FREDDY’S LAST HURRAH
Huy, July 2006. The Tour de France stage was about to roll out. A panting, sweating, stressed-out middle-aged man with the face of a venerable suntanned garden gnome was running through the cars parked ahead of the start line. Freddy Maertens had been left behind by the VIP car with which he was supposed to be travelling to the finish in Saint-Quentin and was desperate for a lift.
We put Freddy in the car and drove him down the course through Belgium until he had sorted things out; after a flurry of phone calls involving his wife Carine, eventually we passed him on to another car. It felt like picking up George Best at the roadside.
The episode reflected the vulnerability that had marked Maertens’s rags-to-riches-to-rags trajectory. I can’t imagine finding any other great of cycling’s past in that situation. Who would dare drive away from a Tour stage start having left Bernard Hinault scrabbling around for a ride?
When I interviewed Maertens in 2017, he was trying to put the past behind him. He’d had heart problems, and it had taken him years to fix his financial issues, which began when his sponsor failed to pay him for 18 months. There were poor investments and a massive tax bill. He asked to be paid for the interview, and he took the money up front. He was working at the Tour of Flanders museum in Oudenaarde.
