• April 6, 2018

Belgium bound

Rules are there to be broken, so I’m going to kick on with the blogs by breaking a rule I set myself, that I wouldn’t be blogging about work in the purest sense of it. There are times when work, pleasure and cultural discovery overlap and that’s how it was last week in Flanders, when I stuck around in Kortrijk for Ghent-Wevelgem, Dwars Door Vlaanderen and the Big One on Easter Sunday. In between times I was researching for next year’s book, which is provisionally entitled, Passion, Cobbles and Brown Beer. It’s about Belgian cycling in case anyone is wondering…

I have spent time in Belgium, of course. You can’t be a cycling writer for three decades and not spend time in Belgium. But I hadn’t ever been there for the kind of sustained period that is required if you want to begin to get your head around a country. I say “begin” advisedly because the only way you can really understand a country is by living there. So last week was the second of three blocks of time I will be spending in Flanders this year.

So what did I learn? Quickstep are dominant, and they look to me like Peter Post’s TI-Raleigh/Panasonic did in the late 1970s and early 1980s, based around versatile one-day racers – Raas, Gerrie Knetemann, Cees Priem and Ludo Peeters – rather than the most highly priced icons in the firmament, with a philosophy of “total cycling”, having numbers up front to dominate the finale.

At Quickstep Tom Boonen’s retirement has left space, established names like Niki Terpstra, Zdenek Stybar and Philippe Gilbert are as good as ever, and Yves Lampaert has hit the boil at the right time. The clincher is probably this: Quickstep don’t have a rider who can win a Grand Tour, which frees up budget for riders worthy of leadership at another team, and it also frees up team slots and budget for one-day riders and development riders because there is no need for a train of climbing domestiques. The other teams simply cannot cope with the numbers Quickstep can field in the back end of a one-day race, unless they have the sprint skills Peter Sagan showed at Ghent-Wevelgem.

The main thing I was reminded of last week was the extent to which cycling is imprinted in the fabric of Flanders. Every village has a race whose name you recognise, or a statue of some long-forgotten star, or a mural of some great race, or a bar that proudly proclaims itself the home of a fan club. Every industrial estate has names you know from jerseys past and present: Collstrop (wood things for gardens), the KBC bank, Willy Naessens building products, and so on.

I hadn’t seen the new format Tour of Flanders before, and was duly impressed. It has mushroomed into an absolutely immense event – what sprang to mind when beetling around the Ronse/Kluisbergen area on Sunday was the Cheltenham Festival, a vast number of sports fans in a fairly confined area, putting away an epic amount of alcohol while watching top class sport. But it was still totally recognisable as the bike race I last saw in the mid-1990s; it has grown exponentially while sticking close to what makes it unique: that particular region between the N36 Ronse highway and the Schelde river, the succession of cobbled hills. I loved the old route with the Muur and Bosberg at the back end, but this latest version works for me.

In the style of Jock Wadley, I managed a couple of lengthy days out on the bike for research purposes: a long trip west to Ypres and the Kemmel to remind myself of how Ghent-Wevelgem slots into the World War I battlefields, and a decent schlep north to Torhout to watch an amateur kermesse, where intriguingly around a third of the 175 riders were from Scandinavia. And again, you are reminded of the basics of Flemish cycling: a tight circuit – three miles in which there was a small berg, a bit of crosswind, and some tight corners – which crucially took in a couple of strategically placed bars, with enough time to buy a round of beers while you wait for the bike riders to pass, as Jo Parkin wrote in A Dog in the Hat.

So four bike races in a week to watch in different ways. Ghent-Wevelgem in the same bar on the Kemmel that I wrote about for Cycle Sport in 1997, Dwars door Vlaanderen in the press room, because it wasn’t a day to be outside, and luckily in pure racing terms it was the best of the four, the kermesse riding the wrong way round the circuit as you would with any amateur event, and Flanders again on the bike, scooting between viewing points around the Kwaremont. All without the pressure of having to knock out a few hundred words afterwards. And that was a reminder of something else as well: I just like watching bike races for all the reasons any fan can understand, I always have done. It was good to feel that passion refreshed.

