JOOP ZOETEMELK & THE 1980 TOUR: THE QUIET ACHIEVER

The 1980 Tour de France is often remembered as the one that Bernard Hinault lost, rather than the one Joop Zoetemelk won. Procycling looks at the race afresh, and tells a story of Dutch dominance and a worthy winner

11 Sep 2020 - Procycling

Writer William Fotheringham 

Image Offside Sports Photography

Forty years ago, the 1980 Tour de France was the classic race of two halves. It was won by Joop Zoetemelk, but is now primarily seen in the context of one rider: Bernard Hinault. 1980 is the Tour of the Badger’s Wounded Knee. It’s the one where Hinault came down with tendinitis so severe that he had no option but to pull out of the race. It thus divides into first half with the Badger dominating the race and an anticlimactic second after he retreated to lick his wounds in his burrow in Brittany.

Looking back, the prescient editor of Miroir du Cyclisme, Henri Quiquéré, could see this coming a mile off. Dusting off the crystal ball when he reviewed the race, Quiquéré hypothesised that in July 2013, as the 100th Tour approached, a cycling fan might take a dusty magazine from his grandfather’s collection and conclude that “an unknown” won in 1980. “Library rats in the 21st century could well get the impression that this 1980 Tour was won by ‘some guy’ to general surprise!” he wrote. This is unfair to Zoetemelk, a courteous, quiet man, who won the Vuelta a España and the Worlds, finished second in the Tour de France six times and wore the yellow jersey three years running, in 1978, 1979 and 1980; also in 1971 and 1973.

Once Hinault had headed for Brittany, Quiquéré wrote, it was as if the French media wanted to erase what happened next. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with seeing the 1980 Tour in terms of Hinault and its impact on his career. As the writer of a biography of Hinault, The Badger, I am personally as guilty as anyone - maybe more guilty than most - in depicting it that way. But let’s recast that oftentold story from another point of view. The 1980 Tour was one of unmatched domination by one team, TI-Raleigh, and a richly deserved win for one of the most consistent, yet consistently under-rated, cyclists of the 20th century.

‘Father Joop’ was much loved by the French media because he had married a Frenchwoman, Françoise, daughter of the mayor of Germigny-l’Évêque, a small village east of Paris near Meaux, where he still lived when I went to interview him for The Badger. Appropriately, his was a tranquil home in a forest, set back from the road, and so deep in the greenwood that fallow deer came to graze in the garden. A former speed skater who took a gold medal in the Olympic team time trial in 1968, and winner of the 1969 Tour de l’Avenir, he had spent most of his career riding for the Gan-Mercier and Miko-Mercier teams, alongside Raymond Poulidor and Barry Hoban.

Zoetemelk was unfortunate in two things. He had to compete with the two most aggressive multiple Tour winners of the 1970s and 1980s, beginning his career when Eddy Merckx was in his prime, and then coming up against Hinault. At the point where he should have taken on the Cannibal head to head, 1974-5, when Merckx was just beginning to decline, Zoetemelk suffered the cruellest blow of all, a dramatic crash in the Grand Prix du Midi Libre in May 1974, which left him with a double skull fracture and meningitis. He lost 10 kilograms in 10 days and was close to death; those close to him said he took four years to get back to his best.

Pass the Dutchie on the left hand side: 

Thévenet ahead of Zoetemelk, '75 Tour

Incredibly, he returned to the Tour in 1975 to finish fourth to Bernard Thévenet, then second to Lucien Van Impe in 1976, winning stages at Puy de Dôme and Alpe d’Huez in spite of a massive saddle boil. In 1978 he emerged as Hinault’s closest rival, and in 1979 the pair enjoyed an epic duel that culminated in a dramatic Champs-Elysées finish. The Badger and ‘Father Joop’ broke away in the Chevreuse Valley after Hinault got frisky, and the pair finished together on the Champs with the race in tatters behind them. However, there was no doubt about who was the strongest. Hinault put 13 minutes into the Dutchman. But furthermore, there was no doubt about who was second strongest - Zoetemelk was another 13 minutes clear of third-placed Joaquim Agostinho.

