Walter Godefroot - THE PERFECT FLANDRIAN

Procycling looks back atthe life and career of Walter Godefroot, who won virtually every classic over the course of a long career and who could be described as the archetypal Flemish pro

Writer: William Fotheringham

Procycling UK, April 2019

There’s a framed photo of Walter Godefroot on the wall of my office, filched from a copy of the long defunct Miroir du Cyclisme magazine. The image, which has likewise long since disappeared from the picture archives, is from Paris-Roubaix in 1978, when Godefroot was close to the end of his career but nonetheless came in 11th. He’s shot from the side, from a motorbike, and is pin-sharp, especially his eyes, which are fixed on what lies ahead. Behind him, ranks of furrows fade away across a ploughed field to a distant, rain-drenched horizon.

Like a rugby player who has just come off the pitch on a filthy wet day, Godefroot is covered in mud; absolutely plastered. He has clearly crashed and fallen heavily into a puddle on his left side. His yellow IJsboerke jersey is barely visible. The slime shines in the flash used by the photographer and the great thick dribbles of goo ooze down the left side of his shorts – they are presumably black but you’d never know - across his thighs and onto his calves.

His face is pockmarked with brown mud or cowshit, but Godefroot wears no glasses. His arms are deep brown, but not with a tan. At the top of his arms, the short sleeves of his jersey have ridden up a few millimetres. The thin pink lines make the slime on his limbs all the more visible. Three things stand out: the slight shine on his partly opened lips as he contemplates the next pavé, the face of his watch, and his bare hands.

He isn’t wearing gloves. Of course he isn’t. “I didn’t need them. I rode all my career without gloves. I wore them only when it snowed”, he told me. He doesn’t play it up. There is none of the macho relish Roger De Vlaeminck or Bernard Hinault would have shown. He just didn’t wear them. Don’t suggest he might be wearing a helmet; these were the 1970s. He isn’t even sporting the figleaf protection of a leather ‘hairnet’. Instead he has a blue Gios casquette, peak at the back, the lettering the only bit of white in the entire photo.

Godefroot won the Tour of Flanders twice, which cements his status as a local legend in his home country, but Paris-Roubaix was his first love, because of the way he felt when switching repeatedly from tarmac to cobbles and back again. “I was better on the pavé than on tarmac,” he told me. “Riding the pavé gives you a kick. When you get back on the tarmac, your legs feel blocked, it takes a little while to get the coup de pédale back. You get the kick again when you go back on the pavé.” Meet Walter Godefroot, the man who was known as the ‘Bulldog of Flanders’. As a DS, he once told a rider who asked for a lighter frame for the Tour de France, “No problem, but you will never be a climber anyway.” Dry as sawdust in his manners, covered in wet mud on his bike, and only wearing gloves in the snow: the perfect image of the Flandrian cyclist.

BEST OF THE REST

Godefroot’s father and mother were textile workers in the Ghent clothing factories. He came to cycling through his family, as most Flandrian bike riders did, but it was far from his first love, although his father and his uncle were both connected with the sport. His father had raced until the age of 21, when lung issues put paid to that, and his uncle coached local amateurs, with some success.

Young Walter was a gymnast, the East Flanders champion as a teenager, and a winner of interschool cross-country running races. “Cycling was a sport like any other to me. You either did football or cycling, and I was too short for basketball. One day my uncle came and said, ‘You can race today.’ I said, ‘You’re mad, I’ve got no bike.’”

He rode that first race on a second-hand machine with gears that didn’t work. He wore moccasins, and stopped to put the chain back on seven times. He still came seventh, and with the money he won, he bought a pair of cycling shoes. The following week he was taken to a race at Sint-Martens-Leerne. On seeing the finish flag, he went straight to the front of the 30-rider lead group and sprinted to second. “That was the start of 47 years in cycling,” he told me in 2011.

Godefroot trained as a joiner. When he wasn’t racing as an amateur, he spent most of his time on house roofs wielding a saw before he turned professional following the Olympics. He won 131 times as an amateur, including what was, at the time, the fastest race ever, a stage of the Tour of Tunisia run off at 52.7 km for the 150 km. The following year, aged just 21, as a new professional with the Wiels-Groene Leeuwe team, he landed the Belgian national championship. He wasn’t a prolific winner to match Merckx or De Vlaeminck, but he was ‘punctual’ as the French say. Every year from 1967 onwards he landed at least one major one-day victory. The highlights were a brace of Tour of Flanders titles in 1968 and 1978, Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 1967, Bordeaux-Paris in 1969 and 1976, and the points jersey of the Tour de France in 1970. Trivia lovers should note, he also won the first Tour stage finish on the Champs-Elysées in 1975. The pick of them all would have to be the 1969 Paris-Roubaix, when he and his Flandria team-mates trapped Merckx, and he opened up a near three minute lead in the final 28 km. He is philosophical about the incidents that tended to hit him in the Hell of the North. He said, “When you make the final selection in Paris-Roubaix five times, and you win once, you have to say you are lucky, because you’ve had that chance five times. 

