Approaching the tenth anniversary of the death of a respected champion, Chris Sidwells looks back at the highs and lows of Claude Criquielion’s racing career.
Claude Criquielion had a French-speaking head and a Flemish heart. He was born in Lessines, a town in the French-speaking Belgian province of Hainaut, but with the Flemish border close by. The Muur van Geraardsbergen is only ten kilometres to the north, and you don’t get more Flemish than that.
Criquielion was a natural athlete, class on a bike, but cycling wasn’t how he started his sports career. He had his father to thank for the switch. “I was a good runner at school, winning all the cross-country races. They wanted me to take up athletics, but my dad said no. He loved cycling. We had a farm, but when the Tour de France was on TV nothing stopped him watching. Whatever needed doing on the farm, he’d do it later.
“When I was 12 he bought me a mini racing bike and a Peugeot team jersey. When I took out my first racing licence, my dad said it was the happiest day of his life,” Criquielion told the journalist Noel Truyers in 1984.
Criquielion’s running ability didn’t immediately transfer to cycling. “I failed at first, although my dad kept encouraging me, so I decided I had to train really hard. That’s when I started enjoying it,” he explained.
With harder training Criquielion started winning; 37 times as a junior and 27 as an amateur. He won a stage of the 1977 Tour de l’Avenir, then was selected for the Belgian team for the 1978 amateur world road race championships, and he nearly won that.
The first ‘next Eddy’
Several pro teams wanted him, but Criquielion chose the Spanish KAS team, “Because Lucien Van Impe was the team leader. I thought I could be a good stage race rider, and there wasn’t a better way to learn than from Belgium’s last Tour de France winner,” he told Chris when he grabbed him for an interview at a team presentation. It was some years after he stopped racing, when Criquielion was a team sports director.
At first it looked like his future would be as a Grand Tour contender. He was ninth in his first Tour de France (1979) while working hard for Van Impe, but reckoned that performance ruined the next five years of his career. Pressure from the Belgian media was immense. It was as true in the 1980s as it is today. The Belgians wanted another Eddy Merckx, even though he’d only stopped racing in 1978. They still want one, but Claude Criquielion was the first ‘next Eddy’. The pressure got to him.
He didn’t do so well in the next few Tours rode, and the press hammered him for it. The truth, as his later career showed, was that Criquielion wasn’t a natural Grand Tour rider, his first result flattered to deceive. It just took the young Belgian a little longer than most to find his way.
“I wasn’t self-confident like some new pros are. I felt uncomfortable on cobbles, I hated the elbow work you need to get in a good position in the classics, and I wasn’t the kind of supple climber you must be to win a Grand Tour.
I still got a few results because I had abilities, but it took me a long time to adapt to pro cycling. I had to learn skills and find the aggression to hold my place in the peloton,” he said.
World champion
The 1984 world road race championships was Criquielion’s big break. It was held in the Montuic Parc area of Barcelona, and Criquielion had already won twice on the circuit there. It suited his strengths. The race was hot and hilly, a grinding down process without much in the way of tactics. Criquielion was its master. He owned the race, romping away from the break to win alone.
The 1984 road race world title was Criquielion's first really big victory
Being world champion made a huge difference. Not to his legs, they’d always been good, the difference was in Criquielion’s head. His confidence soared. “The rainbow jersey gave me morale to fight,” he told Chris. Five years of promise but no consistency were over, Claude Criquielion’s cycling career took off.
Even before his world title the Belgian had told journalists he was no longer focusing on Grand Tours but on the classics. And in 1985, looking magnificent in the rainbow bands, Criquielion won La Flèche Wallonne. Then was second in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, following on from sixth in the Tour of Flanders and eighth in the Amstel Gold Race.
They were great results and they confirmed that Criquielion’s single-day ability stretched across all terrains. He had a natural propensity towards the Ardennes Classics, but he was also mastering the cobbles. In 1987 Criquielion won the Tour of Flanders. He was used to cobbles by then because Flanders was where he trained.
Attacking in the race he most wanted to win, but didn't
Deux-Acren
He’d moved to Deux-Acren, a village even closer to the Flemish border than Lessines. Almost all East-Flanders climbs are within a 30-kilometre sweep of Deux-Acren. Criquielion started doing cyclo-cross to improve his bike handling, so his Flemish soul was formed, although he always said his greatest regret was never winning Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
“They waited until I retired to have an uphill finish,” Criquielion explained. He was second twice, third once and fourth twice, always when the race ended after descending into Liège, and not after climbing out of it like it did later.
Bad luck, but there was one defeat that must have gave Criquielion nightmares. It was 1987, Stephen Roche’s year of grace, and Roche and Criquielion got clear towards the end of the race.
If they’d have kept working they would have stayed clear, but as they approached the finish Roche’s DS, Davide Boifava told him to play cagy. Roche, rather uncharacteristically went against his racing nature and did what Boifava told him.