For 1980, Zoetemelk had moved to the strongest team in cycling, the Dutch squad sponsored by Raleigh and run by the late Peter Post. It had begun as a largely British squad, from which Post gradually eliminated all the UK riders because he did not feel they were good enough. By the end of the 1970s, Raleigh had won two world road titles with Gerrie Knetemann and Jan Raas, and had dominated the long team trials which featured regularly in the Tour route.

Post had also perfected what was to be known as ‘total cycling’, the two-wheeled equivalent of the freewheeling, flexible soccer tactic perfected in the early 1970s by Ajax and the Dutch national side. As well as classic sprinters like Raas and Gerben Karstens, his team employed strong, tactically astute all-rounders like Hennie Kuiper, Knetemann, Leo Van Vliet, Paul Wellens and Henk Lubberding who could ably drop in for each other as the situation required. For 1980, as well as Zoetemelk, they fielded the up-and-coming Johan van der Velde, a lanky 23-year-old who had won the Tours of Romandy and Holland in 1978 and finished 14th at the Tour in 1979.

“The discreet charm of the yellow jersey,” was the Miroir headline when they interviewed Zoetemelk for their Tour preview, a magazine with a split cover featuring the Dutchman and Hinault, and the oft-used headline “À qui le Tour?” (Who will win the Tour?). In contrast to Hinault’s electric start to the season, Zoetemelk had ended up in hospital after a crash in the Tour of the Med - the same hospital as after the 1974 Midi Libre chute - and had taken time off to recover from a broken collarbone. He had also been under the weather in the Tour de Suisse and was a little way off his best form when the Tour started.

Coming off the back of his first Giro win, Hinault’s early Tour form was astonishing - his prologue time trial win in Frankfurt saw him put 27 seconds into Zoetemelk in 7km - but so too was the first half of the Tour for TI-Raleigh. By the end of the first full day’s racing, with Raas winning the road stage and his team-mates backing up in the afternoon’s team time trial, they had snaffled the yellow, green and white jerseys. A stand-off with Hinault’s Gitane team over who should chase the next day’s early break meant that three riders gained almost 10 minutes, putting the yellow jersey out of reach. But after that the stage wins just kept coming: Lubberding at Liège; a repeat of day one on the split stages between Compiègne-Beauvais and Rouen on day seven. 

That was the beginning of an astonishing run, never matched since: seven stage wins in six days of racing. After Raas in the morning in Beauvais and the TTT in Rouen in the afternoon, pursuit specialist Bert Oosterbosch added a lone win in Hinault’s homeland at Saint-Malo, Raas took a third stage win at Nantes and Cees Priem made a lone break on a sodden circuit in Bordeaux. Zoetemelk landed a strong time trial win at Laplume - where Hinault only took fifth due to his knee injury, but still moved into yellow. Knetemann made it 10 wins in 12 days at Pau.

Zoetemelk was supported by a strong 

TI- Raleigh team through the 1980 Tour

Hinault’s withdrawal overnight in Pau left Zoetemelk in the lead, although in courteous style he turned down the chance to race the first Pyrenean stage in the yellow jersey. Having survived the classic stage over the Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde to Luchon, he had only to watch Kuiper - who had transferred to Peugeot at the end of 1978 - and his former Miko team-mate Raymond Martin, who was punching above his weight to finish on the podium and take the KoM jersey.

Kuiper was initially lurking ominously, just 1:10 behind, but he ceded ground gradually in the Alps, where the main threat to Zoetemelk’s chances came from his own team-mate van de Velde, who moved abruptly sideways with 2km to go as he led the main group up to Pra-Loup and caused Zoetemelk to fall heavily on his arm. The following day over the Galibier to Morzine, a long-range move from the 1978 Giro d’Italia winner Johan De Muynck put the Dutchman under real pressure, with the remaining TI-Raleigh domestiques falling apart, and Zoetemelk eventually forced to chase on his own.

The consensus was that by this time, most of the riders were exhausted due to the persistent bad weather in the first half of the Tour; after the unknown Ludo Loos from the Marc team took the final Alpine stage at Prapoutel, all that remained was for Zoetemelk to take the Saint-Étienne time trial, building his final margin to almost seven minutes on Kuiper.

