Tune in on Sunday evening for a double-header of Arrivée episodes, supported by Buycycle. Daniel Friebe and Richard Abraham will give their post-podium reaction to the men’s race and Rose Manley and Denny Gray will have the women’s race covered.
by Lionel Birnie
In the meantime, here’s a collection of whimsical, unconnected memories of the Tour of Flanders. I had intended to write about my many mishaps riding the sportive over the years, but I ran out of space so, for now, my reputation remains just about intact.
1989 – Eddy Bosberg
It was spring 1989 and satellite television was in its infancy. There was also no chance of me persuading my Dad to get a dish installed on the side of our house. As far as he was concerned they were ugly things and, apparently, there was nothing worth watching on the existing four terrestrial channels to warrant beaming another 30 or 40 into our house.
But satellite television meant Eurosport – which had just started broadcasting in Britain – and Eurosport meant live cycling coverage and exotic foreign football matches. Even that failed to persuade Dad of the aesthetic merits of a dish.
Then, one day at school, I overheard a boy a year or two above me talking about the new satellite dish his (obviously much cooler, tech-savvy) Dad had got installed on the side of their house.
For many fifteen year old boys I’m afraid this meant access to exotic foreign programming of an altogether different kind. The satellite dish and the gateway it offered to late-night shows you couldn’t see on normal television was quickly the talk of the school.
Soon enough, video tapes were being brought into school and our friend was recording all sorts in exchange for money, or chocolate bars or crisps. If it sounds sordid and unsavoury, that’s because it probably was.
One day during the Easter holidays, I cycled to his house with a video tape in my rucksack. He came to the door and we conducted a furtive conversation.
‘Can you record something for me?’ I asked.
‘Course,’ he said. ‘It’ll be two pounds. Come and collect it tomorrow.’
‘No, no. You don’t understand. Can you record something else for me… cycling. It’s on Sunday.’
‘Cycling?’ he said, incredulously.
‘Yes, it’s called the Tour of Flanders and it’s on Eurosport on Sunday. Can you record the last hour and a half on this tape? I’ll come and collect it on Monday.’
‘You’ve always been a bit strange, Birnie.’
After the weekend, I cycled back to collect the tape, then rushed home to watch. Other than a few clips on sports highlights programmes and photographs in magazines, it was my first proper experience of Flanders and it was unlike anything else I’d watched. It was rainy and bleak and there didn’t seem to be a peloton, just small groups and individuals all over the place, which made it harder to follow than the pre-packaged Tour de France highlights we were used to. I wasn’t sure I liked it. I remember a bit where the fixed camera watched, almost forlornly, as some stragglers walked up one of the cobbled hills wheeling their bikes. ‘What’s the matter with these guys?’ I thought. ‘Aren’t they any good at cycling?’
The riders kept attacking each other, but not in a way that made any sense, so I couldn’t get a handle on the action. It all felt alien and frustrating and I could see why Robert Millar, Andy Hampsten and Stephen Roche didn’t want anything to do with it.
And then, all of a sudden, the tape stopped and started rewinding.
Disaster. The tape had run out and there was still an unknown distance to the finish.
I had to wait until Thursday, when Cycling Weekly magazine came out, to find out that Edwig Van Hooydonck – a rider I’d never heard of because he’d never done a proper race like the Tour de France or the Kellogg’s Tour of Britain – had attacked on one of the grotty cobbled hills called the Bosberg and ridden solo to the finish. (A move that would earn him the nickname Eddy Bosberg).
Soon afterwards, the teachers got wind of the trade in dubious recordings and threatened serious punishment for anyone found in possession of a video tape. A couple of weeks later, I was caught red-handed with a freshly-recorded video in my school bag and – despite my desperate protests – I was sentenced to detention by one of our teachers, who confiscated the tape.
I hope Mr Ford enjoyed watching the 1989 Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
1999 – My first Ronde
I was a veteran reporter by the time we got to April 1999. I’d been reporting on the sport for about six weeks and had covered Omloop Het Volk and the Vuelta a Murcia – where Marco Pantani won the big stage – and a couple of events in Britain, so I knew everything there was to know about professional cycling.
