RETRO: JAN RAAS
IN 1979 JAN RAAS WON AMSTEL GOLD, THEN ADDED A RAINBOW JERSEY ON THE SAME COURSE. PROCYCLING LOOKS BACK ON THE EVENTS THAT PRECEDED AND SHAPED HIS ANNUS MIRABILIS
We look at the career of the Dutch Classics specialist, and his annus mirabilis in 1979
Raleigh bikes, the pride of the East Midlands, had an illustrious racing heritage, largely thanks to the great Reg Harris. He’d delivered a sackful of sprint world championships in the 50s, but by the 70s track racing was pretty much moribund. Thus Tom Barnsley, Raleigh’s MD, had approached sales director David Duffield with a simple brief: get him a top professional road team, the best that money could buy. Do whatever it took, but get results and, by extension, market penetration across Europe.
Raleigh had been running a professional racing operation of sorts for years. They had good riders, but also an insoluble problem: they were British and British road racing was light years behind. Even the best of them, riders like the sprinter Sid Barras, had been weaned on short, city-centre criterium races. They were the bread and butter of British road racing, but as preparation for the major European events they were useless. In 1973, TI Raleigh, formidable around the lanes of Leicestershire, Lancashire and Lincolnshire, failed to win a single race on mainland Europe. They couldn’t cope with the miles and were like ducks out of water amid European cycling’s culture and (often murky) practices. Not at all good.
Duffield was dispatched at the end of that summer, pockets bulging, to the World Championships in Barcelona. He met with Eddy Merckx, but the Belgian had already renewed with Molteni and De Rosa. Back to the drawing board and, specifically, to a Dutchman named Peter Post. The winner of the 1964 Paris-Roubaix wasn’t in the business of failure. The best track rider of his generation, he’d amassed 65 six-day wins and, upon retirement, assumed control of the circuit. Post was as influential off the
bike as he’d been effective on it. What’s more he spoke English and was extremely well connected. Duffield offered him the Earth.
Post was initially reticent. He had no interest in throwing money at cosseted Frenchman, petulant Italians or indolent Flemish superstars. He’d take the job, he said, but only on condition that he have absolute control. He would build Raleigh a world-class team, not simply go out and buy one. Duffers had his man.
They began 1974 as an Anglo-Dutch composite, but by the early summer Post had already decided to change that. The Tour would begin in Plymouth, but he turned down an invite for his nascent team. The suits at Raleigh were mortified, but Post held his ground. He told them that they weren’t good enough, that he wasn’t prepared to see them made fools of and if the board didn’t like it they could find another manager. They blinked first and at the season’s end Post jettisoned all but four of the Brits. They were replaced by young, hungry Dutchmen and suddenly Raleigh became the go-to team for the best Dutch neo-pros. And so began the transformation of TI Raleigh from British also-rans into Dutch masters and the world’s most prolific professional cycle racing team.
One youngster in particular caught the eye. Jan Raas, a bespectacled 22-year-old Zeelander, had won the Dutch amateur championship in 1974. Like Post he was as stubborn as a mule on and off the bike and blessed with innate racing intelligence. He could look after himself in the rough and tumble on the bergs and, best of all, he had a ferocious kick. He’d turned Post down the previous year and had been supporting himself by working part-time in an oven chips factory and winning amateur races. Now, however, he was married and ready for the next step. Post signed him up for 1975.
Raas was a young man in a hurry. He finished in the top 10 at E3 Harelbeke and Het Volk, and distinguished himself at the Tour of Belgium. He came close to outsprinting Freddy Maertens in the stage to Ostend and ended the season with fifth at Paris-Tours. The following spring he was second behind Maertens at Amstel Gold before riding to seventh at Roubaix.
By now, Post’s winning machine was all but assembled. He’d acquired Olympic and world champion Hennie Kuiper as his GC rider and the sprinter Gerben Karstens for the gallops. Elsewhere, Amsterdam’s Gerrie Knetemann, winner of Amstel as a neo-pro, was being touted as the next big thing. Powerfully built, blonde-haired and bespectacled, “Knete” was Raas’s twin. He, too, was very fast, but also 18 months Raas’s senior. Although a natural for the classics, Knete had more strings to his bow. He could climb (he was on the podium at Paris-Nice) and had a natural predilection for team time trials. He was the archetypal Dutch rider.