• April 6, 2018
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• March 25, 2018

Ups and downs

Advance warning. I’ve been trying for a while to figure out how to do these blogs and have finally decided the only approach is the well known sportswear company one: Just Do It. But I think a proviso is necessary. These pieces are not going to be controversial, opinionated, “calling out” anyone for this and that. I don’t have a massive legal team to back me up, andI have a very good forum in the Guardian when they ask me to put across my views on Jiffy Bags and such.

Nope, these are going to be about the cycling that takes up most of my life, about the bits of bike related stuff that I come across when I get out of the Shire and visit the real world for work reasons, and occasionally about the non-cycling thingies that creep in when I turn my back.

So the last week has been dominated by two things: the arrival of the new book, and the biggest crash I’ve had in years, that has left me nursing a seriously ropy shoulder. Getting your mitts on a new book is a lovely feeling, especially when, as is the case with Sunday in Hell, it’s the first one with only my name on the front cover since the Bernard Hinault biography back in 2015. There have been ghost-written books since then, both of which I’ve been very proud of, but those are not the same.

So it’s a special moment when you rip open the Jiffy Bag (insert your own joke here), and there in front of you is the finished product of several years work. In this case, I had the original idea back in 2011, I started talking about it with the publisher in 2012, and did the first interview for it in 2015. After that, Bradley Wiggins and Lizzie Armitstead asked me to help with books for them, and those kind of proposals are hard to turn down, hence the delay. So it’s been a long road with this one, and finally you get your reward.

It’s rewarding to look at the details, the things the designers put in that sound great in theory and look fine at the proof stage, but which you can only be certain about when the finished article turns up. There are a lot of screen grabs from the film in the book, and they are perfect; there’s a little motorcycle camera logo on many of the pages (to find out exactly what it does you will have to buy the book) and so on. There are some nice pics in the plate section, some taken by me which is a surprising development but they’ve come up sharp. All good.

Most of all, I like to look at a new book and contemplate: a lot of work went into that. But what I can never do is actually read the book. I’ve seen that text so many times that frankly I’m fed up with it. It takes about four or five years before I want to look again at one of my books.

That nice moment made up for the crash in the Abergavenny handicap, which was horrible. These days, I am massively paranoid about how I race, because now that I am in my 50s there is every chance that I won’t manage to race again after a really heavy one with broken bones. So I channel Steve Cummings, staying last wheel or so. Or I sit in the left-hand gutter, usually with half an eye on the roadside eying out where I can take evasive action. Risks are taken only when strictly necessary.

On this occasion I was in the middle of the bunch, close to the front but not at the front, which is a position I try to avoid. It was a classic British race crash, where someone was on the wrong side of the white line, moved across to his left to stay safe, and someone else got caught in the wave and touched a wheel. Two riders ahead of you, you can’t avoid it. At 30mph, it’s going to hurt, although luckily I fell onto the first faller; the big bruise on my hip is probably his pedal. There were others worse off than me so I’m not complaining.

It was the first time in years I’ve been a human speed bump with most of the peloton going over or round me, and as a result I’ve been finding odd bruises and bumps here and there. A broken brake lever, bent bars and probably some damage to shoulder ligaments, in the shoulder that until a week ago was the final major joint that I hadn’t crashed on. It’s a classic: not bad enough to go to hospital for x-rays but grim enough to keep me quiet. Maybe I’ll break the habit of
a lifetime and read that newly arrived book …

• March 25, 2018
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• November 24, 2016

How to get ahead in winter

How to get ahead in winter

First of a series of blogs on the new-look website.

The risks you run as a cyclist if you don’t take winter seriously were brought home this week when a cyclist of my acquaintance ventured out on what looked like a decent enough day only to be caught in a big sleet shower 30 miles from base. The bike rider in question had a cape with him but otherwise was in thin stuff. He ended up shivering under a blanket in a cafe, borderline hypothermic; if he had one thing to be thankful for, it was that he didn’t get a mechanical and end up by the roadside at what could have been a very nasty moment.

Over the years I’ve had enough “episodes” to fill up a Monty Python type “we had it tough” sketch – frozen bottles, frozen everything I guess – but the fact is I actually relish the arrival of winter, having worked out some simple ground rules from experience. Some of these are pretty obvious, maybe all of them if you have been cycling for a while. Some you won’t agree with, but that’s fine. I would just add the proviso that these are my own opinions; no one has given me freebies to make me write nice things about their products (interestingly, companies are always happy to give journalists summer kit, never winter stuff).

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• November 24, 2016
• Uncategorized