Until I got to the Tour of Flanders and everything I’d learned and all my preconceptions were torn up and scattered like confetti in front of me.
The day before the race, it rained hard from morning to night. The sky was the colour of a school chalkboard and the rain fell not so much as blobs but as long thin, grey sticks like the charcoal out of the middle of a pencil.
We stopped for petrol at a service station and I bought a copy of a newspaper which had a dizzying number of pages devoted to the race. Even though I couldn’t understand the words, I could identify with the fervour and the sense of anticipation. People who said that the Tour of Flanders was like FA Cup final day, the Wimbledon tennis final, the Grand National and the Boat Race all rolled into one were right if the pre-race coverage was anything to go by.
The petrol station attendant said to me, ‘Perfect weather for the Tour des Flandres, eh?’ Hearing him speak in English with a Flemish accent but calling the race by its French name was strangely unsettling. It made me question everything I’d learned during my introductory trip to Omloop a few weeks earlier.
The sun was shining the following morning and the crowds at the start in Bruges were huge – so large, in fact, that by the time I’d fought my way through the bodies from the press car park to the podium where the riders were signing on it was time to fight my way back again.
My strongest memory of the race is the atmosphere in the finish straight in Ninove as the crowd watching on the big screen saw Frank Vandenbroucke ride up to the leaders Johan Museeuw and Peter Van Petegem with about ten kilometres to go. It meant the three Belgian favourites were together at the head of the race.
As they swung round the final corner and slowed down, briefly rolling along side-by-side, three-abreast, I assumed that the crowd would be happy because they were guaranteed a Belgian winner. It wasn’t until I heard and saw the reaction that I realised everyone in the crowd had their own favourite. Belgium, and Flanders especially, is a place where you root for the rider from the same village – perhaps even the same street – rather than the one from 15 or 20 kilometres away. People in Flanders know precisely where the riders come from. Museeuw was from Gistel; Van Petegem from Brakel and Vandenbroucke – despite the Flemish-sounding name – was actually the outsider, born in Moescron, over the border in Wallonia and riding for a French team, Cofidis.
There was a huge number of reporters and photographers waiting at the finish and when the three riders crossed the line – with Van Petegem victorious in a jersey as grey as the previous day’s sky – they stopped and slumped onto the floor. The journalists and photographers scattered, flocking round each of the riders, encircling them, dictaphones, microphones and notebooks closing like dark clouds above their heads. It was intense and suffocating. For Van Petegem there was joy – he’d just won his first Monument. Museeuw had won three times before and was making his comeback after a horrendous crash at Paris-Roubaix the previous spring, so just being in the final three was a victory of sorts.
Instinctively I headed towards Vandenbroucke – the wild child of Belgian cycling, the outsider in so many ways, the one seemingly destined for greatness, of whom so much was expected. The way we closed in around him after six hours of effort must’ve been intimidating. I’ll always remember the look in his eyes as the Flemish journalists peppered him with questions. It can sound to an outsider like quite a harsh language at times and this was one of those times. Perhaps the questions were innocuous but they sounded like he was being cross-examined, asked to justify why he had lost.
As I stood there, observing, it struck me that ten years had passed since I’d watched that video recording of the Tour of Flanders, not really understanding what was going on, not really sure if I liked it.
Now here I was standing in the finish straight, close enough to hear the rider below me gasping for breath, coughing as he tried to answer the questions, and I realised I still didn’t really have a clue what was going on.
Meeting Freddy Maertens
My magazine colleague Edward Pickering and I went to the Centrum Ronde Van Vlaanderen in Oudenaarde hoping to interview Freddy Maertens, who worked there selling the tickets and stories from the past. He was, apparently, a great raconteur who had a tale for every occasion – some of them were even true.
Famously, Maertens – who was twice world champion and won the 1977 Vuelta and 13 stages in the process – never won the Tour of Flanders, which made it one of those strange quirks that he ended up working in a museum dedicated to the race and its history. The closest he came was in 1977 – a race that was one fabulously Belgian controversy after another. Maertens punctured at the bottom of the Koppenberg and took a wheel from a spectator, which was against the rules, and was then pushed all the way up the climb, which was also against the rules.
