RETRO: 1989 TOUR OF FLANDERS
Procycling looks back at the career of double Flanders winner, Edwig van Hooydonck
The cycling landscape in Belgium was very different in 1989. Of course, the Muur, the Molenberg and the Oude Kwaremont all looked very similar to how they do now – the rolling, sparsely-populated hills of the Flemish Ardennes stood green and brown against their habitual backdrop of overcast skies, and the villages through which bike races passed were as sleepy then as they are now. However, while modern Belgium has acknowledged that there will never be another Eddy Merckx, in 1989 it had been only 11 years since the greatest cyclist of all time had retired. The locals had spent those 11 years looking for, identifying and ultimately casting off potential replacements. Fons De Wolf and Eric Vanderaerden were two of the highestprofile disappointments – unfortunately excellent results weren’t enough to satisfy the insatiable appetite of the home fans. De Wolf won Milan-San Remo and the Giro di Lombardia and Vanderaerden took both the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix over the course of their careers, but that would just have been a season’s work for Merckx. Two quite successful careers, but the Belgian fans had got used to perfection, and ‘quite successful’ wasn’t good enough.
In 1989, the Belgian public fixed their unsparing gaze on the next unfortunate prospect: Edwig Van Hooydonck. Van Hooydonck was a diffident, precocious, red-haired beanpole who’d decided at seven that he wanted to be a cyclist, won just about everything going as a junior and followed in the footsteps of his older brother Gino in turning professional for Jan Raas’s Kwantum team in late 1986, having won the amateur Tour of Flanders as a first-year senior that year. In 1987, aged 20, and as the
team morphed into Superconfex, he won Brabantse Pijl and came fifth in ParisRoubaix. He was also seventh in the Col d’Èze TT at Paris-Nice. In case nobody at home had noticed the latest ‘New Merckx’,he was second in the GP Eddy Merckx in 1987, then won it the following year, along with the Ruta del Sol and six other races. Fifth in Tirreno and 15th in the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré in 1988 hinted at stage racing promise, but Van Hooydonck’s big breakthrough came in the 1989 Tour of Flanders.
In his first two attempts at the race, Van Hooydonck had come 27th and 22nd. The first result especially was deceptive, however. In 1987 he’d been part of the group that sprinted for 11th, albeit 3:45 down on winner Claude Criquielion. The gap to winner Eddy Planckaert had been much bigger in 1988, but he still decided to focus with zeal on the 1989 edition of the race.
In December and January of the 1989 preseason, Van Hooydonck trained specifically on the climbs and parcours of the Ronde. The Superconfex directeur sportif, Hilaire Van der Schueren lived in the village of Atembeke, at the foot of the Bosberg climb and they designed a circuit of seven kilometres which incorporated the Muur and Bosberg. Van Hooydonck would ride the circuit again and again, sometimes more than a dozen times, in a big gear, and he knew every metre of the Bosberg. “I know every bump, every stone and every patch of mud by heart,” he once said. He even rehearsed an attack: the second telephone pole on the left-hand side marked the point at which he would go. He trained his legs to get used to the acceleration, then to hold it over the draggy summit, which takes hundreds of metres to really flatten out.
Van Hooydonck didn’t exactly fly under the radar in the run-up to the 1989 Ronde. He won Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne and was eighth in the Three Days of De Panne. But he was still not considered one of the big favourites. In the late 1980s, the dominant riders in the Tour of Flanders were Eddy Planckaert, who’d won in 1988, 1986 winner Adrie van der Poel, three-times runnerup Sean Kelly and 1988 runner-up Phil Anderson. There were other strong contenders for 1989: the winner in 1987, Claude Criquielion, multiple top-10 finisher Marc Sergeant and Eric Vanderaerden, who’d won the 1985 edition in atrocious conditions.
Van Hooydonck’s advantages were his huge strength and knowledge of the route. His disadvantages were well known, even at this early point in his career, however. He was seen as one-paced, and his rival Eddy Planckaert would once say of him, “He phoned in his attacks 100 metres before they happened.” He also disliked the rough-andtumble fighting that is part and parcel of the Flemish races. While few would be able to match him in a straight drag race on a climb, the harder challenge in Flanders is the elbowing and shouldering that happens on the run-in to every key point. Van
Van Hooydonck’s advantages were his huge strength and knowledge of the route. But his disadvantages were wellknown. He was seen as one- paced and he disliked ighting
Hooydonck might have been tall, but he was gangly tall rather than well-built tall.
The weather for the 1989 Ronde was terrible. It rained heavily, though it was not as cold as four years previously. Van Hooydonck faltered early on, getting caught behind a crash on the Taaienberg, the fifth of 12 climbs. However, he fought his way back, and on the third-last climb, Berendries, he slipped into a group of seven, which also contained his compatriots Sergeant, Herman Frison and Mathieu Hermans, plus Norway’s Dag Otto Lauritzen, Denmark’s Rolf Sørensen and Australian Allan Peiper. The group did not work at all well together – Hermans kept on attacking – but by this point the peloton had been eroded to around 30 riders, and their lead drifted out to over a minute by the time they reached Geraardsbergen, at the foot of the Muur.
Lauritzen was the most confident and he attacked over the climb, with only Van Hooydonck strong enough to match him.
Next came the Bosberg. Van Hooydonck was ready, and he attacked at exactly the planned moment on the climb. Lauritzen had no answer. The Belgian made good his escape, and duly time trialled to the finish 22 seconds clear of the pursuers, who in turn had shown how badly the main favourites had misjudged their race by finishing a minute and a half clear of the next group. In case the local fans and pundits weren’t excited enough by the prospect of a 22year-old Belgian crushing everybody in the biggest Belgian race, Eddy Merckx himself, in the race organiser’s car, was driven alongside Van Hooydonck on the run-in for a chat. According to the rider, however, the great man was only giving him a time check – 20 seconds with three kilometres to go.
