The Whimsical Guide to the Classics
Part 1: Omloop Het Nieuwsblad
by Lionel Birnie
This is the first edition of a new series spanning the spring. The Cycling Podcast’s Whimsical Guide to the Classics will take a not-entirely-logical, linear or always serious look at each of the major one-day races. I’ll delve into my memory bank, and The Cycling Podcast’s vault, in an attempt to capture the essence of the Classics as we head from the slick cobbles of late February to the pre-grand tour vibes of Liège-Bastogne-Liège. We start in Flanders, with Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. It’s the first half of ‘Opening Weekend’ – a phrase that no one used twenty years ago – and it marks the ‘real’ start of the pro cycling season.
Last year, I wrote You never forget your first Omloop, which you can read below. It’s an account of my first trip to Flanders to see a race that had, up to that point, only existed for me as ink on a page.
From the Vault
Before you read on, you can listen to two special episodes released for Friends of the Podcast in 2016 and 2019. They will transport you to the heart of Flanders, summoning the smell of farmers’ fields and fried onions that seems to follow you from hill to hill.
Flanders Fever, 2016
Opening Weekend, 2019
These episodes are not on the current Friends of the Podcast feed so The 11.01 Cappuccino is the only place to hear them.
When I was a kid, I had a book called European Cycling: The 20 Greatest Races, by Noel Henderson. It was published in 1989 and, as well as the great races you’d expect to be listed there, it included the Tour of Henninger Tower, Bordeaux-Paris, the Zurich Championship, Paris-Brussels, Paris-Tours and the Grand Prix des Nations.
Although that book told me so much, it also left me with so many supplementary questions. What was the Henninger Tower, for example? It wasn’t until years later that I learned it was a grain silo owned by the Henninger brewery in Frankfurt, and that it was no ordinary grain silo but was in fact the tallest building in the city and had a restaurant and viewing platform at the top.
The Tour of Henninger Tower – or Rund um den Henninger Turm in German – changed its name to Eschborn-Frankfurt ‘Der Radklassiker’ in 2009 when the brewery stopped sponsoring the race, and in 2013 the grain silo was demolished and rebuilt as (presumably luxury) apartments, with a design inspired by the original. The race logo features the outline of the new Henninger Tower, as well as the Commerzbank Tower, Frankfurt's current tallest building, and the Taunus hills, where the race heads before it reaches the city.
What does all this have to do with Omloop Het Nieuwsblad? Well, nothing really, except to illustrate that while much in cycling changes, there are certain foundations – cornerstones of the sport (or should that be cobblestones?) – that remain constant. The first race listed in European Cycling: The 20 Greatest Races was Het Volk, which was then, and is now (under a different name), the curtain-raiser to the spring Classics season.
The book told me that the race had been created straight after the Second World War by Gent’s daily newspaper, Het Volk, to boost circulation and rival the Tour of Flanders, which had been created in 1913 by a sports paper, Sportswereld, which merged with another big Flemish paper, Het Nieuwsblad, in 1939. My GCSE German told me there was a good chance ‘Het Volk’ meant ‘The People’ and, as there was a gaudy red-top tabloid in Britain of the same name, which focused on sex, sensation and scandal, my first impression of Het Volk, based on the fragments of information available to me, was of some sort of low-rent, slightly seedy event.
The other thing I noticed from the book was that for the first four decades of its existence, Het Volk was an almost uniquely Belgian affair. Ireland’s Shay Elliott was the first foreign winner, in 1959, and after that there were only three other foreign winners, all Dutch, until 1991 when Andreas Kappes of Germany won. It’s become more international since then, but it’s still an event that is as Flemish as stoofvlees (that’s beef stew, by the way – not even my GSCE German could have helped me with that one).
***
One of my first assignments when I started writing for a weekly cycling magazine was to interview Sean Kelly on the phone. He’d only been retired from racing four years and was settling into the co-commentator’s chair for Eurosport. They had set up the call to get a bit of publicity for their spring Classics coverage, which seemed in those days to be shoe-horned into a spare 15 minutes between frames of snooker from The Crucible in Sheffield.
Kelly talked about winnning Milan-Sanremo, Paris-Roubaix and Liège-Bastogne-Liège – and how he should have won the Tour of Flanders at least once. As we were wrapping up our conversation I asked him which of the Classics he remembered least fondly.
‘The one I had most trouble with was Gent-Gent,’ he said. ‘It always came too early in the season for me and there were guys who were already going like a bat out of hell. My focus was on the races later in the spring so I didn’t want to start the season too strongly.’
As he continued his answer, I scrabbled around in my brain to work out which race he was talking about. Was Gent-Gent a defunct Classic I’d never heard of? I listened out for clues but there were none other than that Kelly said he’d been on the podium a few times without winning it. As I was brand new to the job, and I was talking to the great Sean Kelly, I was reluctant to reveal my ignorance by asking him to clarify what he was talking about, something I regretted as soon as I put down the phone.