Post felt that his charges were ready, finally, for the Tour and four days before the start Raas celebrated by riding away at the Dutch national championship. Kuiper won stage 4 before Raleigh dominated a short TTT at Leuven. Maertens’s Flandria, riding in their backyard, had been favourites, but the Dutch had served official notice.
By Bastille Day, Raleigh were down to five. Kuiper and Knetemann had each abandoned, and Raas was on his knees. Stage 18 would comprise three split stages over 280km, the last of them the sprinters’ favourite into Bordeaux. The riders were outraged and informed Tour organiser Félix Lévitan in no uncertain terms. Raas, ailing anyway, packed his bags and made ready to ship out.
Post appeared shortly after breakfast and asked him what he was doing. Raas informed
Raas, a bespectacled 22- year- old Zeelander, had won the Dutch amateur championship in 1973. Like Peter Post he was as stubborn as a mule on and off the bike
him that he was off, whereupon Post pulled out a fistful of criterium contracts and informed Raas that the Tour wasn’t finished and if he weren’t up to riding to Paris he certainly wouldn’t be up to taking part in the crits. Raas was incensed, but the crits were where the money was. He changed for work and that afternoon baulked Maertens to perfection. Karstens sprinted to victory and Raleigh added the Tour’s blue ribbon stage to their collection.
Though Post’s methods were brutal, his management abilities were second to none. Raas, however, was through being managed. He was Dutch champion, yet Post had seen fit to humiliate him and he was no longer prepared to stand in line behind Knetemann, Kuiper and Karstens. In short, he was nobody’s domestique and he told Post he’d do well to adjust his contract accordingly. With the fault line in their relationship widening, Post demurred. Raleigh was his team and, as he saw it, Raas was issuing a challenge to his primacy. Thus Raas was invited to take it or leave it. The irresistible force to Post’s immovable object, Raas chose the latter option. It was over before it had truly begun. In 1977, Jan Raas took his Dutch champion’s jersey to Frisol, the rival team. The bust-up with Post was now a matter of public record and the stakes were higher than ever. Maertens outsprinted Raas at Het Volk and then helped himself to Paris-Nice. Nobody dared look beyond Maertens at San Remo, but when Raas attacked on the Poggio, nobody had an answer. There were seven Belgians in the top 10, but the flying Dutchman prevailed.
Roger De Vlaeminck won Flanders for Brooklyn and Francesco Moser took Flèche Wallonne for Sanson. Knetemann was there or thereabouts but by the time Amstel Gold came round, Raleigh were in urgent need of a win. They forced the selection on the Cauberg and so, headed into Valkenburg, Knetemann and Kuiper were two to Raas’s one. But it was no contest. Raas shut down Kuiper first, then Knetemann before riding away from them both. It was a masterpiece.
Now Post had a problem. He and Raas could never be friends, but he had a profound respect for the guy. Raas had developed into a sensational rider, just as he’d said he would, and moreover he was a genuine threat to Raleigh’s pre-eminence. Raas’s win at San Remo had called his judgement into question, while the debacle at Amstel had heaped something approaching ignominy on his team. He daren’t contemplate a repeat and he knew that if he could get Raas and Knetemann to work in tandem he’d have most of the bases covered. The eyes of the Dutch cycling public were upon him and he needed to be seen to be magnanimous.
Post might have been proud, but he was also a pragmatist. He invited Raas to tell him what, and who, he wanted and the two of them were reunited – the best of enemies.
It was one of Post’s smarter moves. Raleigh won copiously in 1978. Raas alone delivered 21 victories, including a barnstorming solo effort at Amstel. At the Tour he added three stages and two days in yellow, before Knetemann outsprinted Moser to win the rainbow jersey at a sodden Nürburgring.
Then came 1979. That spring Raas was the best cyclist on the planet. In three weeks he won E3 Harelbeke, Flanders and a third consecutive Amstel. They rechristened it the Amstel Gold Raas and, as Valkenburg made ready to host the Worlds, installed him as odds-on favourite.
The course, 17 laps of 16km, would be a replica of the 1948 race won by Briek Schotte. On paper much harder than the Amstel route, it would feature both the Bemelerberg and the Cauberg before concluding in the town centre. For the Italians, Moser and Giuseppe Saronni were united only in their mutual loathing, while the Belgians De Vlaeminck and Daniel Willems could barely look one another in the eye. France’s Bernard Hinault chuntered that it was “little more than a kermesse”, but he was fooling nobody. It was savage.
