Legendary Belgian former cyclist and sports director Walter Godefroot passed away on Monday at the age of 82. As a cyclist, Godefroot won several Monuments and, in the 1990s, was part of the successful Telekom team, which included Bjarne Riis.<\/p>\n
Born in Ghent, Godefroot was a professional cyclist from 1965 to 1979 and won races such as the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, and Li\u00e8ge-Bastogne-Li\u00e8ge. He also won ten stages in the Tour de France and took the green jersey in the 1970 Tour de France. In total, he achieved 61 victories.<\/p>\n
After his active career, he started working as a team leader and manager at Telekom\/T-Mobile in the 1990s. With that team, he won the Tour de France in 1996 (Bjarne Riis) and 1997 (Jan Ullrich), as well as numerous other races with top riders such as Erik Zabel, Andreas Kl\u00f6den, and Alexandre Vinokourov. In recent years, Godefroot suffered from Parkinson’s disease.<\/p>\n
Read more below the tweet. <\/p>\n
Merckx bids farewell to GodefrootFellow generation member<\/a> Eddy Merckx<\/a> had kind words for Godefroot on Sporza<\/a>. \u201cWalter was certainly a great rider; he was a little faster than I, but above all, he was a complete rider. He could do more than some people thought he could. A great champion has left us.\u201d<\/p>\n “What I will never forget: Walter gave my son Axel his first chance to become a professional. I am glad that we saw each other several more times. It is with regret in my heart that I must say goodbye.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Legendary Belgian former cyclist and sports director Walter Godefroot passed away on Monday at the age of 82.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":113938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":["post-113937","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-cycling","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113937","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}