You never forget your first Omloop

Lionel's memories of his first trip to the opening cobbled Classic of the season

Omloop Het Nieuwsblad by Simon Gill

by Lionel Birnie

This week’s episode, Chasing the X Factor, featured our conversation with Jens Haugland, the boss of the Norwegian Uno-X team, who found out on New Year’s Day that his squad would be making its debut at the men’s Tour de France this summer.

It turned out I had a few things in common with Jens. We were both ‘head boy’ at our respective schools, although in my case that perhaps says more about my school than it does about me. We both followed the 2007 Tour de France in a camper van. And we both like sports teams who wear yellow and red, or ‘mustard and ketchup’ as Daniel described it. (My team is Not Watford FC, in case you were wondering).

Where the similarities end is that Jens is CEO of a fuel company with a turnover in the hundreds of millions, as well as the general manager of the Uno-X men’s and women’s professional cycling teams.

As we wrapped up our conversation, he said something that immediately struck a chord. He explained, with boyish enthusiasm, how much he was looking forward to going to Belgium to watch the first cobbled classic of the season.

‘I can’t wait for the Omloop, man… It’s going to be the atmosphere, just the sign-in and everything… I’m flying out on Friday evening to make sure I get all the fun.’

I’m not going to Omloop this year, and I can already sense that on Saturday morning I will be hit by sense of missing out as the riders hit the cobbles. It always make me think back to the first time I saw these races with my own eyes.

Cobbles, frites and deceptively strong beer

It’s 24 years since I first travelled to Belgium for Omloop Het Volk, the race we now know as Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. No one called it Opening Weekend back then but it was the first serious engagement of the professional season after warm-up events in Italy, France and Spain. The first edition of the Tour Down Under (won by Stuart O’Grady) had been held the previous month but there were no races in South America or the Middle East.

For me it represented a beginning of a very different kind because it was the first professional bike race I covered as a journalist. I remember that weekend as if it was yesterday. You never forget your first Omloop.

I went with a couple of colleagues from Cycle Sport magazine – a young, equally inexperienced colleague who was also covering her first Omloop, and our editor, who was showing us the ropes.

We met the photographer Graham Watson and his motorbike driver, a lovely Frenchman called Jacky, for dinner at the Broel hotel in Kortrijk, which is sadly no longer there. I had steak and frites and one bulbous glass of Leffe beer too many, not realising its potency and despite Graham’s gentle warning. It was all on expenses too, which seemed impossibly generous not to say glamorous considering I’d recently joined the magazine from a local newspaper where the allowance barely stretched to a supermarket sandwich meal deal.

At some point over dinner, before things started to go a bit blurry, Graham asked what our plan was for race day and for the first time it struck me that I had absolutely no idea. How on earth do you cover these races? I looked to my editor for some advice and realised at that moment that the point of this weekend was an initiation of some sort. An introduction to covering European bike racing. Sink or swim.

My colleague and I looked at each other. Somehow we were going to have to work it out.

Graham slid the race roadbook across the table. I looked at the map, and the turn-by-turn directions. It appeared the race started in Gent and finished in Aankomst. At least I thought it did, until Graham pointed out that ‘aankomst’ was the Dutch word for arrival. I was off to a good start.

I recognised some of the names from the magazines and books I’d read – the Oude Kwaremont, Paterberg, Muur and Molenberg – but I realised I had no idea where they stood in relation to each other out there in the three-dimensional fields of Flanders. I didn’t realise that while it took the riders a good couple of hours to cycle the 90 kilometres from the Oude Kwaremont to the Molenberg, we’d have time for frites and mayo from one of the roadside cabins before driving the most direct route between the hills, and still make it to the aankomst – which was in Lokeren, since you ask – to see the last 40 minutes or so on the telly in the press room.

Next morning, I had butterflies in my stomach and barely touched the breakfast buffet, even though it was also on expenses.

We arrived at the start in St Pietersplein, the square in the centre of Gent, long before the team buses and camper vans started to pull in. We had a coffee in a smoky bar just off the square and then, armed only with our flimsy cardboard press passes on Het Volk-emblazoned lanyards around our necks, strode off to work.

I scoured the start list on the sheet of A4 paper in my hand, looking for some sort of inspiration. What exactly was I hoping to achieve? I didn’t know any of the riders or staff, and the bus parking area was more or less open to the public, meaning I had to bump and barge with hundreds, if not thousands, of Flandrian cycling fans just to get a glimpse of the stars of the show.

I headed to the Palmans team camper van, where the only British rider in the race, 25-year-old Roger Hammond, was getting ready.

‘Hi Roger. I’m Lionel from Cycling Weekly…’

‘Oh, hi.’

It was his first Omloop too, although he’d ridden Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, Gent-Wevelgem and the Driedaagse van de Panne the previous season which made him a veteran in comparison.

We had a chat about how the race might pan out until I realised that for Roger and many of the riders, the race was about staying involved and useful to their teammates for as long as possible rather than keeping an eye on the big guns.