There were footnotes to this Tour which are forgotten now, as they so often are. The race was curiously parochial, with not a single Italian in the field (three Italian teams had turned up the year before to see what Hinault was made of, and, with the exception of Giovanni Battaglin, had received a kicking). Of the 13 teams, six were French, four Belgian, two Spanish and one Dutch. Of the 130 riders, only five were from outside the traditional European heartlands, which gave the likes of Swede Sven-Åke Nilsson and Ireland’s Sean Kelly an exotic aura.

Peeters, Zoetemelk, Maas, Alban & Martin (l- r) 

climb in the Alps, Bastille Day 1980

The French press had a field day in the opening stages with Philippe Tesnière, riding for the Boston-Mavic-Amis du Tour team. The Breton broke away on day one in a classic move to take the mountains jersey (to universal amusement as he was renowned as a terrible climber); he was knocked off by a spectator at the start two days later, and struggled through to the finish in Liège finishing an hour and 40 minutes behind the winner, Raleigh’s Lubberding. The organisers gave him a 2,000 franc prime for courage, and then eliminated him for being outside the time limit. A rider with massive calves, he later reverted to amateur status and became part of the fearsome Breton mafia that dominated local races in northwest France.

The main beneficiary of a four-man break that gained 22 minutes on the road to Metz on day two was a bucktoothed Belgian riding for IJsboerke: Rudy Pevenage was to lead the race for eight more stages. Later, he was Jan Ullrich’s main confidant as a team manager at T-Mobile. Kelly took two late stages after being disqualified for pulling the jersey of Jos Jacobs of IJsboerke in a typically robust sprint finish at Nantes, and was robbed of his best chance of a Champs-Élysées win by Pol Verschuere.

Mancunian Graham Jones got to the final mountain stage between Morzine and Prapoutel-les-Sept-Lieux in 13th place overall, only to suffer stomach trouble and plummet to 49th, losing a guaranteed win in the white jersey; this was a career turning point for Jones, who never rode at that level again. Double Tour winner Bernard Thévenet - by this stage of his career riding in relative obscurity at the Spanish Teka team - bowed out of the race with a courageous second place to another Bernard, Vallet, at Martigues.

All this was overshadowed, rightly, by Hinault’s exit, a truly dramatic event, largely because of the way in which he and his directeur sportif Cyrille Guimard tried to take the drama out of it, in a pre-internet version of the Streisand Effect (*). The Breton began to feel pain in the knee during the second team time trial between Compiègne and Beauvais; the Miroir du Cyclisme photographer captured him slipping off the back of the Renault string on at least one climb, and Renault finished an unaccustomed fourth because of his struggles.

(*) Streisand Effect: fenomeno mediatico per il quale un tentativo di censurare o rimuovere un'informazione ne provoca, contrariamente alle attese, l'ampia pubblicizzazione.

Il nome si deve a un blogger e imprenditore statunitense, Mike Masnick, che prese spunto da una vicenda avvenuta in California: l'attrice e cantante Barbra Streisand, nel 2003, intentò un'azione legale nei confronti del sito web Pictopia, del fotografo Kenneth Adelman e altri al fine di ottenere un risarcimento di 10 milioni di dollari e la rimozione dal sito di quelle immagini che, a giudizio di Streisand, ne ledevano il diritto alla privacy in quanto raffiguravano la propria villa a Malibù.

Adelman si difese sostenendo che le sue fotografie avevano scopo solo documentale, in quanto tese a rappresentare l'erosione costiera della regione e che le immagini sarebbero state disponibili al pubblico nel quadro di un progetto di monitoraggio delle coste californiane. La notizia della denuncia da parte di Barbra Streisand ebbe l'effetto di moltiplicare l'attenzione sulla fotografia incriminata della sua villa (edificio che, come ironicamente scritto dalla testata on-line The Smoking Gun, era già visibile da tempo sulle mappe satellitari del sito web GlobeXplorer), la quale passò da poche migliaia a oltre 420.000 visualizzazioni nel mese successivo all'uscita della notizia.