Harry Pearson - The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman

I would like to thank my friend Steve Marshall for introducing me to professional cycling and accompanying me on many fine trips to watch races; Ben Clissitt, Adam Sills and Ian Prior at The Guardian for letting me write about them and Lionel Birnie and Richard Moore of the Cycling Podcast for encouraging me to waffle on about Flanders.

The editorial team at Bloomsbury Charlotte, Ian and Zo have done a fantastic job untangling my prose and I am greatly indebted to them and to Jasmine Parker for the maps and Eliza Southwood for the cover illustration both are far better than I deserve.

Thanks to Francis de Laveleye of Editions Jacques Brel for permission to quote from the great mans lyrics.

I have read too many books about cycling to keep track. The following titles have lodged in my brain: A Peipers Tale by Allan Peiper with Chris Sidwells, Continental Cycle Racing by Noel Henderson, Cycling in the Sixties by David Saunders, In Pursuit of Stardom by Tony Hewson, Brian Robinson: Pioneer by Graeme Fife, World Champions I Have Known by Rene de Latour, The Full Cycle by Vin Denson and For the Love of the Cobbles by Chris Fontecchio.

A number of books provided insight into the history of Flanders, notably Jan-Albert Goris Strangers Should Not Whisper, The Coburgs of Belgium by Theo Aronson and Hugo Clauss monumental and brilliant novel The Sorrow of Belgium . Tim Webb and Joe Stanges CAMRA Good Beer Guide to Belgium ensured I was never thirsty, if sometimes dizzy.

Without exception the Flemings I met on my travels were, as ever, friendly, courteous and showed a kindness to an often bedraggled Englishman that went far beyond good manners. In particular I would like to thank Kristof and Eva who looked after me in Ghent, the staff at the Krook library, the Wielermuseum in Roeselare, the Centrum Ronde van Vlaanderen and especially the Wielermuseum de Gistelse Flandriens. I was also well entertained by the excellent bar and waiting crews at Bidon Coffee & Bicycle, Gruut, Trappistenhuis, Aba-Jour and, of course, the Trollekelder.

And finally, and most of all, I would like to thank Deryn for giving me the best possible reason to come home.

PROLOGUE
Brick chimneys and iron men

The smell of a freshly opened bottle of beer is the smell of my country, the great Lige-born writer Georges Simenon said. If the scent of Belgium is that of good ale, then the defining sound of the nation is the swish of bicycle tyres on wet roads, the whistling of wind through spokes, the juddering thrum of steel frames on cobblestones.

Bike racing is madly popular all over Belgium, but in the northern, Dutch-speaking half of the country it goes far beyond that. It is part of the national identity, beloved by young and old, male and female. In terms of the number of fans football may be more popular, but when it comes to the consciousness of Flanders theres little doubt that bikes are the thing. In small Flemish towns middle-aged ladies who lunch unfurl LottoSoudal brollies, toddlers wear beanie hats proclaiming their affection for Tom Boonen and teenage girls fashion capes from flags covered in photos of cyclocross genius Sven Nys, the Cannibal from Baal. Compared to this a few K.A.A. Gent scarves and the odd Club Brugge bumper sticker are nothing.

You can no more imagine Flanders without bicycles than you can France without garlic, Germany without sausages. Even those rare Flemings who profess no interest in the sport will, when pushed, trip off the names of the heroic riders of the past Buysse, Maes, Van Steenbergen, Schotte, Van Looy, Van Springel, De Vlaeminck, Godefroot, Maertens, Van Impe, Museeuw with the ease of a Jesuit priest reciting the catechism. Cycling is in the psyche and in the blood. It is as unavoidable as the weather.

