straight sprint and Ottenbros won on the inside by centimetres, throwing his head down like a track rider and not lifting it again for a couple of seconds. "It was an odd feeling", he said years later. "The nearer the finish line came, the more I had to tell myself I was just in a kermesse, although with a few more spectators than usual. I had to forget that I was riding for a world title because if I'd realised that, I'd never have won." "The race needed a winner", wrote the French journalist Pierre Chany, "and it was Ottenbros: Ottenbros, who finished the Tour de France in 78th place, three hours behind the yellow jersey… He was escorted to the podium by just his team manager and two policemen." The tone of Chany's reporting was just the start. The revenge of the stars The world of cycling turned on Ottenbros. Some say they felt that an unknown had no right to the biggest prize, others that they were imposing the guilt they felt for denying the championship to Merckx. The only rider to congratulate him was Franco Bitossi, who rode up alongside him in the Tour of Flanders and said he admired what he had done. The gesture so moved Ottenbros that he gave him one of his rainbow jerseys. Often he was lucky to get even start money. Riders jeered at his weakness on hills and called him The Eagle of Hoogerheide, an ironic reference to the climber Federico Bahamontes, the Eagle of Toledo, and to the unrelenting flatness of the south-west Netherlands where Ottenbros lived. "That nickname made me more famous than my world championship ever did", Ottenbros told L'Équipe. "And yet I was the strongest rider on the day. Or do you reckon that I bribed all the other 190 riders? Don't forget that they all wanted to be world champion as well. I raced and they didn't. I can't be held to blame if the stars of the day didn't take their chance." In the Netherlands, fans deserted him, disappointed by the lack of further results. He broke his wrist in the Tour of Flanders at the start of the following season and could neither ride in his rainbow jersey nor defend his title. Then his team, Willem II–Gazelle, folded, victim of a ban on cigarette advertising. "Believe me", he says, "I wasn't in the