The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman by Harry Pearson

Author:Harry Pearson [Pearson, Harry ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

7

Show Me the Money

Dwars door Vlaanderen, March 22

E3 Harelbeke, March 24

The Nokere Koerse was closely followed by the Handzamme Classic. The Handzamme Classic (which, confusingly, wasn’t actually a Classic at all) had originally been a stage of the Driedaagse van West-Vlaanderen, but then, in 2010, you might say it went off on a solo breakaway. So far it has not been reeled back in, and since the Driedaagse van West-Vlaanderen is now also a one-day race, it seems unlikely it will be in the future. Although the UCI had given the race semi-Classic status it was a low-key affair, which set off from the beach resort of Bredene and wiggled along the coast before finishing after just under 200 kilometres, usually in a bunch sprint, in Handzamme. As at Nokere, Adam Blythe was beaten for speed in the final 50 metres, this time by Norwegian Kristoffer Halvorsen.

During the hiatus in the Flemish cycling season that followed Handzamme, spring arrived. The rain gave way to warm sunshine. Daffodils popped up and danced in the breeze, cherry trees blossomed and the temporary fencing, beer tents and hospitality marquees of the Ronde van Vlaanderen sprang from the warm Flemish earth. We were nearing the start of Flemish Cycling Week – a whirl of five races that sent Flanders into such giddy excitement nobody seemed to notice that it actually went on for nearly a fortnight. Flemish Cycling Week culminates with the Ronde, which by this point was creating such a tingle of excitement it was an effort of iron will not to put three exclamation marks after it.

The great race was 12 days away and the banners advertising its imminent arrival strung across the streets of towns and cities along the route seemed as much a harbinger of the new season as gambolling lambs and frolicking bunnies. Indeed, I suspect that if Charles De Coster had written his tale of sixteenth-century Flemish trickster Tijl Uilenspiegel today it would have opened with the line, ‘In spring in Flanders when the posters for the Ronde go up.’

My friend Steve had come up from his home in Luxembourg to join me for a few days’ watching bike racing, drinking beer and complaining about football. Steve was the man who had introduced me to pro bike racing back in the mid-1980s. He had a picture of Sean Kelly on the wall of his flat in Tottenham. In those days I was so ignorant of the sport I’d thought the reason Kelly was wearing a green jersey was because he was Irish. These days Steve is less enchanted with the sport than he’d been then, the legacy of the apparently endless doping scandals that had ripped cycling apart since the fateful day in 1998 when Flemish grandfather Willy Voet, a soigneur with Festina, was stopped by French customs officers on the border near Lille driving a car stuffed with more drugs than Woodstock. (Voet had a fair few drugs stuffed in himself, I should add. Shortly before arriving

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