Sports Poets Society

http://www.bikeraceinfo.com/oralhistory/freddy-maertens.html by Les Woodland Freddy Maertens’ career consisted of two great arcs. The first began with a wildly successful time as a junior and amateur racer in Belgium’s province of West Flanders. As a junior in 1970 he won 42 races and in 1972 he won 28 amateur races before turning pro. From there he kept getting better and in 1976 he became Belgian and World Champion, won the Tour de France green jersey, the Tour of Switzerland, Gent - Wevelgem and a host of other important races. He sustained that incredible streak in 1977 by winning Het Volk, Paris-Nice, Vuelta a España and was possibly headed for victory in the Giro d’Italia (he’d already won seven stages) when he crashed badly and broke his wrist. The next year race wins didn’t come as easily, though he did again win the Tour de France green jersey. After 1977 there were no major wins until 1981 when he again became World Champion and won the Tour de France gr...

http://www.bikeraceinfo.com/oralhistory/van-looy.html Les Woodland visits the only man to have won all seven classics. An excerpt from Woodland's Cycling Heroes Les Woodland climbed aboard his old Carlton bike to take a nostalgia trip across Belgium and Holland to visit some of cycling's greatest riders. "Cycling Heroes: The Golden Years" tells the story of that journey he took in the early 1990s and the time he spent with some of the finest riders from the 1950s, '60s and '70s. Rik van Steenbergen, Rik van Looy, Jan Janssen, Wim van Est, Hennie Kuiper and Peter Post were some of the most colorful and dominating riders of an era that produced many of the sport's greatest-ever champions. In this book Woodland has collected their and other riders' precious and fascinating recollections, some going back to a time of leather saddles, cloth caps and spare tires wrapped over riders' shoulders; when screaming fans packed smoke-filled velodr...