Freddy Maertens

Freddy Maertens (born 13 February 1952) is a Belgian former professional racing cyclist who was twice world road race champion.Vanwalleghem, Rik; Freddy Maertens: een leven in wit en zwart, 2012 () Maertens' career swung between winning more than 50 races in a season to winning almost none and then back again. His life has been marked by debt and alcoholism. It took him more than two decades to pay a tax debt. At one point early in his career, between the 1976 Tour and 1977 Giro, Maertens won 28 out of 60 Grand Tour stages that he entered before abandoning the Giro due to injury on stage 8b. He achieved eight Tour stage wins, thirteen Vuelta stage wins and seven Giro stage wins in less than one calendar year.

Personal life Maertens was the son of what his wife, Carine, described as a hard-working middle-class couple: Gilbert Maertens and Silonne Verhaege. His mother was the daughter of a shipbuilder in Nieuwpoort harbour. She had a grocery and newspaper shop, which delivered newspapers. Gilbert Maertens, the son of a self-employed bill-sticker, was a flamboyant and restless man who was a member of the local council and on the committee of the town football club. He ran a laundry with a staff of four behind his wife's shop.

Maertens is one of four brothers: he, Mario, Luc and Marc. Marc also rode as a professional. Maertens went to the St-Bernadus college in Nieuwpoort. He read enthusiastically and showed a talent for languages. He could make himself understood in French, Italian and English as well as his native Dutch by the time he turned professional. He then went to the Onze Lieve Vrouw [Our Lady] college in Ostend.

Maertens and Carine Brouckaert met at a cycling club dance when she was 15. She had been sewing shoes for her father, a cobbler, since the previous year. The two were introduced by Jean-Pierre Monseré and his wife, Annie. Carine was Annie's niece. She had never heard of Maertens.

They married in November 1973 and rented a house in Lombardsijde. She said: "I got to know a young boy who was more adult than his years and who knew what he wanted: to be a professional bike rider. I fell for him. Not because I thought he could become a great rider but because I felt straight away that I could play a role in his life, that he needed me. Three years later we were married. Our dream had started. We didn’t know then that it would turn into a nightmare".

On 25 May 1979 he flew to the United States to see a doctor, to confirm that he had no drug problems. He and a medical advisers flew from Amsterdam to New York City in a McDonnell Douglas DC-10. Maertens mentioned to his colleague, Paul de Nijs, that one of the engines made an odd noise. After Maertens disembarked in New York the plane continued towards Chicago but crashed on take-off when an engine fell off, killing 279.Maertens, Freddy, Niet van Horen Zeggen

Amateur career

Maertens rode his first race at Westhoek when he was 14, in 1966. The field included riders of 17 and 18, including some from France. The race was open to riders who did not have a licence from the Belgian federation, the BWB. He had trouble riding in a group. His second race went better. Among the riders he beat was Michel Pollentier, later a friend and a team colleague as a professional.

Maertens continued to ride unlicensed races in 1967. In 1968 he took his first licence from the BWB, riding in the nieuweling or beginners' class. He won 21 times and came second 19 times to a rider named Vandromme.

Maertens asked his father permission to leave school in his second year as a junior, or under-19, rider. He won 64 times as a junior. His father made him promise that he would train regardless of the weather.

Relationship with father Gilbert Maertens gave his son his first bike, which Freddy Maertens described as "a second-hand thing that he’d got from a beach business for a bargain". Not until he won a race on that would he get a better one. His biographer Rik Vanwalleghem said: "The training school that Maertens went through with his father was hard. Horribly hard. Gilbert never lost sight of anything. He knew how much and how often his son trained, what he ate and drank, how much he slept, who he went around with. He imposed a merciless regime. And he had an eye open for the slightest thing that would obstruct his son's progress. He worried, for instance, that Freddy's male hormones would get the better of his son and drive him into the arms of bewitching young girl who’d put the slides under his mission. Women were the devil's work; it had been like that in the Garden of Eden and little had changed since".

Gilbert caught his son flirting with a girl and took revenge by cutting his racing bike in half. He intervened with the army, when his son was called for national service, to ask that he not be given an easier time because of his reputation.

Maertens' relationship with his father affected the rest of his life. He rode well only when he had a dominant figure behind him: first his father, then Briek Schotte and then Lomme Driessens. His wife described him as trusting and vulnerable, that he needed care because otherwise he would be "like a bird waiting for a cat".

Professional career Maertens won 50 times as a senior, including the national championship at Nandrin. In 1970 he came second to the Frenchman, Régis Ovion, in the world amateur championship. He competed in the individual road race at the 1972 Summer Olympics. He turned professional in 1972. The frame-maker Ernest Colnago and the former champion Ercole Baldini came to his house with an offer to join their SCIC team. They offered to support him in his last year as an amateur and then take him as a professional.