“I always punctured at the bad moments. One year, there were riders falling left and right in the mud. I went past everyone on the grass. I was first out of the section, André Dierickx followed me; we put the hammer down and I fell off as well. Even the year I won, I punctured. I was at the back of a small group, maybe 15, I went to the back, waited for the tarmac. Briek Schotte, the Flandria DS, came at once and gave me a wheel. I got back on, and Eric De Vlaeminck asked me why I wasn’t at the front – the point was that no one in the group saw the puncture.”

Godefroot was both blessed and cursed as a cyclist in that his career ran almost exactly parallel with that of Eddy Merckx. They rode the Olympic road race together for Belgium in 1964 – he took the bronze medal, Merckx flopped – and turned professional in 1965. And while Merckx hung up his wheels with his health in shreds in 1978, Godefroot kept going into 1979.

Unlike contemporaries De Vlaeminck, Felice Gimondi or Herman Van Springel, all of whom steered away from Merckx at times, Godefroot kept fighting ‘the Cannibal’ on whatever terrain they happened to meet. “I went in with my visor open,” he told me. He may have bent in the wind, but unlike José Manuel Fuente or Luis Ocaña, he was never broken. “For me, Merckx was a competitor like any other. When I think back, it’s clear I would have won more races if he hadn’t been there. But I gave it all I had without being fixated by Merckx. I respected him as a competitor, because I could see what he was capable of. If I did 200m turns in a break, Merckx kept going for a kilometre. If he got away, you would never get him back.”

As well as Merckx, Godefroot confronted two other five-time Tour winners through his career - Jacques Anquetil early on; Hinault in the last years. The difference was, he felt, neither displayed Merckx’s will to win. You would see Anquetil when the race split; he would move from echelon to echelon using his superior physical ability. Merckx, on the other hand, would have been in the first echelon because he would have made it form. Hinault, believed Godefroot, simply didn’t have the same devotion to the cause of winning, day-in, day-out.

There were times when Godefroot beat Merckx through superior race craft – the 1967 Liège when he attacked to the left just as Merckx looked to the right as they approached the finish on the athletics track in Rocourt. Sometimes he won thanks to superior numbers, as in Roubaix in 1969, when he was one of four Flandria riders at the front with Merckx and his fourth attack paid off. 

There were times when Merckx was untouchable, as in Paris-Roubaix of 1970, when five Flandria men, including Godefroot, were unable to hold him and times when between them they created now-forgotten mini-epics, such as the stage of the Tour of Belgium into Knokke Heist, when together with De Vlaeminck they left the peloton 12 minutes behind on a day of high wind and snow showers. 

On occasion, Godefroot was purely unlucky and could claim to be the moral victor. In Roubaix in 1976, he forced the winning break together with De Vlaeminck, Marc Demeyer, Hennie Kuiper and Francesco Moser, with Merckx floundering behind, then punctured on a right-hand bend, swinging wide as the others ploughed on. That was that, but he still had the strength to escape with Merckx as the finish approached, and put in a searing sprint to take fifth. “I was very fresh at the velodrome, but I wasn’t frustrated. That’s not how I am. I was philosophical – these are things that happen.” Those moments are captured in Jørgen Leth’s epic film A Sunday in Hell. Discussing the film with Godefroot for my book, two things emerged. Firstly, Godefroot should have been a central character in the film along with Merckx, De Vlaeminck, Moser and Freddy Maertens, and was initially treated as such. Leth’s cameramen went to visit Godefroot the day before the race to shoot behind-the-scenes footage, but the material stayed on the cutting room floor; he was neither a larger-than-life character nor a tragic hero. 

Like the gloves, Godefroot is matter-of-fact about this: there is no need for emotion. There is plenty of thought though, lashings of analysis. That watch in the photo (which also figures strongly in A Sunday in Hell, in luscious slow motion) was a vital accessory: he rode by it, constantly calculating the average speed from what gear he was in, and figuring out when he would get to this cobbled section, that hill, or the feed zone.

FROM RIDER TO MANAGER

Godefroot was made to be a directeur sportif. He had always loved the team side of cycling, earning the praise of L’Équipe writer Pierre Chany for the way he worked to help Ferdinand Bracke win the Vuelta in 1971. In 1979, he directed IJsboerke as their road captain when their German Didi Thurau won Liège-Bastogne-Liège, telling Thurau the correct moment to attack and supervising the blocking operation behind him.