A look at the start list from that day now brings back a lot of memories. TVM-Farm Frites had the defending champion, Peter van Petegem, wearing number one. He would go on to win the big one, the Tour of Flanders, later in the spring. Five of his teammates went on to become sports directors at World Tour teams (Steven De Jongh, Tristan Hoffman, Servais Knaven, Andreas Klier and Geert Van Bondt). That says something about how knowledge and experience of the Flandrian roads is passed down from generation to generation even if the courses change over the years.

Look! That’s Matt White, riding for the Italian Vini Caldirola squad. The French Big Mat team had in their line-up Thierry Gouvenou, now better known as the Tour de France route director, and Alexei Sivakov, father of Ineos Grenadier Pavel. It tickled me then – and still does now – that the small Belgian Spar team had Gert Omloop and Wim Omloop in their ranks. Imagine the potential headline – Omloop wins Omloop.

When the race rolled out, we headed to our car. Our editor drove. I navigated, sharing map-reading duties and making up our plan on the hoof. There was no sat-nav, no iPhone, no Google Maps – goodness, I sound old – so all we had to go on were the race roadbook and a Michelin map of East Flanders. The road names were all in foreign, and not relatively easy foreign like French, but Flemish, which required two or three looks at each word to take in.

We saw the race on the Oude Kwaremont where I heard for the first time the clatter and bang of bikes as they thundered over the cobbles. What looked so smooth and controlled on television was actually noisy and chaotic in the flesh. There were little bumps and barges, micro-corrections to avoid a touch of wheels or to prevent veering into the grass verge. The occasional shout of warning or annoyance if a rider in front made a mistake that caused someone to interrupt their rhythm.

But the sound that surprised and stuck with me was the panting. The sound of a couple of hundred athletes fighting to keep their breathing under control.

Next stop for us was the Molenberg, the final climb, by which time it looked like a completely different race. At the Oude Kwaremont there’d been a break of six riders more than seven minutes clear of the big peloton, now the bunch was more split up and the pressure was really on. I scribbled down the numbers of the riders in the break, then counted the seconds on my watch, then tried to pick out a few numbers in the chase group. There was a Mapei rider, one from TVM, a couple from Lotto, another from TVM. Was that Museeuw? No, that’s Peeters. Who’s that Cofidis rider? Looked like Vandenbroucke. There’s Museeuw! Was Tchmil in there? Oh forget it, this is hopeless!

As the afternoon wore on, the weather got worse. The sky turned black and the rain fell. We drove to Lokeren in the Saturday afternoon traffic, knowing the clock was ticking, oblivious to what was happening in the race. There was no GCN+ or Eurosport Player, no Procyclingstats for text updates. Heck, no phone signal because my little Nokia didn’t even have overseas coverage. We had race radio, though, which gave frequent but basic updates. We’d get the bare facts of who was in the break, the time gaps, any punctures or mechanical problems. But as we headed to the finish we drifted too far away from the race and lost reception. We were in an information black hole.

The press room was in a suite at Lokeren football club’s stadium. We sat at little tables and craned for a view of one of the televisions at the front. At the bar were little brioche-style sandwiches with various fillings. Plasticky sheets of cheese and ham. Egg and tomato. An indefinable and alarmingly pink meat paste that was incredibly moreish. There was also beer which some of the reporters were drinking. And people were smoking. The old image of the athletes on the pitch and the wheezing hacks in the press box was alive and well here.

We arrived just in time to see Frank Vandenbroucke attack. At first glance he looked too slight for the cobbles and the flat run-in to the finish. The only rider to react was Wilfried Peeters of Mapei, who was every bit the stereotypical Flandrian powerhouse. Surely Vandenbroucke would get outmuscled.

Peeters barely did a turn, although in fairness he had teammates in the group behind. Undeterred, Vandenbroucke rode on the front like a World’s Strongest Man contestant in the tractor-pull round, and still had the speed to finish it off in the sprint.

As the riders approached, we dashed out to the line. The riders were cold and covered in a film of grey, agricultural Flemish phlegm. I stuck my dictaphone into the huddle around Vandenbroucke, then Peeters. They were speaking Dutch. I went to the press conference – conducted mostly in Dutch, with a couple of questions in French.

Back in the office on the Monday morning, I wrote my report. The internet was in its infancy back then. Cyclingnews certainly existed but our trusted news sources were the wire feeds from AFP and Reuters.

The editor of Cycling Weekly stood over my shoulder as I scrolled through my words, feeling quite frustrated at their inadequacy. I’d travelled to Belgium for the weekend, my eyes opened wide by this vivid, complex event. My illusions about what these races were like had been shattered in the most magical way, and yet my report read like an incomplete compilation of events as they’d unfolded. I fear I failed to convey what the day had been like at all. But I suppose that is what the job demanded at the time. The British audience could not switch on the TV to watch a race like Omloop Het Volk live. Some of the national newspapers might have carried a top ten result but there was little in the way of blow-by-blow reporting.

As I filed my article, the editor said: ‘You definitely got the winner right, didn’t you?’

I had, I said. Although I did double-check the wires just in case.

Next week’s episode of The Cycling Podcast will look back at Opening Weekend and the UAE Tour. In the meantime, The Cycling Podcast Féminin is back with Kool and the Gang. Listen to Rose, Orla and Lizzy as they catch up with what’s been going on the women’s peloton.

Omloop Het Nieuwsblad by Simon Gill