Gilbert Maertens was more impressed by the Belgian businessman, Paul Claeys, who had inherited the Flandria bicycle company. Flandria already sponsored Maertens' club, SWC Torhout, and Maertens rode a Flandria bike. Claeys came to the Maertens house with his team manager, Briek Schotte, a legend in Belgian cycling. Claeys offered Gilbert Maertens a concession for Flandria bikes, allowing him to sell them without first buying them. Maertens pushed his son to sign a contract for 40,000 francs a month as an amateur and then double in his first full year as a professional. The family needed the bike concession because Silonne Maertens had fallen ill and closed her shop.

Maertens said: "I would have preferred to go to SCIC and Colnago but my father said, 'You have to do something for us too.'"

Colnago and Baldini had promised more money and a gentle start as a professional. But with Flandria Maertens rode more than 200 road races a year and on the track and in cyclo-cross in the winter.Procycling, UK, issue 1 He suffered what he called the poor organisation and penny-pinching attitude of Claeys and his Flandria company. He also complained about the weight of Flandria frames; rather than ride them, he had his frames made in Italy, by Gios Torino, and had them painted in Flandria colours.

He was never paid in 1979, his last season with Flandria, which had failed.L'Équipe, France, 9 July 2001 It was the start of financial troubles with tax officials (see below).

Rik Vanwalleghem says Maertens was naïve as a new professional. Belgian racing was dominated by Eddy Merckx and Roger De Vlaeminck. Maertens did not observe an unwritten rule that new professionals establish themselves gradually and not try to humiliate established riders. Instead, Maertens, just 21, charged in and upset everyone by demanding they make room for him and make room quickly". What Vanwalleghem saw as his blunder was greeted, he said, by Belgian journalists eager to write of something else after years of Merckx's international domination. That worsened relations between them.

1973 world championship

Relations between the riders and their fans reached their nadir on 2 September 1973 in the world road championship around the Montjuich climb near Barcelona. Maertens had said he was not willing to ride for Merckx. That angered Merckx's supporters who, Maertens said, six times threw cold water over his legs.

Merckx broke clear on a hill. Maertens said none of the others took up the chase and so he chased by himself. Merckx was angry that Maertens, in his view, had sabotaged his chances of winning. Maertens was the better sprinter.

The two were unable to cooperate and were caught by Luis Ocaña and Felice Gimondi. Maertens agreed to lead Merckx in the sprint and allow him to win. He would be well paid, he understood – "a fantastic offer." But Maertens rode too fast for Merckx to stay with him. Gimondi rode in Maertens' shelter instead. Maertens realised too late and Gimondi won.

Enmity between Merckx and Maertens lasted decades. It ended in 2007 when the two met in a hotel in France.

"I was smoking a cigarette and he asked me for a cigarette. He said to me, 'Freddy, we have to talk about Barcelona.' I said, 'I think so too.' And then we spoke about it for three hours and we shook hands and everything was over".

Lomme Driessens Guillaume "Lomme" Driessens was one of three father figures in Maertens' life (see above). He started as a masseur and soigneur for Fausto Coppi. Riders in his care won the Tour seven times. He was a team director from 1947 to 1984. He died in 2006.

Maertens said: "There was my father, then in the beginning as a professional I had Schotte, then I had Driessens..." Driessens provoked the rivalry between Maertens and Merckx by insisting that far from Maertens' having betrayed Merckx by chasing him, Merckx had ensured that Maertens did not win. He had, he said, hidden his exhaustion and therefore his ability to win so as to mislead Maertens into losing. The historian Olivier Dazat said Merckx had dropped Driessens as manager of his teams and that Driessens had never forgiven him.Dazat, Olivier (1987), Seigneurs et Forçats du Vélo, Calmann-Lévy, France Driessens had directed his Romeo-Smith team to ride all year against Rik Van Looy in similar circumstances and now he wanted his revenge against Merckx.

Maertens said: "I enjoyed working with Driessens. There were no problems. When you work with Driessens there are no problems. A lot of people complained about Driessens, saying he took the racers' money, that he did this, he did that. But in the morning, he was the first to wake you, he prepared your food. He was a fabulous organiser".

He was a dominant figure whose wish to control extended to standing over Carine Maertens to tell her she was not cooking minestrone correctly. Freddy Maertens said Driessens' visits and interventions meant they were no longer bosses in their own house.

Equipment war The world championship at Barcelona was complicated by commercial interests. Professional cycling had been dominated by an Italian component maker, Campagnolo. A Japanese rival, Shimano, had recently entered the market. It supplied the Flandria team and designed a range of components specifically for it. Of the Belgian team, Maertens and Walter Godefroot used Shimano; Merckx and the others used Campagnolo.

The Belgian world championship team was training on the championship circuit two days before the race, along with some of the Italian team. Maertens said what he called the "big boss" [grand patron], since dead, at Campagnolo [named in his biography as Tullio Campagnolo] drove beside the group and shouted "Sort it out between you but Shimano mustn't be allowed to win the championship".L'Équipe, 9 July 2001

Maertens said Gimondi won because he pushed him into the barriers at the finish. When he demanded Belgian officials protest, he said, they answered: "We can't do that to our Italian friends".

1974 world championship