me well. And I ate well. I ate a lot of fish.’

So what happened – why did he never hit those heights again? After all, he was still a young man, only twenty-nine. ‘I said to my wife, “When I become world champion again, I’m finished.” I said the same to Bernard Hinault.’ The only reason he didn’t retire, he adds, is because he needed the money. He finally cleared his tax debts in 2011. ‘It followed me for thirty years. Thirty years! I feel much better now, and my wife, too. Thirty years! It’s not possible, eh?’

For many, Maertens, despite a career trajectory that resembles the profile of a Pyrenean stage, is the fastest sprinter in history. Those who saw him at his best – rather than in a park in Dunfermline – say that at his best he was electrifying, with a kick that could destroy opponents. But in recent years another sprinter has emerged to lay claim to the title of fastest ever. At their best, who would win, Maertens or Mark Cavendish?

Maertens gives the question serious thought, chewing his full lips. ‘Can we arrange it that I am thirty years younger?’ he says.

‘Imagine you are both twenty-seven,’ I tell Maertens. He continues to chew his lips, and now furrows his brow and stares at his clasped hands. ‘There are similarities, yeah. He doesn’t always need team-mates, he is good at positioning himself – like me. And he is able to jump twice – go, and go again. I could do that, too. Yeah, Cavendish is very fast.

‘But I was very fast, too.’

Classement

1 Freddy Maertens, Belgium, Flandria, 6 hours, 33 minutes, 50 secs

2 Urs Freuler, Switzerland, Bilta-Echter Glarner-Chämi Salami, same time

3 Jos Jacobs, Belgium, Capri Sonne, s.t.

4 Eddy Planckaert, Belgium, Wickes-Splendor, s.t.

5 Walter Planckaert, Belgium, Wickes-Splendor, s.t.

6 Yvon Bertin, France, Renault-Elf, s.t.