VANDERAERDEN, ERIC THE RED, YELLOW & BLACK

ERIC THE RED, YELLOW & BLACK THE 1985 TOUR OF FLANDERS WAS THE HARDEST OF THE MODERN ERA. PROCYCLING LOOKS AT HOW BELGIAN CHAMPION ERIC VANDERAERDEN MASTERED HORRENDOUS CONDITIONS TO TAKE HIS BEST EVER VICTORY

Writer: Edward Pickering

ProCycling, December 2016

Three men rode into Geraardsbergen on the afternoon of Sunday 7 April 1985 with a chance of winning the 69th Tour of Flanders. Constant heavy rain since the start of the race in St Niklaas, 250km previously, had drowned the ambition of all but a handful of riders – any tactical plans they might have had couldn’t have been more effectively washed away than if they’d been written in sand at the turn of the tide.
 

By the first of the race’s 12 significant climbs, the Molenberg, which came just after halfway, the peloton was down to 60 riders. Two climbs later, at the Koppenberg, there were fewer than 30, with two hours still to race. The rain hammered down, from a characteristically north European grey blanket of thick cloud, washing a layer of mud from the fields on to the roads. From there, bike tyres kicked the resultant dull slurry up to the bodies and faces of the riders, painting them with a wash of dirty watercolour. It was cold, too. Legs froze, and one contemporary journalist described the conditions as “Siberian”. Even Sean Kelly, usually more impervious than his rivals to the cold and wet, later wrote in his autobiography Hunger that if he hadn’t deliberately pissed himself at the bottom of the Muur van Geraardsbergen in order to warm his legs, he wouldn’t have got over the climb.
 

The three leaders in Geraardsbergen were Hennie Kuiper, Phil Anderson and Eric Vanderaerden, who could legitimately be described, albeit loosely, as the past, the present and the future of Classics racing. Kuiper, aged 36, was nearing the end of a glittering career which included an Olympic gold road race medal, two second places at the Tour de France and wins in the Worlds road race, Milan-San Remo, Flanders, Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Lombardy. If he’d  won Liège-Bastogne-Liège (he was a distant second in 1980, to Bernard Hinault, in worse conditions even than the this race), he’d have achieved a career sweep of all five of the Monuments plus the Worlds only achieved by two riders: Eddy Merckx and Rik Van Looy. There was no question of winding down his career in his 37th year, however. His Milan-Sanremo win had come that season, with Vanderaerden a frustrated fourth on the Via Roma, having won the bunch sprint just 11 seconds behind. The young Belgian had angrily blamed Sean Kelly and Francesco Moser for not helping to chase the lead trio over the Poggio, shouting his grievances to reporters at the finish and having to be restrained by his team’s soigneur.
 

Anderson, aged 27, was at his peak in 1985. He’d won E3 Prijs the week before Flanders and would go on to win both the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré and Tour de Suisse, then come fifth at the Tour de France. (No other rider in the history of cycling has won the Dauphiné and the Tour de Suisse in the same season, and the achievement is not likely to be matched any time soon, as the races currently overlap.)
 

And then there was Vanderaerden, the 23-year-old Belgian champion and a rapidly rising sprinting and Classics star. He’d already finished in the top four of Milan-San Remo in each of his first three seasons, been 10th in the previous year’s Flanders, and won Paris-Brussels.
 

Between these three riders and victory, there were a few obstacles. The physical ones were the Muur van Geraardsbergen, the Bosberg and the final run-in to Ninove, which included a short diversion via the Flierendries climb on the edge of the city, included for the one and only time in the history of the race. But there’s no such thing as a straight fight in a bike race – the three survivors all carried their fair share of tactical baggage, which weighed every bit as heavily on them as the fatigue and cold as they climbed through Geraardsbergen. Vanderaerden and Anderson both rode for the Panasonic team, while Kuiper represented Verandalux. Kuiper had spent more time alone at the front, so was more fatigued. It looked like a simple two-againstone, but to Vanderaerden, Kuiper was already beaten. His biggest rival was his own teammate, Anderson.

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When he was young, Eric Vanderaerden staged pretend races with his friends, like any young cyclist. While his friends all wanted to be Eddy Merckx, Vanderaerden played a different part.
 

“I was always Marino Basso,” he tells Procycling. “Why? I’m not sure. I think he had an exotic name; an Italian name.”

Perhaps the Belgian was getting some practice in at not being Eddy Merckx for later in his career. He was very successful as a young rider – as a junior he was second in the world championships, and he won both the junior and amateur Tour of Flanders (making him the only rider in cycling history to win all three versions of the race). He was so successful as an amateur that the Belgian cycling federation waived a rule which prevented riders turning professional before they turned 22.
 