Ahead of him, Roger De Vlaeminck caught Eddy Merckx, who was in the late autumn of his career and well past his best, but still a legendary figure. Maertens caught them and for a moment these three titans of Belgian cycling were all together for one last time. Merckx was dropped leaving Maertens and De Vlaeminck at the front of the race for the final 70 kilometres. The pair had words, quite heated words, then De Vlaeminck sat on Maertens’ wheel all the way to the line before sprinting past to take his only Tour of Flanders win with ease.
De Vlaeminck was booed on the podium for wheelsucking. Maertens said he’d been told by the race judge that he’d be disqualified after the race for his illegal wheel change (which he was), but then added that De Vlaeminck had offered him money to keep riding to the finish. De Vlaeminck denied that and said he’d sat on the wheel for purely tactical reasons, because he knew Maertens was the faster sprinter.
A few days after the race it emerged that Maertens and third-placed Walter Planckaert had tested positive for amphetamines and were stripped of their results, which is why second and third places are blank in the Tour of Flanders roll of honour for the 1977 race to this day. Many in Flanders consider Maertens the moral victor, though.
Anyway, Ed and I were very hopeful of a colourful, entertaining chat and we approached Maertens and asked if he had time for a coffee in the Tour of Flanders-themed cafe adjoining the museum. At first he said he was too busy. Then he asked for money. We said we couldn’t pay for an interview but we’d buy him lunch if he could spare the time. He eventually agreed to a coffee and so we sat down hoping to unlock the door to his treasure trove of cycling stories. As we sipped our coffee, he unwrapped and ate the little chocolate on the saucer under his cup, then – without saying anything – reached across the table and took my chocolate too. What do you do when Freddy Maertens eats your little coffee chocolate? I can tell you that you let it go.
Anyway, we got nowhere with Maertens. I couldn’t work out if he was having fun with us or just being awkward but he resolutely refused to talk about cycling. He had just been a celebrity guest on a Belgian cookery show similar to the UK’s Ready, Steady, Cook, where the guests bring on a collection of seemingly random ingredients and then team up with a professional chef to create a dish.
All Freddy would talk about was the cookery show and the osso buco he made. I tried in English – and Ed tried in French – to change the subject back to cycling but he wasn’t having any of it so in the end we just went along with it and asked him for his recipe and cookery tips.
That feature could very well have been described as Mishaps in Flanders because almost nothing we attempted in those few days came off. We went to Herentals – home town of Rik Van Looy (and, not that we knew it at the time) a teenage Wout van Aert. We’d arranged to meet Van Looy at the cycling school he ran but just as we pulled up he sent a message saying he wouldn’t be able to make it.
We dropped in, unannounced, at Eddy Merckx’s office and he gave us 20 minutes of his time with far, far more grace than we could have reasonably expected. My face still flushes slightly pink with embarrassment as I think of the audacity of just parking up outside the office of Eddy Merckx Bicycles, not far from Brussels, strolling into reception and asking if Eddy was in.
We called in at the house of former Tour de France king of the mountains Lucien van Impe – which was named Alpe d’Huez, appropriately – but he wasn’t home.
We rang Allan Peiper to see if he had time for a quick coffee but he said he was in Gent. We then saw a Lotto team car driving down the road towards us and realised he was at the wheel, very definitely not in Gent.
Our Belgian photographer, Luc, said he thought he’d seen Tom Steels, the former Tour de France stage winner, out training so we swung the car round in the road and tried to catch him up. When we did, we realised it was just a middle-aged Belgian wearing full Mapei kit. We didn’t think to ask Luc why a retired former Belgian champion would be out riding in 15-year-old team kit but, in his defence, the guy did look quite a lot like Tom Steels.
So we went home and cobbled together – cobbled together (!), this stuff writes itself – a feature about Freddy Maertens’ osso buco recipe. I exaggerate slightly, but not much.