At the finish, Van Hooydonck burst into tears and on the podium he was still weeping copiously, even as he held up the winner’s trophy. The stereotype of the Flandrian rider is of a taciturn, hardworking type, but the pressure Van Hooydonck had been putting on himself since childhood all came out in that victory. He was reportedly mocked by Briek Schotte, the two-time winner of the race in the 1940s, for this emotional outburst, though for most, the distance between Van Hooydonck’s vulnerability on the podium and the dominant fashion in which he’d just won a hard race in tough conditions was an interesting dissonance. And if anybody was in doubt about his talent, just a week later Van Hooydonck came third in Paris-Roubaix. Poor form hampered Van Hooydonck’s 1990 season, despite a repeat of his third place in Paris-Roubaix, and his knees were already starting to show signs of wear and tear, but he returned to the Tour of Flanders in 1991 as one of the favourites. The aggression started early, with a dangerous move of 15 which included future winner Johan Museeuw, former winner Vanderaerden, Laurent Jalabert, Peiper, Sergeant and Sørensen going away with over a hundred kilometres still to ride. Van Hooydonck joined a sevenrider pursuit, but it took them 30 kilometres to cross the 35-second gap to the front group. The net result was a lead group of about 25 riders, two minutes clear of the peloton.
In 1989, the springboard for Van Hooydonck’s victory came when he quietly infiltrated an innocuous-looking attack. This time, he had the confidence and strength to go with a more obvious racewinning move with 30 kilometres to go, through the town of Brakel and 10km before the Muur. The Belgian attacked with Sørensen and the Dane’s Ariostea teammate Rolf Gölz, plus his up-and-coming compatriot Museeuw. The latter was already seen as a future winner of the race, though he’d previously been better known as a bunch sprinter who’d won two stages of the Tour de France the summer before. (A measure of the trajectories of the two riders’ careers so far: Museeuw was actually a year older than Van Hooydonck, but his breakthrough in the Classics would come at a later age.)
Van Hooydonck dragged Gölz clear over the Muur, but Museeuw and Sørensen managed to close the gap on the descent. The Ariostea pair’s plan was to tough out the Bosberg, then use the final gently-
dragging 10 kilometres to the finish to use strength in numbers to beat Van Hooydonck and Museeuw.
However, this didn’t take into account Van Hooydonck’s own confidence, strength and knowledge of the parcours, or else they’d just forgotten what had happened two years previously. Gölz seemed to sense what was coming, because he glued himself to the Belgian’s wheel in the approach to the Bosberg. That meant he had a superb view of Van Hooydonck reaching his waymarker, the second telephone pole on the left, rising from his saddle and simply riding away from his three rivals. Museeuw later claimed that bad positioning had cost him the chance to follow his compatriot, but the fact is that between midway up the Bosberg and the finish, Van Hooydonck put 45 seconds into the chasing trio, who had every interest in working together to the finish. There was no doubt who the best rider was: Van Hooydonck, now known to the Flemish cycling public as ‘Eddy Bosberg’. Van Hooydonck never won the Tour of Flanders again. The luck that had at least pushed him towards victory first time round deserted him in the 1992 edition when he was again the strongest rider, but could only come third. In an unusual Ronde, an early break had been given a 20-minute lead, and two riders, the eventual winner Jacky Durand and runner-up Thomas Wegmüller, managed to hold off a desperate pursuit in the final 20 kilometres by Van Hooydonck and Maurizio Fondriest. Ironically, Durand had finally dropped Wegmüller about halfway up the Bosberg at Van Hooydonck’s telephone pole.
And then came a steady but inexorable diminuendo of results for Van Hooydonck, and a quiet retirement midway through 1996 when he was just 30. The story told in the Belgian press is that as EPO slowly took hold in the peloton, Van Hooydonck refused to have anything to do with it, and he later told journalists about his suspicion of what his rivals were up to. In 2007, he told Gazet
van Antwerpen that Johan Museeuw, who had himself at that point claimed he had “not been 100 per cent honest” in his final season in 2004, had not been telling the truth. “Museeuw used drugs his entire career; it’s that simple,” he said, before talking about the 1992 Brabantse Pijl. “I was in the break with Museeuw. He won the E3 Prijs only the day before, which I didn’t compete in. You must think, ‘I am fresher. I have the best chance to win.’ Then you see that guy ride away from me in a gear three teeth bigger than me.”
In a 2010 interview with Belgian cycling commentator Michel Wuyts, he described his anger at having been denied results by riders who were using EPO and stated that it wasn’t normal that he seemed to be over the hill at the age of 26. “I didn’t find it honest,” he said. By the time Museeuw made his own full confession in 2012, it was clear what had been going on. For his part, Van Hooydonck generally tried to avoid the subject, having tired of being the go-to guy for quotes about doping during the 1990s.
In retirement, Van Hooydonck worked as a salesman, kept tabs on the cycling scene and pursued a political career, gaining election to the council in his home town of Wuustwezel representing Open Vlaamse Liberalen en Democraten, an economically liberal right wing party. His nephew Nathan currently rides for BMC.
Next year will see the 30th anniversary of Van Hooydonck’s first Flanders win. It seems a shame that the Bosberg currently lies dormant at the Ronde, having last appeared in 2011, though it has appeared in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and the BinckBank/ Eneco Tour. It would be a fitting tribute to the meteoric career of Eddy Bosberg if the race could cross it once more.
As EPO took hold, Van Hooydonck refused to have anything to do with it, and he later told journalists about his suspicions