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Dutch legend Knetemann “too young to die”

Published: Nov. 2, 2004
Photo: AFP (file photo)

Everything in the life of Gerrie Knetemann appeared to be going wonderfully.

Just a month ago, he was coaching the Dutch national team at the world championships in Verona. The highlight for the 53-year-old cycling legend was the excellent performance of his teenage daughter, Roxanne Knetemann, who finished sixth in the junior women’s time trial and fifth in the road race (in which her teammates placed first and third)

Then on Tuesday afternoon this week, just as Americans were going to the polls, Knetemann, a big man who always wore glasses, was out riding his mountain bike with three friends near his hometown of Bergen. The weather was overcast, in the high 40s, with a cool breeze blowing out of the northeast. As usual, being just a couple of miles from the North Sea coast, the air was damp.

The man they called “Kneet” was probably having a lot of fun; but all that ended when he suddenly stopped riding. He felt sick. It was a heart attack. Gerrie Knetemann was dead.

In an exemplary pro racing career between 1974 and 1989, Knetemann racked up 129 victories, including the world’s in 1978, two editions of the Amstel Gold Race, 10 stages of the Tour de France and a dozen shorter stage races, including the 1978 Paris-Nice. He was also an excellent track racer, winning four six-day races between 1978 and 1985.

Knetemann won races through his power and endurance rather than his finishing speed. He was an invaluable member of the TI Raleigh team during his best years, 1976-83, when the Dutch squad routinely won team time trials at the Tour. Most of his victories came in two-man or solo breakaways. He was not a great climber or sprinter, but a consistent time trialist. He even beat Bernard Hinault in a 57km time trial at the Tour de France in 1980.

Knetemann’s crowning achievement was winning the word title on West Germany’s hilly Nürburgring in 1978. On the final lap, he was in a breakaway group with theoretically superior racers like Hinault, and the Italians Giuseppe Saronni and Francesco Moser. But Knetemann matched all their attacks and finally escaped with defending champion Moser. Everyone in the huge crowd expected Moser to win, but at the end of the grueling seven-and-a-half-hour race, it was the Dutchman’s stamina that won the day.

Knetemann’s last major win came at the Amstel Gold Race in 1985. It was one of those cold, damp days in the Limburg region of his native Netherlands, when only 25 of the 146 starters made it to the finish. The race looked like going to another Dutch star, Adri Van der Poel, but the cold got to him and he abandoned the race when he still had a solo lead on the Keutenberg climb. His compatriot Nico Verhoeven then went on the attack, but “died” when Knetemann came through with a strong counterattack to finish alone a half-minute clear of the chasers.

After retiring, Knetemann became the coach for the Dutch national team. It was a job he enjoyed and one in which he earned the trust of the current crop of Dutch racers. “He was a trainer with whom I had a great understanding. I felt that he had a lot of respect for me,” said top Dutch rider Michael Boogerd on Tuesday on learning of Knetemann’s death. “This is an enormous shock. At only 53, he was too young to die.”