I swivelled in my chair to ask the rest of the office, but no one in particular, very casually whether they’d heard of Gent-Gent.
‘Have you been speaking to Sean Kelly?’ came a voice older, wiser and more experienced than mine.
‘Yes.’
‘He means Het Volk.’
No one seemed to know why Kelly called Het Volk ‘Gent-Gent’. It was perfectly logical, given that for much of its history the race had started and finished in Gent, but for the past couple of years the finish had been in Lokeren. Someone suggested that Kelly didn’t like to mention the name of sponsored races unless he was also getting paid, but as no one had ever heard him refer to the Amstel Gold Race as the Limburg Classic, we ruled that out. I was satisfied that Gent-Gent was, in fact, Het Volk, and before I got on with writing my piece I looked up Kelly’s results in the Tour of That Big Tower In Frankfurt.
***
No one in Flanders called the race Gent-Gent, but I was soon to find out they didn’t tend to call it Het Volk either.
My second trip to cover the race came in 2000, a year after my debut. By now I felt like a veteran. I set off in one of the company pool cars, took the Eurotunnel across and headed straight for Gent with the office copy of the Michelin map of Belgium on the passenger seat as my only companion.
I arrived at my hotel, an Ibis near a cathedral, checked in, dumped my bags in my room and headed down to the bar for a pre-dinner beer. The barman, noting my terrible attempt at ordering a beer in Flemish, asked where I was from and what I was doing in Gent.
‘I’m here for Het Volk tomorrow,’ I said.
He looked at me quizzically.
‘Het Volk,’ I repeated, adding a terrible Flemish accent in case I was pronouncing it wrong.
He shook his head.
I thought everyone here was obssessed with cycling. Had I stumbled across the only Flandrian who didn’t know his Kemmelberg from his Kwaremont?
‘The cycling,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow. Het Volk. The big race?’
‘Aaaaaah,’ he said, as the penny dropped. ‘Omloop!’
I learned that everyone called the race Omloop, otherwise they thought you were referring to the newspaper.
The barman told me that his grandfather had been a cyclist. Quite a good one. He’d won Omloop in the 1950s, or was it the early 1960s? Way back, anyway.
I asked the barman his grandfather’s name and he replied so quickly and so Flemishly that I didn’t catch it. I asked him to repeat it. He said it just as quickly – nothing more than a combination of Cs and Ks and Rs and Ts. Although incomprehensible to my English-speaking ear, it also sounded stereotypically Flemish – the local equivalent of John Smith or Dave Jones.
I raised my eyebrows and did a half nod to give the impression the name rang a bell.
‘You know him?’ said the barman, surprised, almost excited.
‘It’s before my time but the name rings a bell.’
‘Rings a bell?’
‘Oh… it’s an English expression. It means it sounds familiar. Anyway,’ I said, changing the subject, ‘who’s going to win tomorrow?’
‘Johan Museeuw,’ he said, as if the answer was the most obvious thing in the world.
The following day at the start in the square at Sint-Pietersplein, I spotted a Belgian journalist I’d met the year before – the only familiar face in a sea of faces. I went over to make small talk. Awkward small talk.
‘The barman in my hotel said his grandfather won this race in the 1950s or early 1960s,’ I said.
Unimpressed, my colleague said: ‘Every barman in Gent has a grandfather who won Omloop. Especially this weekend.’
Changing the subject, I asked who was going to win the race.
‘Johan Museeuw. It has to be.’
That day in late February 2000, I was stalked by a sense of déjà -vu all afternoon. I’d only been to Flanders a handful of times but already the place felt familiar. There was something about the countryside that made me feel like I was in a cartoon. The background scrolling past the car window seemed to repeat itself. The sky was a continuous sheet of pale grey. The patchwork of ploughed fields were each a slightly different shade of brown, their furrows different widths. The rows of pollarded trees separated the fields the same way their bare stumps seemed to stand between winter and spring.
Rural Flanders felt like being stuck in a glorious maze. The roads all seemed to lead to the same place. No matter which way I turned, the Molenberg was always there, just over my shoulder, and every time I popped out at the end of one of the narrow lanes, having bumped monotonously over the joins between the concrete slabs, I seemed to end up on the same main road that links Kluisbergen and Ronse and the Oude Kwaremont.
But it was the distinctive combination of smells in the air that played with the senses so. The mud, the cigarette smoke, the whiff of fried onions that floated every bit as cartoonishly as the repetitive landscape, and the diesel fumes all swirled in my nostrils along with the wintry air that had just enough of a hint of spring to take the edge off.
***
As had been preordained, Johan Museeuw won that edition of Omloop, signalling his return from an horrific injury sustained in the Arenberg trench during Paris-Roubaix a couple of years before. He’d crashed, shattering his knee cap. Gangrene set in and he almost lost a leg. Astonishingly, he was back racing at the top level by spring 1999 and finished third at the Tour of Flanders, although he was beaten by Peter van Petegem and Frank Vandenbroucke, the apparent heir to Museeuw’s classics crown.
