Noël Dejonckheere, the Belgian sprinter turned mentor and federation coach for young US riders seeking to cut their teeth in Europe, has died at 67 at his home in Izegem, west Flanders.
Dejonckheere is widely credited as being one of the first to see Greg LeMond's potential talents for European racing, meeting the three-times Tour de France winner while both were competing in the USA in the 1970s and encouraging the teenage LeMond to try his luck on the other side of the Atlantic.
While LeMond went on to ride as a junior in Belgium for a year and then lived in Kortrijk, near Izegem for the rest of his professional career, Dejonckheere turned pro himself, taking 60 wins include six stages of the Vuelta a España.
On retirement he then became a sports director and long-term staff member at 7-Eleven, Motorola and BMC thanks to his trusted relationship with team manager Jim Ochowicz. He was also employed by USA Cycling for a decade as the director of the Under 23 development program, based in Izegem.
Numerous young US riders learned the ropes of the European racing scene while based at Izegem and under De Jonckheere’s tutelage. They include Danny Pate, Dave Zabriskie, Brent Bookwalter, Taylor Phinney and Tejay Van Garderen and Tyler Farrar. Other top riders Dejonckheere had already helped cut their teeth during his time at 7-Eleven and Motorola included Lance Armstrong and Canada’s Gord Fraser, but the most striking case of all is surely Greg LeMond.
According to an article published by the cycling museum Koers.be, Dejonckheere and LeMond crossed paths while the Belgian was racing in the States in the mid-1970s.
As the article recounts, "in his biography entitled 'Greg LeMond Yellow Jersey Racer', the American wrote: 'I just met him and he rode with me even though I had been racing only for four or five months. He went back and told his parents he'd seen the new Eddy Merckx!'
"Dejonckheere advised him to train in a more focused way and to come over to race in Europe. LeMond acted upon this advice. A good thing too! Without Dejonckheere's encouragement he may never have realized his full racing potential.”
Already Junior World Champion in 1978, LeMond then raced in Belgium for a year, winning a number of junior races before being scouted by Cyrille Guimard for Renault-Elf-Gitane in 1981.
While LeMond’s career then garnered him three Tour de France titles and two further World Championships win, he always remained a devotee of cycling-mad West Flanders, moving to near Kortrijk with his wife Kathy after a brief, less happy spell living in France.
As Koers again recounts, quoting LeMond, "When I won the Worlds in 1983, our neighbours in Kortrijk planted four flags outside our house: the US flag, the Lion of Flanders, the Belgian flag and that of the town."
Having already taken a World Championships title on the track, Dejonckheere, meanwhile, was developing his own career as a sprinter.
Spending the bulk of his decade-long career as a sprinter on Spanish squads after turning pro in 1978, it was perhaps unsurprising he should rack up most of his 60 victories south of the Pyrenees, with numerous victories in minor stage races and six stages of the Vuelta a España.
Outside Spain and before retiring in 1988, he also secured two stage wins in Paris-Nice, two in the Coors Classic in 1978 and various stages in the Deutschland Tour and the Tour of the Med.
On retiring, Dejonckheere became part of the team staff at the biggest US professional team of the era, 7-Eleven, and then stayed with the squad when it was rebranded Motorola.
With strong US connections, in the late 1990s the Belgian then was named as director of the Under 23 US program in Europe, running the team house in Izegem with his wife Els, to help young North American riders learn the ropes in a very different cycling environment to the one they’d find back home in the US. Dejonckheere then went on to work in BMC as a logistics manager, before retiring in 2017.
In 2010, Dejonckheere left the US governing body to join the BMC professional team as European operations manager and assistant director sportif. He held that role for seven years.
“Noël Dejonckheere had been ill for some time,” Bert Maertens, the mayor of Izegem, said in declarations to Sporza. “But even so the news of his passing away is hard to accept and comes far too soon.”
“I knew Noël for a long time, he was somebody who mattered in cycling and he remained a part of it after his own racing career, helping numerous young talents by instructing them in their profession.”
Noel Dejonckheere: born, Lendelede, Belgium, 23 April 1955; died in Izegem, Belgium 29 December 2022.