As a team manager, he began with IJsboerke, the outfit where he ended his riding career. That later morphed into Capri-Sonne, and he then moved through Lotto and Domex-Weinmann in the 1990s to the little Stuttgart squad that became the behemoth T-Mobile team over the last years of the 20th century and into the 21st. He took lessons he had learned as a rider, mostly from the single year he spent at the Salvarani team run by Fausto Coppi’s former domestique Luciano Pezzi, and applied them at IJsboerke. He may have been Flemish through and through, but he looked to Italian cycling culture when organising his teams. “When you looked at the organisation and structure of Italian teams, the way they did travel, clothing, food, kit, finances, all in that tradition going back to Fausto Coppi, comparing them with a team like Flandria was like night and day. They would spend money in ways that counted, and it made a difference: in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

At Peugeot in 1971 and 1972 he watched Gaston Plaud wearing suits and wining and dining sponsors. He didn’t want to be that kind of directeur sportif, he decided. He also saw French riders who were unwilling to work for a team-mate because a good personal ride would earn them criterium contracts. “The main lessons came from the Italians; the others taught me what not to do. I took all that to IJsboerke - we were the first Belgian team to work in the Italian way.”

Godefroot was respected by his riders. “Someone you could trust – the kind of man who kept his promises and was always up front if there was anything wrong,” was the view of Bjarne Riis, who won the Tour de France for Telekom in 1996. “So dry, but I liked him because his word was his word,” said the Dane Brian Holm, who runs a podcast named Radio Godefroot. That’s his tribute to the man he admired as a directeur sportif, but he was also well aware of his idol’s dry, unemotional ways. Holm continued: “When he asked me to work with him as a DS, I had some questions: ‘I rode for you for five years, you never congratulated me when I won, there was no big emotion.’ His reply was that if he had been emotional when I won, he’d have had to be angry when I lost. I asked him why he never said hello to my wife, why he never phoned me.

“He said, ‘Of course not, but you could trust me.’ His point was that you had to be a directeur sportif with your head, not your heart, and if you make friends with the cyclists you manage, you are a bad boss because one day you might have to fire them. He said, ‘You keep these two things miles away.’ He never lost his temper, but he would look at you with those Godefroot eyes, move his head a little and you would feel guilty.”

Godefroot doesn’t give press interviews any more - a few quotes to a Belgian newspaper when he is in the mood – but he was happy to help me when I was writing two recent books: a biography of Eddy Merckx, and a ‘biography’ of the film A Sunday in Hell. The photo I mentioned suggests a rider who was as hard as nails but at 75, he is a patient, gentle man, who fell from grace in the early 2000s after revelations of doping at the Telekom team, where he was the lead directeur sportif right through the 1990s.

He firmly denied knowing or condoning what was going on but clearly, he feels cycling has turned his back on him, that people were quick to point the finger and assign guilt; whatever your feelings on the rights and wrongs of what happened 20-odd years ago, you have to acknowledge that’s hard for him.

It’s better to recall Godefroot as part of a golden generation of Flandrian cyclists, driven men with their own uncompromising  work ethic, based on the stark choice that faced them as young men: the bike or  manual labour in a factory or on a farm. It’s a mindset that he illustrated with a story from his good friend Roger De Vlaeminck. “Roger told me one day, ‘When I take my bike out at 7am and pass people of my own age with their bags going to the factory, that gives me the morale I need to train all day.’ That’s how we saw cycling...”

THE RONDE: A DECADE BETWEEN WINS

Walter Godefroot’s career was bookended by wins in his biggest home race, the Tour of Flanders. He won it in 1968, when he was 24 years old and in his fourth season as a professional. He was a perennial contender for the rest of his career, but had to wait until 1978, his penultimate season as a rider, to score a second win, this time aged 34. In total, on top of his wins, he achieved a second, a third (subsequently stripped from him after a positive doping test), a fourth, three more top-10 finishes and four more in the top 20. 

His two victories were not just separated by a long period of time, but the race itself changed significantly between 1968 and 1978. Before 1973, the race finished in Gent, and though the cobbled climbs of the Flemish Ardennes were still an important challenge, there was a long run-in to the finish which allowed the race to come back together. This suited the fastfinishing Godefroot, who won a 15-rider sprint in 1968. However, by the mid-1970s the finish moved to Meerbeke, with the Muur van Geraardsbergen and Bosberg much closer to the line, making it a much tougher race. 

Godefroot’s 10-year span of wins is a Tour of Flanders record, but is not a record in major races. Gaetano Belloni’s first and third Lombardia wins were separated by 13 years, as were Fausto Coppi’s first and fifth Giro d’Italia wins. Gino Bartali won Milan-Sanremo in 1939 and 1950, while Alejandro Valverde’s first and fourth Liège wins were split by 11 years.