Even if Nelissen couldn’t remember what had happened, his body offered a daily reminder. He called them ‘souvenirs’: the scars on his knee, on his fingers and above his right eye. But that winter he was already thinking about his comeback. He attended races, where he was a star attraction. At a criterium in the Netherlands a young fan approached, open-mouthed. ‘Nelissen, is it really you?’ In France a policeman asked if he would pose with him for a photograph. ‘Too bad I don’t speak French,’ said Nelissen. ‘I would have asked him if he could make some speeding tickets go away.’ He posed for the photograph anyway.
Nelissen had no qualms about returning to the sport, he told Truyers. ‘There are always risks, but I’m not scared. I need risks, because of the thrill. They excite me, ignite the fire. I love to be challenged. I once bought a horse, just because it threw everybody out of the saddle. I’m a daredevil, but I’m not reckless.
‘I’ll never let go of the handlebars during a sprint. I never let somebody box me in. If someone pushes me, I’ll return the favour.’ And yet he admitted that one aspect of Armentières would influence him. ‘From now on, I will look out carefully to see if there’s danger on the horizon, like the Indians do, but then I will immediately look down.
‘I only fear one thing actually,’ Nelissen continued. ‘When I see the images of Armentières, I realise that I had a lot of luck. I fear that my chances to come away like that again in a similar incident are very small.’
* * *
It was as though Armentières had never happened. The following season, Nelissen won two stages at Paris–Nice, one at the Four Days of Dunkirk, one at Midi Libre. He replaced his shredded Belgian champion’s jersey: he won the national title again. The next year, he carried on: a stage at Paris–Nice, three at Étoile de Bessèges.
Then came Ghent–Wevelgem in March 1996 and the realisation of his one fear. It wasn’t a sprint; mid-race, Nelissen collided at high speed with a concrete bollard by the side of the road. He was aware of everything this time: lying on the road screaming in agony, his right kneecap crushed, cruciate ligaments ripped apart, femur and tibia broken, pelvis cracked. He lost two litres of blood and underwent emergency surgery at Ghent University Hospital.
‘As far as I’m concerned, he should never get back on a bike again,’ said Anja. ‘If he told me that he was going to stop cycling, I’d be happy. I admit there are crashes in this sport, but why is he so often among the victims? And why is it so serious each time?’
Nelissen returned again with a lower division team. But the after-effects of the crash were profound. The knee gave him constant pain; he could barely ride 40km. He had three more rounds of surgery, then admitted defeat. Nelissen retired in 1998, aged twenty-eight.
* * *
These days, Nelissen lives in Kerniel, in east Belgium. He and Anja split up but he has a new partner, Viviane. And he runs a courier company, Nama Transport.
The difficulty in contacting Nelissen owes nothing to his reluctance to speak. He is no recluse. He is simply – unusually for a Belgian ex-professional – no longer involved in the sport of cycling. He was for a while; he ran a youth team for six years. But no other door opened, partly, he thinks, because he only really worked with two team directors, Peter Post, who retired, and Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke, with whom, he says, ‘I was constantly fighting.’ He still follows the sport ‘very closely, but if you look around my living room, you won’t find any cycling memorabilia, apart from the trophy for my second victory in de Omloop [Het Volk]. Even my Belgian jerseys I gave away.’
He is still regularly asked about Armentières. It is what he is remembered for. Which is ironic, because he still remembers nothing. ‘It has never come back. What I do remember now are the kilometres leading up to the finish. A lot of twisting and turning. Very fast. But the fall … nothing.
‘My first memory is waking up in the hospital. I had no idea what had happened. I knew – because I was hospitalised – that something had happened to me. But I couldn’t figure out what it was exactly. I had no broken bones or anything like that. How? Why? I had no idea. In the early morning, people started coming in, but I didn’t really speak French back then. So it was still a bit unclear. There was a television in the hospital that you had to keep going by putting coins in it. Believe it or not, that started showing the images of the race, and just when the sprint was about to happen I ran out of money! So even then I didn’t see the crash.
‘I didn’t see Jalabert in the hospital. I saw a man on a stretcher, but had no idea it was Jalabert. I just saw a lot of blood.’
Nelissen didn’t see the policeman, either. Nor did he hear from him. In his interview with Truyers in the winter of 1994, Nelissen said: ‘People say he was given a camera by a girl behind the barrier and he took the picture to do her a favour.’ Even if that were true – and it was never proven – Nelissen remarked that it was ‘very sweet of him, but not allowed. He was there to secure our safety, which didn’t happen.
‘It’s unfortunate, but he didn’t do it deliberately. Therefore I didn’t want to press charges, even though there was a lot of pressure from the team. That would just have caused a lot of misery and pain. For him, it would have been terrible; he would have lost his job, his house. That, I would have never wanted. I don’t want him to pay for the rest of his life.’
Gendron, the gendarme, worked for the French army unit CRS-3 in Quincy-sous-Sénart, though Nelissen understood that he moved – or was moved, perhaps – to the south of France with his wife and young child after the incident. The crash in Armentières was the subject of a subsequent police investigation, but Gendron was cleared of any wrongdoing.
At the time, would Nelissen have wanted to see him? ‘Huh,’ he says. ‘An apology would have been nice … I did hear stories later on that he lost his house … But what do you make of stories like that?’
Peter Post estimated that the cost to Nelissen in lost earnings was around £2 million. And although, as Nelissen told Truyers, the rider did not want to pursue Gendron through the courts, Post felt differently. ‘Peter Post didn’t want to leave it,’ Nelissen says now. ‘But what happened in court exactly, I don’t know. I personally got 65,000 Belgian Francs [about 1,500 Euros]. That’s what the policeman had to pay me. But what he had to pay to Peter Post, to the team, I don’t know. There was a legal case; I had to deposit my [medical] expenses, my bills. But I never appeared in court. I was just given this compensation.’
Nelissen recalls that he was back on his bike just two weeks after the crash. Really, he says, his injuries were not that bad. It was a miracle. It could also be partly why he harbours no ill feeling towards the policeman. On the contrary, he is remarkably generous. ‘If you hear what happened, that he took a picture for a little child,’ he says now, ‘well, everybody makes mistakes in life. He has been punished very hard for it. But I don’t really know what happened to him; I heard so many stories, it’s impossible for me to figure out what is true and what is not.’
The legacy of the crash for Nelissen is a scar above his eye and problems with his back: ‘I had three hernias that go back to the crash. My spine was damaged, but the helmet took the blow, that’s for sure. You need some luck in life.’ But he is known for his bad luck. ‘Yeah, but I was still lucky in a way. It could have been worse. That’s how I see it. I can be grateful for still being here. After my last accident [at Ghent–Wevelgem], I’m lucky to still have a right leg.
‘People have often told me I was born unlucky, but that’s not how I see it. The young rider in the Tour [Fabio Casartelli, who died in a crash in 1995], then [Andrei] Kivilev [who died in a crash in 2003],
