Strength and character were the hallmarks of Johan Museeuw's racing. Museeuw was the cyclist’s cyclist, admired by fans and rivals alike.
Swedish 2004 Paris-Roubaix winner Magnus Backstedt says, “Johan was always a competitor, always there trying to win. He really showed how hard he could fight when he came back and won Paris-Roubaix after a bad crash. That was an amazing story and an amazing performance.”
Museeuw’s bad crash was in the 1998 Paris-Roubaix, he was out of competition for a long time. His left knee was smashed, but an infection could have cost him his life. It was a serious attack of gangrene.
“For a whole month my knee was twice its normal size. I couldn’t even move, the only thing I did was lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling, the pain was terrible. For 20 days they gave me morphine injections to kill the pain. I reached the extreme limit of pain I couldn’t have handled any more. It felt as if they had put a thousand needles in my body, but I survived,” he told Cycle Sport magazine when he started training again.
A key figure in Museeuw’s return, physiotherapist Lieven Maesschalck, remembers the struggle. “Johan’s rehabilitation was physically and mentally difficult. He suffered a lot of pain in hospital and afterwards he pulled himself through four hours of physiotherapy a day.
“At first, he could only bend his knee ten degrees, but to ride a bike you have to bend it 110 degrees. It took two months before he could get on his bike again, and then he started from behind zero because not only were some of the muscles around his knee wasted, some were destroyed. And he was still in terrible pain just trying to work the knee.
To come back and win Paris-Roubaix twice from where he was then. Well, that was huge.”
It was huge, Museeuw won Paris-Roubaix in 2000 and 2001, and stopped straight after completing the great cobbled classic one last time in 2004.
You can read more stories about Johan Museeuw in the 4th edition of the Cycling Legends illustrated book series, Flandriens. Available now on our website here