There are only around five million Flemings spread across the northern Belgian provinces of East and West Flanders, Antwerp, Limburg and Flemish Brabant, yet their bike riders have been a dominant force in a global sport for well over a century, hoovering up one-day Classics and Grand Tours at a rate that would do credit to a nation ten or fifteen times the size. Flemish riders have won the three major stage races 18 times, ParisRoubaix 46 times (no British or North American rider has ever won it), MilanSan Remo 11 times (French riders have won it only twice more, the Spanish six fewer), the Mens Elite Road Race at the UCI World Championships on 20 occasions (one more than Italy, 12 more than France). With the exception of New Zealand in rugby union, its hard to think of anything comparable.

That it came to be this way is down to the personality of the Flemish. Flemings are northerners. They like ale and chips and complaining (Im a Yorkshireman, so dont bother writing in). They live indoors, hidden behind net curtains, nurturing strange passions for cacti and chicory and songbirds and pigeons. Like all northerners they nurse a sense of grievance against the south, which may stem from an ingrained, though never acknowledged, sense of inferiority. In his wonderful documentary Magnetic North the English writer and broadcaster Jonathan Meades observes that northerners have the superiority of the warm south fed to them in the womb. The Mediterranean lifestyle, the art, architecture, food, sex is all so much tastier and more beautiful than anything we can manage. And so northerners come to love the north with the same fierce defensiveness that a mother loves an ugly child. As the great Jacques Brel (from Schaarbeek, a suburb of Brussels) sang in his hymn to northernness, La Bire: Its full of horizons/that drive you mad/But alcohol is blond/The Devil is ours/And hopeless people/Need both of them . In Flanders they needed cycling too, but perhaps even Jacques Brel couldnt find a rhyme for that.

Every nation uses sport to reveal the character traits it most admires. Cycling is a brutal test of endurance. It is about suffering, pain and hardship. Like farming which for centuries was the cornerstone of the Flemish economy it is shaped by the landscape, prey to the vagaries of the climate. It is no use whining at the gnashing wind, the spit-thick rain, the sucking, bitter soil, the icy air that makes your joints swell, cobbles that jar your body until your nose bleeds you just get out and get on with it. The Flemish like toughness, obduracy and fortitude; guts, nuts and phlegm. Their biggest bike races Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Dwars door Vlaanderen, E3 Harelbeke, GhentWevelgem, Ronde van Vlaanderen (the Tour of Flanders) and Scheldeprijs are held between the end of February and the beginning of April. They could have organised them in the late summer when, historically, the great Tours were over, the weather is warm and balmy, the cobbles dry and almost benign and there are no great puddles concealing potholes deep enough to trap a wild pig in. But what would be the fun in that?

The relationship between the Flemish and bike racing is a grand romance, but like all great love affairs this one had to begin with an introduction.

Karel Van Wijnendaele was born Carolus Steyaert in 1882 in a village between Torhout and Lichtervelde in West Flanders. The name of his birthplace was Bakvoorde, which was almost a pun on popular preconceptions about Flemish life among Francophones. The fifth of 15 children, Van Wijnendaele never knew his birth father, a flax worker who died when Carolus was 18 months old. His mother quickly remarried, to a local farmer named Richard Defreyne, and she moved with her five children to his house in Torhout. Nearby stood the castle of Wijnendaele, from which Carolus would eventually take his pen name.

These days Torhout is a typically sleepy Flemish small town, the sort of place where the old ladies place cushions on the ledges of upstairs windows and lean out over the street, watching the comings and goings of their neighbours, every once in a while earnestly adjusting their bosoms. Torhout has its own special, fiery mustard the Flemish like hot mustard and the walk from the station to the centre of town takes you past the Smoking Cue Billiard Hall, the Zwarte Leeuw Caf (advertising itself as the local of Torhout 1992 football club supporters) and the Criterium Bar, which has windows decorated with cartoons of Peter Van Petegem, the Zwarte van Brakel (loosely the Black-haired one from Brakel), double winner of the Ronde van Vlaanderen. The plaque commemorating the towns association with the man who invented that race is on a nondescript apartment block next to a chemists with a window display of constipation medicine.