Museeuw went on to win in the velodrome at Roubaix a few weeks later, unclipping his foot and pointing to his reconstructed left knee as he crossed the line.
Omloop had been a big part of Museeuw’s comeback story but by winning it the Lion of Flanders had sprinkled a bit of stardust on the race itself. (This was before the doping allegations and Museeuw’s subsequent confession, of course, when everyone was still pretending to be innocent).
In truth, Omloop is not so much the curtain raiser to the classics season, it’s more like a trailer at the cinema, teasing the coming attractions – specifically the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. It’s somewhat detached from the heart of the cobbled Classics campaign and the conventional thinking is that, with five weeks to go until Flanders, it’s not desirable to be too good too early.
That’s why the two giants of the generation that emerged from Museeuw’s shadow – Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara – never won Omloop. Boonen went close, finishing second twice and third twice. Cancellara only started the race on two occasions, and his best result was 13th. Peter Sagan, who looked at one stage set to dominate the Classics, also failed to win Omloop. In back-to-back years he was outsprinted by Greg Van Avermaet – quite a feat in itself – and finished second. In 2016, Sagan did a Reverse Samson, riding with unshaved legs. As world champion, no less, this provoked much pre-race chatter and had every Flandrian of a certain age jutting out their bottom lip and shaking their heads in disapproval.
The beauty of Omloop is precisely that it stands alone, slightly separated from the other, more important, cobbled Classics. It’s a prequel to the coming season and we watch fully understanding that some of the actors who turn in star performances in the crisp air of late February may have only walk-on roles in April. That’s because many riders who have looked impressive over 200 kilometres at Omloop have lacked the strength in depth when it comes to the additional 50 or so kilometres that the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix demand.
***
In 2008, two newspaper groups merged and Omloop Het Volk became Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. A decade later, Omloop’s Gent-Gent became Gent-Ninove and the race set up to rival the Ronde van Vlaanderen in the first place now mimics it. As the Tour of Flanders route evolved and settled on a circuit based around the Oude Kwaremont, Omloop now pays homage to the ‘old’ Flanders finish, which took the riders over the Muur in Geraardsbergen and the Bosberg before the interminable, slow motion finish on another of those cartoon background-style roads on the outskirts of Ninove.
Although the route and the name may change, the essence of Omloop remains the same. It’s about the marriage between town and country, a sense of regional autonomy that feels especially strong in Flanders, the history and hot dogs (or braadworst, to give them their proper name). It’s about feeling the adrenaline of watching the first Classic of the season unfold – chasing it across country to see the riders on the same hill or stretch of cobbles as last year, and the year before, and the year before that. It’s about enjoying a post-race beer and speculating whether the winner can repeat the victory at the Tour of Flanders (answer: he can’t, no man has ever won both races in the same year). There’s something intoxicating about ‘opening weekend’ – even if the phrase makes the toes curl a bit. Would it even be opening weekend without the speculation, without lengthy pre-race discussion of how the day’s pre-eminent Classics superteam (previously Quick Step, now Visma-Lease A Bike) can’t possibly be beaten? Would it even be opening weekend without arriving in Kuurne for the following day’s rematch with last night’s final Leffe knocking at the inside of your skull?
There’s something about Omloop that makes us all a little bit giddy and tempts us all to get a bit too carried away. But bear in mind it’s a long spring and take a leaf out of Mathieu van der Poel’s book. Spend Saturday with your feet up in front of the telly. Crack open a beverage of your choice but take it easy. It’s still five weeks till Flanders.
Who’s going to win, and how? Feel free to speculate away in the comments.
The Tour de Lunsar needs your help
Last year, we featured the Tour de Lunsar in an episode of Service Course. It’s a grassroots race around Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, and the episode was a wonderfully evocative account of the challenges and triumphs involved in racing in west Africa. Friend of the Podcast Stephen Moon has long been a supporter of the race and he got in touch to explain that the 2024 edition was in jeopardy unless funds could be raised to put on the event. We spoke to Stephen and the race founder and organiser Karim Kamara in an episode last month and shortly afterwards someone who had heard the interview made an incredibly generous private donation of £10,000, which will go a long way to securing the 2024 edition.
The Go Fund Me page is still open because they want to ensure the full programme of events over four-days, including races for men, women and junior cyclists, can go ahead. The more they raise now, the more they can start to look ahead to 2025 and beyond, offering riders all over the region a chance to compete and take their first steps on a cycling journey that might take them to the top.
If you’d like to donate, click on the link above, or listen to the episode of Service Course. We’re very happy to have been able to spread the word and we wish everyone involved with the race the best of luck as they prepare for the event in April.
Next time: We get dusty on the white roads of Tuscany. It’s our whimsical guide to Strade Bianche.
Lovely writing Lionel, and so good to hear your voice on the linked Podcasts, as well as Richard’s of course.
Sitting in bed with a generous dose of Covid and self pity, this is is perfect remedy. Nicely timed and thank you.