to absorb all the ex-pros. Retired riders become team directors, race organisers, national selectors, they run amateur teams, or, in Freddy Maertens’ case, they are employed in the Flanders Cycling Museum.
Not Wilfried Nelissen, however.
Nelissen seems to have disappeared. ‘Wilfried Nelissen you want? That’s a tough one. Give me a bit of time,’ says one Belgian journalist. Another one first expresses surprise that I want to contact him, then admits it might not be easy.
Nelissen was the third man in a golden generation of sprinters, though he tended to be obscured by the shadows cast by the other two, the flamboyant Mario Cipollini and the lethal Djamolidine Abdoujaparov. Cipollini – ‘Super Mario’ as he liked to be known, ‘Il Magnifico’ as he liked even more to be known – was an Italian playboy and showman who became ever more outrageous, arriving at the start of one stage of the Tour, in 1999, dressed as Julius Caesar in a chariot pushed by his team-mates. (In case you were wondering, it was Caesar’s birthday.) On other occasions, Cipollini wore one-off, non-regulation skinsuits: tiger-print, zebra-print, a translucent muscle-suit. In retirement, he hasn’t changed much. During the 2013 Tour de France in Corsica, I drove past a fit-looking forty-six-year-old riding his bike with his top off and an impressive all-over tan. It could only be Cipollini.
Abdoujaparov was his polar opposite: a dour Uzbek. He was the Tashkent Terror, a stern-faced warrior. While Cipollini was tall, bronzed and dashing, with his chiselled jaw and mouth full of white teeth, the dark-haired, razor-cheeked Abdoujaparov was compact, powerful and dangerous; outrageously fast but a menace in a bunch sprint. There was nothing malicious about Abdou. It was just that with elbows out and head down there was no telling where he would go; he weaved left, right, seemingly out of control.
But the main victim of Abdou’s erratic sprinting was Abdou himself. He was involved in one of the most infamous crashes in Tour history, on the Champs-Élysées in 1991. Head down, he was heading for the win when he veered dramatically, and wholly unnecessarily, to the right, colliding with one of the Coca-Cola advertising bollards, which jutted out from the barriers. It was as if his bike was swiped from under him. It was stopped dead by the obstacle while the sprinter was catapulted from his bike and tossed to the road like a rag doll.
Motionless, he lay in a crumpled heap, where he was hit square-on by another rider. Robert Millar, who was in the bunch as they streamed across the line, said later that it looked as though Abdou had fallen out of a plane. It was the final stage. He was in the green jersey. He had to finish. Somehow he was helped across the line and then loaded into an ambulance, an oxygen mask strapped to his face.
Abdou had a quiet year in 1992. But in 1993 he was back, and at the top of his game. So was Cipollini. And so was Nelissen, who had more in common with Abdoujaparov than Cipollini in the looks department. Dark-haired, with thick eyebrows over pale grey-blue eyes, his mouth struggling to contain tombstone-like teeth, Nelissen resembled a boxer who had lost a few fights. He looked like a typical Belgian hardman. He came from Tongeren, the oldest town in Belgium and, more significantly as far as cycling is concerned, located in the south-eastern corner of Flanders. Any athletic child in Flanders has little chance of not growing up to be a cyclist.
Nelissen turned professional in 1991, aged nineteen, with the Weinmann team, switching to Peter Post’s Panasonic (which became Novemail) in 1992. Known as Jerommeke, Nelissen came to prominence during his first year under Post: a win at Paris–Bourges, two stages at the Tour of Switzerland, two at the Dauphiné Libéré. In 1993 he won the early-season semi-classic, Het Volk, to ensure his celebrity status in his native land, especially in Flanders.