When Vanderaerden signed his first professional contract with the Aernoudt team in 1983, aged 21, it had only been five years since Eddy Merckx retired. The press fixated on his successful amateur career and anticipated that he might be The Next Merckx (Danny Willems had already been tried out and discarded for that role, while Fons de Wolf was about to be). Vanderaerden inadvertently poured fuel on the fire by picking up with the pros where he’d left off with the amateurs, winning two stages at Paris-Nice, two stages at the Vuelta a España, and the Tour de France prologue, as well as taking fourth place in Milan-San Remo, in his first season.

“Everybody was waiting for the new Merckx,” Vanderaerden says. “I could win a lot, but not every race. If I went two weeks without winning, the press already started asking how it was possible I wasn’t winning any more. They expected too much of me and I couldn’t handle the pressure.”

He was similarly realistic, even about his contemporary rivals. At the time, Vanderaerden and Kelly were treading on each other’s toes in the sprints and Classics, and they really disliked each other, sometimes not even waiting until the sprint was over before scuffling with each other. “He could sprint and do a Classic,” says Vanderaerden of Kelly. “I could do the same and a lot of times we crossed swords in trying to win. But Sean was a big rider, a lot better than me. He won Paris-Nice seven times and won the Vuelta and did top 10 in the Tour. But in the Classics we were at the same level.”

In 1985, Vanderaerden didn’t have the palmarès of the next Eddy Merckx, but it was always more about the anticipation than the reality for Belgian fans. The first ever win by a Belgian national champion at the Tour of Flanders wouldn’t reduce the pressure; quite the opposite, in fact. But even if he couldn’t match Merckx’s career results, Vanderaerden did achieve one small win over his illustrious predecessor: when Het Nieuwsblad held a poll in 2013 to celebrate the centenary of the Tour of Flanders, asking readers which was the best ever edition, the staff at the newspaper expected Merckx’s historic victory in 1969 to win, but the public chose 1985 instead.

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In the Grote Markt square in the centre of St Niklaas, the 1985 Tour of Flanders began. The rain came as the race started, and didn’t stop all day. Vanderaerden didn’t like racing in the cold and rain any more than anybody else, but he was able to ignore it, while others allowed it to put them off. This was something Vanderaerden says he could only do in the first, more successful part of his career; when he was older, and enjoying less success, something changed.

“When I was young, I could turn on a button and just race. Nobody likes to ride in the rain, especially in March or April, when it’s only three degrees. I was very young and I could say to myself, ‘Keep on going; you are not afraid of the water,” he says.
 

Vanderaerden was tough. Allan Peiper tells a story in his autobiography A Peiper’s Tale of the Belgian crashing in the 1988 Tirreno-Adriatico: “Afterwards, in the showers, his soigneur Ruud Bakker got a brush and scrubbed all the gravel and dirt out of his wounds. We were staying in this pissy little town and the only medical thing there was a vet, so Ruud got the vet to sew up Eric’s arm. He was a tough guy, a hard bastard. Nobody gave Eric any shit.”
 

The route of the 1985 Ronde would describe the shape of an S from Sint Niklaas through Kruishoutem and to Zwalm, where the peloton would tackle the cobbled Paddestraat, and then soon afterwards the first climb of the race, the Molenberg. It wasn’t much of a peloton – riders dropped out in their droves, and the only attack of significance was a short-lived foray by Peugeot’s Allan Peiper, former world champion Jan Raas and three others, which gained 50 seconds, and was promptly chased down by Vanderaerden’s Panasonic team.
 

Panasonic were extraordinarily strong. And not universally popular. They often employed a tactic of putting a rider into a break, then stopping working. The rider up the road would sit in; the riders in the peloton would sit in. If the break got caught, all their riders were still fresh; if the break wasn’t caught, the dormant Panasonic rider would suddenly wake up.
 

On the Oude Kwaremont, Anderson and Greg LeMond, riding for La Vie Claire, put the pressure on, and split a 60-strong group in half, reducing the number of potential winners to 30. And en route to the next climb, the Koppenberg, Vanderaerden suffered a flat tyre.

According to Vanderaerden, he took a wheel from Ludo de Keulenaere. Cycling journalist John Wilcockson’s race report in the June 1985 edition of Winning magazine says that Johan Lammerts was the donor. Other accounts say it was Bert Oosterbosch. Either way, that Panasonic had Vanderaerden and Anderson both in the lead group, plus Eddy Planckaert, and three domestiques, was testament to the strength of the team. As Vanderaerden chased, the front group hit the Koppenberg.
 

