Remembering Phil Anderson's first Tour of Flanders podium

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Phil Anderson with his wife in 1983 at the Clarence Street Cup in Sydney

In the mid-1980s, Panasonic was the team to beat in the Spring Classics. The team run by Peter Post, himself a Paris-Roubaix winner, was created following the fall out he had with Jan Raas in 1983 which saw the end of the TI-Raleigh squad.

Raas took six riders and created the Kwantum-Decosol team, today its known as LottoNL-Jumbo, while seven riders followed Post to the new Panasonic team. Phil Anderson had ridden for the Peugeot team since the 1980 season where he become the first non-European rider to wear the yellow jersey at the Tour de France in 1981, won a Tour stage the next year and followed that with 1983 victory at the Amstel Gold Race. Anderson also finished ninth at Flanders and fourth at Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the first time he would finish inside the top ten of a monument.

That year the team took victory at the Tour of Flanders via Johan Lammerts while Ludo De Keulenaer and Vanderaerden made it three Panasonic riders inside the top ten. Defending champion Raas was out of the race after a crash at Milan-San Remo and would never ride Flanders again after his 1983 victory. Jacques Hanegraaf was the best finisher for Raas' Kwantum Hallen – Yoko team in 11th place, crossing the line at the end of the group that also included Anderson in 23rd place.

The race was described by historian Rik Vanwalleghem as follows. "It was a legendary Ronde, one which wrote Sport with a capital S. It was as cold as Siberia all day and the rain fell in torrents," Vanwalleghem wrote. "Of the 173 starters only 24 were counted in at the finish. In this apocalyptic background Eric Vanderaerden got back to the front after looking beaten to ride 20km at the head of the race alone. Impressive."

"In the last 50km or so there was a rider up the road, Hennie Kuiper, and my teammate Vanderaerden tried to bridge up to Kuiper," Anderson said. "It was kind of a false resistance by Vanderaerden who was stuck in the middle of the peloton and Kuiper as he was maybe a couple of meters in front of the peloton and you could see Kuiper was 100-150 metres ahead. I jumped across to Vanderaerden to take him up to Kuiper so there were three of us in the front."

"The second last climb this particular year, as it's all changed now, was Muur de Geraardsbergen and the three of us had maybe 30 to 45 seconds lead on the chasing peloton," he said. "I was riding on the front on the cobbled section in the last 100 metres of the climb. Vanderaerden was yelling at me to ease up a little bit so I eased up a little bit and as I did, Vanderaerden attacked. I just had to sit with Kuiper as Vanderaerden rode away."

Vanderaerden's winning margin was 41 seconds over Anderson and 1:01 minutes over Kuiper. Walter Planckaert finished eighth for Panasonic to cap off a memorable day for the team but a frustrating one for Anderson who admitted to being "pretty pissed off" after crossing the line. Another Australian, Alan Peiper, was the last rider to finish the race riding for Peugeot. Peiper would go onto to ride for Panasonic, posting a career best seventh at Flanders with the team in 1987.