Frank Vandenbroucke is the great lost talent of world road cycling.
Born in Mouscron in Belgium in 1974, he went on to race for three of the biggest professional teams on the world circuit – Lotto, Mapei and Cofidis, and became the darling of the cycling press for his daring approach to winning races.
Between 1993 and 1999 he won a slew of races, including the Liege–Bastogne– Liege (known amongst the cycling fraternity as the hardest race in the world), Het Volk, Paris–Nice, Paris–Brussels and stages of the Tour of Spain. The Tour de France was in his sights. But his personal life was another story; he became addicted to cocaine and succumbed to pressures within his teams to take EPO and other performance-enhancing drugs. The notorious Cofidis team – where he was joint team leader with Scotland’s David Millar – eventually broke him. On leaving Cofidis he moved to the Italian team Lampre and then a number of other teams until he effectively ended his career in 2004, aged only 30. Five years later, he was dead.