Nelissen’s nickname, Jerommeke, meant nothing to anybody outside Belgium. ‘Jerommeke is a cartoon character, with unlimited strength and speed,’ explains Jan-Pieter de Vlieger, a journalist with Belgium’s top daily, Het Nieuwsblad. ‘He featured in the Suske and Wiske series, Belgium’s most popular comic books, by Willy Vandersteen, the acclaimed cartoonist.’ Sometimes you see the Jerommeke nickname suffixed with ‘Woefie’ – the sound a dog makes? De Vlieger isn’t sure. He sends a picture of Jerommeke: like a Belgian Desperate Dan, without the cowboy outfit. Beyond Flanders, Nelissen acquired another name: the Bulldog. To his team-mates, meanwhile, he was Willie.
Nelissen was the fastest of the lot, faster even than Cipollini and Abdou, according to Marc Sergeant, his lead-out man in 1994. Sergeant was a team-mate to lots of good sprinters, and these days the Lotto team he directs includes André Greipel, one of the best sprinters of the current generation. Yet he says: ‘Honestly, Willie was maybe the fastest guy I ever worked with. He was a real sprinter.
‘Let me give you an example. Sometimes he would say, “I’m dead, I’m not good today.” We’d say, “Come on Willie, you have to do it – come on.” And when he saw the sign for three or four kilometres to go, at that point he turned into a beast. I don’t mean in a bad way. It was an instinct he had. He wasn’t arrogant or aggressive, but he could say: “I’m going to win here; nobody else,” and he could beat Cipollini, Abdoujaparov – anybody. And he was a friendly guy, with no enemies. Everybody respected him.’
In his pomp, Nelissen explained this transformation: ‘A sprinter has to be like that. The trick is to get me mad.’ He compared it to road rage: ‘There was a guy once who didn’t give way and he started beeping his horn at me. When something like that happens, I’m ready to jump out of the car. People have to hold me down or I would explode. Well, that’s the feeling I get when I start a sprint. That’s how I get going, get the adrenaline flowing, like fireworks going off. In the sprint, I would kill or eat somebody, but after the line the calmness returns.’
The 1993 Tour was set for a battle royal between the three supreme sprinters of this golden generation. The opening stages confirmed it. Cipollini won stage one, Nelissen won stage two, Abdoujaparov won stage three. But it was Nelissen who wore the yellow jersey for two days after his stage win, then reclaimed it for one more day after stage five. Cipollini fled when the race reached the mountains to spend the rest of July on the beach – as he always did. (The Giro represented the main dish to Cipollini; the Tour was dessert. But then he wasn’t a dessert man – he never finished the Tour.) That year, there were no more bunch sprints until two days from Paris, where Abdoujaparov won the classic sprinters’ finish into Bordeaux and then laid to rest the ghost of 1991 by winning on the Champs-Élysées.
It was all set for 1994, though Cipollini didn’t make it to Lille for the Grand Départ; he was recovering from a horrific crash at the Vuelta a España, when he was taken across the road and into the barriers by a team-mate, landing heavily on his head (he wasn’t wearing a helmet). There were fears his career could be over. It wasn’t. Like Abdoujaparov, and all the rest, he would be back.
This is where sprinters are different to retired golfers. They don’t lose their balls.
* * *
Not a lot was happening on stage one of the 1994 Tour. The riders rolled out of Lille at 10.45am; it was a warm and sunny day, in the high 20s. Chris Boardman was in the yellow jersey, having won the prologue. For Miguel Indurain, going for his fourth overall win in a row, a flat stage in northern France posed only a little more danger than a rest day. Boardman’s Gan team, which included Greg LeMond in his final Tour, took control in the later stages, after a three-man break had finally escaped with 67km to go, building a lead of almost two minutes. Until then, the bunch was fanned across the road, only coming to life for two bonus sprints, both won by Abdoujaparov.
The Gan team reeled in the break, then Nelissen’s Novemail took over. Typically for a Peter Post-run team, they had strong rouleurs like Marc Sergeant, Gerrit de Vries and Guy Nulens. Untypically, they also had French riders, mainly stage race specialists and climbers – Charly Mottet, coming towards the end of his career, Bruno Cornillet, Ronan