Ed – and possibly Simon – I owe you an apology
I was talking to Ed about our trips to the Tour of Flanders this week, trying to make sense of a jumble of memories collected over the past 25 years. It is, along with the Tour de France, the race I’ve attended most often and over that time I’ve grown to appreciate, and then love, the place.
I told him I had a confession to make.
‘Oh yes?’ he said, warily.
I started to tell him the story. We were on the Molenberg one year, tired from the sportive and possibly a little weary from the previous night’s recovery drinks, with an hour or so to wait until the riders arrived. We walked up the climb and found a spot perched on the grass bank.
We were under-prepared. We didn’t have any snacks, or much cash between us. My stomach was rumbling, so I volunteered to go back down the hill to get a couple of braadworst from the chip van to take the edge off.
‘Onions and ketchup?’ I asked over my shoulder as I set off.
‘Oh yes,’ was the reply.
As I feared, the chip van did not take cards. I fished around in my pocket for some euros and found I only had enough for one braadworst. I considered my dilemma for a split-second before taking decisive action. I ordered one giant, curly sausage in a roll.
‘Onions and ketchup?’ said the woman in Flemish-accented English.
‘Oh yes,’ I replied.
I felt guilty, of course I did, but François said it best when he described cycling as a team sport practiced by individuals.
I tucked into my illicit snack, savouring every salty, fatty, ketchupy bite, as I walked slowly back up the Molenberg, timing my last bite so I had time to wipe the grease off my fingers and dispose of my napkin before being in sight of my hungry teammate.
‘Where are the hot dogs?
‘They don’t take cards and I didn’t have enough cash,’ I said.
Back in the present day, Ed interrupted me. ‘You’ve told me this story before,’ he said. ‘Except you said you were with Simon.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I could have sworn it was one of the times the two of us went to the Molenberg, although it’s entirely possibly I’ve done this more than once and I owe both you and Simon an apology.’
On the road to Ayr
Two years ago, Simon Gill and I were in Scotland on Tour of Flanders Sunday. We’d set off from Stranraer in the morning and had enjoyed a peaceful ride on mostly deserted roads in beautiful, occasionally wild countryside.
It was the third stage of our Tour d’Écosse ride and I still wasn’t sure we’d make it to Alloa at the end of the week. As the cliché goes, we were taking it day by day.
Four days before we set off for Scotland for the trip, Richard Moore died suddenly and the shock was still impossibly raw. The adrenaline that had got us to Scotland and through the first couple of days of cycling was wearing off and there was nothing to replace it, just a sense of empty loss. Grief makes you think irrational things but during that trip I genuinely expected a message from Richard to pop up in WhatsApp any moment telling me I was getting Scotland all wrong.
Shortly after rolling out of Stranraer we’d stopped to record a bit and I felt a wave of emotion wash over me and the tears started dropping in big blobs on my handlebars.
Simon and I rode in our own little worlds for a lot of the day – sometimes side by side, often a few metres or so apart – and we came together to record our thoughts, marvel at the scenery, and compare notes about how far there was left to ride.
We stopped for a snack and to refill our bottles sometime in mid-afternoon. I looked at the map. There was an hour or so to go to Ayr, up over another deserted hill before dropping down to the coast.
I had a look at my phone and saw the Tour of Flanders had 40 or 50 kilometres remaining so I grabbed my soundbar from the broomwagon, put it into my handlebar bag, put GCN on my phone and hooked everything up so Simon and I could listen to the commentary as we rode along.
It sounded like a wonderfully chaotic race. It was hard to tell from the commentary what was happening but we heard the names Mathieu van der Poel and Tadej Pogačar a lot so we knew it must be a humdinger.
I’m still not sure why we didn’t stop to watch the last five kilometres – perhaps because it would have forced my brain to ask itself what Richard would have made of it all. So we listened to the flurry of names as Pogačar seemed at one moment to have the race won, only to throw it away as Dylan Van Baarle and Valentin Madouas caught them by surprise.
‘Who won that?’ I asked Simon rhetorically. ‘Was it Van der Poel…? It was. It was Van der Poel.’
