[1] His career coincided with the best years of another Belgian rider, Eddy Merckx, and supporters and reporters were split over who was better.

Gilbert Maertens, the son of a self-employed bill-sticker, was a flamboyant and restless man[2] who was a member of the local council and on the committee of the town football club.

Maertens mentioned to his colleague, Paul de Nijs, that one of the engines made an odd noise.

After Maertens disembarked in New York the plane continued towards Chicago but crashed on take-off when an engine fell off, killing 279.

He worried, for instance, that Freddy's male hormones would get the better of his son and drive him into the arms of bewitching young girl who’d put the slides under his mission.

[2] Gilbert caught his son flirting with a girl and took revenge by cutting his racing bike in half.

[2] He intervened with the army, when his son was called for national service, to ask that he not be given an easier time because of his reputation.

The frame-maker Ernest Colnago and the former champion Ercole Baldini came to his house with an offer to join their SCIC team.

Gilbert Maertens was more impressed by the Belgian businessman, Paul Claeys, who had inherited the Flandria bicycle company.

Claeys offered Gilbert Maertens a concession for Flandria bikes, allowing him to sell them without first buying them.

Maertens pushed his son to sign a contract for 40,000 francs a month as an amateur and then double in his first full year as a professional.

[2] What Vanwalleghem saw as his blunder was greeted, he said, by Belgian journalists eager to write of something else after years of Merckx's international domination.

Relations between the riders and their fans reached their nadir on 2 September 1973 in the world road championship around the Montjuich climb near Barcelona.

[12] Driessens had directed his Romeo-Smith team to ride all year against Rik Van Looy in similar circumstances and now he wanted his revenge against Merckx.

[6] He was a dominant figure whose wish to control extended to standing over Carine Maertens to tell her she was not cooking minestrone correctly.

Freddy Maertens said Driessens' visits and interventions meant they were no longer bosses in their own house.

He said his masseur, Jef D’Hont, had told Gust Naessens – Merckx's soigneur – that he was going to eat and asked him to hand a bottle to his rider.

The Ronde van Vlaanderen museum in Oudenaarde has in its window a lettered brick with the name of each year's winner.

It made his performance in the 1981 Tour de France and victory in the 1981 world championship in Prague the more remarkable and was regarded as one of the greatest comebacks in cycling history.

In the world championship he finished in front of Giuseppe Saronni and Bernard Hinault, two short and stocky riders like himself.

Journalists wondered whether the era of tall, lean riders such as Merckx, Gimondi, and De Vlaeminck was over.

Despite his sprinting dominance, Maertens never won a one-day classic, coming closest with second places in the Tour of Flanders (1973) and Liège–Bastogne–Liège (1976).

He lost money entrusted to others to invest, including 500 000 francs in the Flandria Ranch, run by his sponsor.

[6] Maertens told L'Équipe that "like everyone else", he had used amphetamines in round-the-houses races but he insisted that he had ridden without drugs in big Tours – not least because he knew he would be tested for them.

He was first found positive after Professor Michel Debackere perfected a test in 1974 for pemoline, a drug in the amphetamine family that riders believed to be undetectable.

I’ve never hesitated to confess that I spent three weeks under the surveillance of Dr Dejonckheere at the St-Joseph clinic at Ostend and that after treatment I stayed under his control for another two years.

Legend says that on the Friday before the world championship at Goodwood, England, he asked his taxi driver to join him for a pint of beer, "because he sweating so much."

[24] He worked as a salesman after retiring, including in Belgium and Luxembourg for Assos, a Swiss clothing company.

The bicycle shop "Maertens Sport" in Evergem on the outskirts of Ghent is owned by Freddy's brother Mario.

1979 "Fall From Grace" by Freddy Maertens and Manu Adriaens, ISBN 978-1-898111-00-9, 1993, Ronde Publications, Hull.