Cycling methodology had evolved in the 1970s. Previously the role of the domestique had been that of water-carrier and moving billboard, but latterly a new style of racing had emerged. It had its roots in the Italian peloton where, in simple terms, the heads of the gruppo had allowed a form of cycling catenaccio to develop. Nothing meaningful would happen until the final couple of hours, whereupon the TV cameras would roll and all hell would break loose. It was spectacular, but what preceded it was simply an exercise in energy saving. The Italians raced often and nobody raced more tactically. As such, a system of attaccarsi, literally “to attach oneself”, had emerged. The star riders would cling, sometimes literally, to their gregari and be hauled up the climbs. It was questionable ethically, but the man in the street was none the wiser. It was also extremely effective and pretty soon everyone was doing it.
Raas began the race as the Dutchman most likely. He’d won Amstel three times, knew the roads and his form was good. He’d prepared meticulously for the race, had an outstanding team in his service and the Dutch Federation had sold 217,000 tickets. Thus each time they hit the Cauberg, the crux of the race, the producers at host broadcaster NOS focused almost exclusively on him. It made sense so to do, but the attention revealed cycling’s dark side. Raas was pushed repeatedly on the climb, in much the same way the Italian, Belgian, French and Spanish leaders allegedly were. Moser, arguably the greatest beneficiary of the practice, was routinely belayed up climbs like this, as was his nemesis Saronni. The problem – for Raas at least – was that their indiscretions went largely unnoticed, because the camera crew only had eyes for him. The non-initiates watching on TV were horrified, but it was all part of the game.
Headed into the home straight they caught the fugitive André Chalmel and now only four remained. The young Frenchman JeanRené Bernaudeau had ridden valiantly, but he couldn’t win a sprint in this company. The German Didi Thurau, a former Raleigh man, had lost out to Moser in a two-up in 1977. Raas had the best sprinting pedigree, and also, allegedly, a willing (and in all
probability highly remunerated) lead-out man in Thurau. The two of them would have to reckon, however, with a brilliant Italian.
Five days prior, Giovanni Battaglin had annihilated Moser and Saronni at the Coppa Agostoni. His winning margin, over three minutes, had convinced the azzurri management that he was worthy of a free role, and he’d worked Raas over on the final ascent of the Cauberg. Though no thoroughbred, Battaglin was a tidy sprinter, and after 275km and seven hours it would be strength, not outright speed, that would determine the outcome. Extreme left of the carriageway, Thurau on the front, Raas softtapping behind, Battaglin third wheel.
They waited and waited, but 200m out Battaglin blinked. He tried to come round Raas just as Thurau swung hard across the road. Raas followed suit, but in so doing his back wheel hit Battaglin’s front. The Italian was taken down and the rest, as Bernaudeau gave best and Thurau sat up, was naught but pandemonium and a riot of brilliant orange.
Raas’s rainbow jersey wasn’t perhaps the purest, but it was a perfect mirror on the times. And besides, 217,000 Dutchmen couldn’t have cared less.
Battaglin was inconsolable. Convinced they’d been hoodwinked by a German-Dutch alliance, the Italians lodged one complaint for the pushes (ironic given that they’d patented them) and another for irregular sprinting. The jury threw them both out.
At the season’s end, Post faced ridicule for signing Joop Zoetemelk, Holland’s perennial Tour de France bridesmaid. Six times a Tour runner-up, Zoetemelk finally wore yellow for Raleigh in 1980. And so it went with this succession of winners, as Post unearthed the likes of Johan Van der Velde, Henk Lubberding and Cees Priem. Raleigh won over 900 races before it fell apart in 1983.
Raas would add two more Amstel wins. There would be a second Tour of Flanders, victory at the 1982 Paris-Roubaix and a total of 10 Tour de France stages. All told, he would amass 115 victories and he remains Holland’s greatest ever classics rider.
He and Post split acrimoniously in 1984, just as Raleigh became Panasonic. He joined Kwantum, but a crash at the 1985 Tour ended his racing career. When he became a sports director he found himself in competition with Post and at times it was ferocious. They were maestro and former pupil, neither was capable of taking a step back and their respective methodologies weren’t very different. Raas did the job for 20 years, through various iterations and sponsors, latterly with Rabobank. He subsequently wrote opinion pieces on cycling, but these days lives quietly and is rarely seen at bike races. Peter Post, the architect of the Raleigh legend, passed away in 2011.
Battaglin tried to come round Raas just as Thurau swung across the road. Raas followed suit, but in doing so his back wheel hit Battaglin’s front