Three became two
Their break started near the top of La Redoute, where Criquielion pushed so hard he forced a split. He went over first, Roche followed and the reigning world champion, Moreno Argentin of Italy tagged on behind. After Argentin there was a gap, and the three pulled away.
Criquielion, a master of anything a single-day race could throw at him by then, flew down the other side of La Redoute. Roche followed, but Argentin couldn’t hold them. The Belgian-Irish duo cracked him, or so they thought.
They got a good lead, but Roche stopped working in the last couple of kilometres, so Criquielion slowed down and a futile game of poker began. They didn’t know Argentin had waited for a few riders to catch him, worked furiously with them, then gone alone again after Roche and Criquielion… He was closing.
With Stephen Roche near the end of Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 1987
He caught them in sight of the finish line. The leading two were caught by surprise, and Argentin blew right by. Neither had enough left to match him. Argentin won, Roche was second and Criquielion third.
They would never have been caught if Roche hadn’t took his foot off the gas, and the Irishman reckons it was a long time before Criquielion forgave him. But that was nothing like the grudge the Belgian held against another English-speaking rider after the 1988 world championships.
Controversy
They were held in Ronse, another border town like Lessines, but on the Flemish-speaking side. Ronse has controversial world championship history. The 1963 pro race ended here with the infamous Benoni Beheyt-Rik Van Looy ‘who pulled who’ sprint. It’s cycling’s equivalent of football’s ‘hand of God’ and is still talked about today. So is the 1988 finish, and its repercussions ended up in a Belgian court.
Criquielion had thousands of fans around the hilly circuit, and he didn’t disappoint. The race was on short but tough loop. No big climbs but they were repeated so often, that and ever-increasing pace wore things down until the best were left for the last lap.
Criquielion attacked to kick it off, and a 23-year-old Italian, Maurizio Fondriest went after him. He caught the Belgian with seven kilometres to go, and there was a gap behind them.
It looked like the race would be between those two, but a miraculous effort from Canada’s Steve Bauer bridged a 17-second gap to catch them with 800 metres to go.
Bauer eased once he’d made the two up to three, took some deep breaths, and the other two tried to size up how much he had left. It wasn’t long before Bauer showed them, as he launched his sprint.
Criquielion jumped after him, and Fondriest was stuck, still riding hard but looking at bronze. Bauer gritted his teeth, stuck his elbows out and went for the line.
Criquielion started to come past, but had decided to try on Bauer’s right, the side nearest the barriers.
Bauer took his hand off the handlebars, reaching down to the lever to shift gear, and veered right. The gap between Bauer and the barriers, the very gap Criquielion was trying to ride through, began to close.
It was terrible, but sort of inevitable. Criquielion’s front wheel hit the feet of a barrier and he crashed. Bauer looked behind and stopped sprinting for a moment. Fatal, Fondriest pounced, caught up and flew past the Canadian just before the line.
Aftermath of the 1988 world championships crash
All Hell broke loose. Fondriest was jubilant, the Italian fans went mad, but for once they couldn’t be heard. Police reckoned close to 250,000 people crowded around the 13.2-kilometre Ronse circuit. Most of them were Belgian, and they wanted Bauer’s guts.
The race judges disqualified him, but things were so ugly Bauer was put under police guard for his own safety. He lived in Belgium, not far from Ronse, so for weeks afterwards police guarded Bauer’s house and his family as he received all manner of threats.
Aftermath
Criquielion slowly got up and walked across the line, dragging his busted bike behind him. Ten riders passed him, then the controversy moved to the courts. Criquielion sued Bauer for criminal assault. It took years and two appeals to bring things to a conclusion, and Criquielion lost. It was a sad affair that saw everybody suffer.
Many tributes were made to Claude Criquielion by friends and rivals at his funeral in 2015, but perhaps the most poignant was from Eddy Planckaert. He said that Criquielion was remarkable; easy going for a cycling champion, but highly respected. He also felt it was a shame that what happened in Ronse tended to over-shadow the many great victories he had.
Claude Criquielion was indeed a class act, highly respected as a rider and later as a team manager. In many ways his action after Ronse wasn’t typical. He just believed he’d been wronged, and felt the only way to prove that was in law. He was by all accounts an honest man, who must have felt that pursuing Bauer was the honest thing to do.
Maybe best to leave that in history, and remember Claude Criquielion on his bike. He was an incredible stylist with a powerful burst of speed and the physical strength to make the burst stick. Once in a breakaway he worked whole heartedly, was rarely crafty, and even when he was a successful champion he was never too proud to help a team mate.
An ideal sports director for young riders
He stopped racing in 1991, well before his power waned, which is always a sign of class. And when he became a team director he did the job with dignity and care. The early difficult years he experienced in his own pro racing career helped him help many new pros through their first years.
Claude was also an Alderman in his local community, and those who knew him say he was a family man, a caring man, as well as a great cycling champion. A true professional in all his dealings. Rest in peace Claudey Criquielion.