It was a mess. Fans, policemen and photographers stood in the climb’s smooth gutter, which was the riders’ primary choice of line. The soaking weather had turned the 20 per cent cobbled slope into an almost impassable obstacle, a situation exacerbated by the riders being terribly overgeared, their bikes only having seven sprockets: Nico Verhoeven, Anderson and Planckaert were the only three riders at the front to crest the climb on their bikes. Greg LeMond stalled on the steepest part, bringing the rest of the group to a standstill. And while 25 or so riders extricated themselves from a tangle made from their bikes and each other, Vanderaerden was chasing back on, picking his way through and miraculously managing to stay upright, even as shouldered bikes swung into him. He was last into the climb, 30 seconds behind the group, and 12th out of it. Anderson, Planckaert and Verhoeven forged ahead, joined by LeMond, Kelly and Adrie Van der Poel, while Vanderaerden chased with Kuiper and his team-mate De Keulenaere, at the head of a group of five.
 

“My luck was that the bunch was only 30 or 35 riders when I punctured,” says Vanderaerden. “That meant I didn’t have to start the Koppenberg in 120th position. I was already catching the leaders by the foot of the climb.”
 

When the leaders coalesced into a group of a dozen, Kuiper was the most lively, attacking on the Varentberg and Berendries climbs and gaining 30 seconds.
 

Vanderaerden knew that he had to catch the Dutchman, or he risked a re-run of the Milan-Sanremo finish.
 

On the climb of Tenbossestraat in Brakel, with 25 km to go, he attacked from the group, and started inching painfully up to Kuiper. Then Rudy Rogiers, a Belgian cyclist who had come second in the previous year’s Paris-Roubaix, attempted to chase and drew Anderson out. Anderson remembers it differently, telling cyclingnews in an interview last year that he could see Vanderaerden was having difficulty in catching Kuiper so he bridged up to help him. As Rogiers faltered, Anderson caught Vanderaerden, and then the Panasonic pair caught Kuiper. It was a three-man race. Between Vanderaerden and Anderson.

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This wasn’t the only time in cycling history two team-mates have emerged as the main contenders for a big race.
 

“Anderson was an ambitious man. We thought, ‘Don’t trust him, ’” Guy Fransen, the sports editor of Het Nieuwsblad tells Procycling. “The Flemish people thought,

‘Watch Phil. He is the enemy.’ That’s the story of cycling. The image of the 1986 Tour is Bernard and Greg [Hinault and LeMond] riding together and winning the Tour, but we know the real story.”
 

Vanderaerden, who by Geraardsbergen could barely feel his legs or feet, save for the sensation that his cycling shoes were full of water, was ready to go.
 

“I knew I had to go on the Muur,” says Vanderaerden. “I could win in a sprint against Kuiper and against Anderson, but I also knew for sure that if I didn’t attack, Anderson would try something. I went up the Muur at one hundred per cent.”
 

This doesn’t quite square with Anderson’s memory of the climb. “Vanderaerden was yelling at me to ease up a bit, so I eased up a little bit, and as I did, Vanderaerden attacked. I just had to sit with Kuiper as Vanderaerden rode away,” he said.
 

Vanderaerden used two recent experiences of racing and riding on the Muur to decide the moment to attack his two rivals. In Omloop Het Volk in February that year, he’d missed a downward gear change, stalled and crashed on the climb, but a few days before Flanders he’d ridden up in training and noted that an amateur rider ahead of him had used the outside line on the two 90-degree left-hand bends on the Muur, where the gradient was shallower. “That’s where I decided to ride in the race,” he said
at the time.

With Kuiper wasted and Anderson trapped, all Vanderaerden had to do was haul himself over the Bosberg and Flierendries and keep his momentum to the finish.
 

Anderson’s memory of the finish is that he was “pissed off” as he rolled in for second place, 41 seconds behind the victor and 20 clear of Kuiper. He wasn’t the only one. “[The race] was grim, but not as grim as reaching the finish to discover that Vanderaerden had won,” wrote Kelly in Hunger.

However, Vanderaerden was ecstatic. At the time, he saw it as a good race to have won, but as time has gone by, the 1985 event has cemented itself as one of the greatest in Flanders history.

“At the time, I thought, well, I’ve won the Tour of Flanders,” says Vanderaerden. “But 30 years later, there are still only three winners of the race in the national champion’s jersey – me, Stijn Devolder and Tom Boonen. And people are still talking about this edition.
 

“Maybe I could have won it more times, but I’m happy to win it just once.”