The rain fell as we arrived at Ayr United’s Somerset Park ground, where a junior match was being played and they very kindly let us in to clack around in our cycling shoes.
Orla had sent me a message earlier in the day, a voice recording of the Robert Burns poem Epitaph On My Own Friend read by Sir Chris Hoy. Burns was from Ayrshire and Ayr United’s football team is nicknamed The Honest Men, a reference to the poet. My plan was to end the episode with the poem but I had to find the words to set it up, so I left Simon in the stadium and clacked outside to the car park into the rain. I listened to Hoy’s beautiful reading of the poem and the tears fell again, competing with the rain to see which hit the ground hardest.
An honest man here lies at rest,
As e’er God with His image blest:
The friend of man, the friend of truth;
The friend of age, and guide of youth:
Few hearts like his, with virtue warm’d,
Few heads with knowledge so inform’d:
If there’s another world, he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this.
Last year, I was back in Flanders and headed to Bruges for the start of the race. Flanders Classics, the race organisers, wanted to pay tribute to Richard and had arranged a ceremony at the sign-on podium.
The crowd was huge and I’m sure I spotted a flag that said ‘Buffalo Forever’ in the sea of faces. Richard’s younger brother Peter said a few words brilliantly, and the crowd gave a warm round of applause.
Gent-Wevelgem, one of the events organised by Flanders Classics, had been the last race Richard covered. I remember his messages that day after Biniam Girmay had won. His excitement was palpable and infectious. Some time in the evening, as he drove back to his home in northern France, he rang and I said I didn’t really have time to speak because it was my daughter’s bedtime. I said I’d speak to him properly in the morning, before we recorded the podcast. Of course, I didn’t get the chance because next morning came the shattering news.
At the weekend, Richard’s dear friend Charlotte Elton – who helped Flanders Classics to invite Peter to the ceremony before last year’s Tour of Flanders – was out on the Baneberg climb chalking her tribute to the Buffalo on the Gent-Wevelgem course.
I like to think she did it on behalf of all of us who loved and miss Richard – in fact, I’m sure she did – so thank you Charlotte.
Motherhood
by Rose Manley, host of The Cycling Podcast Féminin
When my daughter was born, it was like an asteroid had hit. It felt like a little ball of stardust had been travelling towards me for millions of years, imperceptible but constant, flying through clouds of ice and dust, brushing past the beams of ancient stars, ever faster, ever closer. Travelling through the multitudes of space and time to land here, bewildered and blinking, plonked on the end of a hospital bed. Looking at that curious face, I realised that I didn’t know much then, I didn’t know much at all. But I knew me and I knew her, and knew that we had always been destined for each other.
What followed since is a haze of nappies, playdates, tears, giggles and love, that stretches on and on like its own ever-expanding universe.
What I’m trying clumsily to say is that motherhood is an experience that is impossible to put into words. All this is why I was so thrilled that I could have so many heartfelt conversations with so many eloquent women for our mini-feature on motherhood in a recent episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin.
I spoke to Lizzie Deignan and Joss Lowden, riders who have made the return to racing post-baby, and former British champ Meg Backstedt, for whom that pathway didn’t exist. Former Trek-Segafredo rider Abi Van Twisk also speaks profoundly about her decision to step away from cycling after the birth of her baby boy.
I’m also grateful to have spoken to Deignan’s agent Emma Wade about the business aspect of maternity leave for professional riders. She opened my eyes to the ways in which support for racing mothers is strengthening the sport, not just for those who choose to have a family, but for all riders and the fans too.
Now please listen and enjoy, I must dash as my little ball of stardust has just thrown juice all down herself.
Tremendous stuff, you should do this for a living…
Seriously though, I’ve only been into cycling as a spectator sport since last year’s Tour (de France), and the Cycling Podcast and now this newsletter are two things I never skip.
Strangely, even though I’d never heard of Richard prior to coming across the podcast nor read any of his work, I almost feel I share some of your sense of loss, if that isn’t inappropriate to say.
Keep up the great work.