Wilfried de Jong - The Man and His Bike: Musings on life and the art of cycling

I FIRST MET Wilfried de Jong during the 1990 Tour de France. Or perhaps it was 1991. He was working on an article entitled The Sounds of the Tour. My memory might be playing tricks there too. It could just as easily have been The Smells of the Tour. What I do know is that he had come up with what to my knowledge was a brand new take on the Tour. In light of the endless column inches published on the worlds premier cycling event, it was a remarkable feat. Youd think that by the early 1990s every possible angle had been covered.

But theres no point airing such views in the company of Wilfried de Jong. Seen through Wilfrieds eyes, the world is so rich and varied that there are always new angles to cover. And yes, even in the Tour de France, only a fraction of the possible avenues have been explored. Most of us tend towards a superficial view of the world, a view in which the Tour is simply a matter of winners and losers. Whos on the podium? Whos riding in that coveted yellow jersey? Yet there are individuals for whom reality doesnt stop there. To them our surface reality is a portal to layer upon layer of reality beyond. Wilfried de Jong is one of those individuals. Lets call them artists. They take us deeper, to share in experiences that are sometimes unsettling, sometimes euphoric. We should cherish such minds or risk losing our own to a world of boredom and predictability.

When I first met Wilfried at the start of the 1990s, I had known him for quite some time. He was one half of Waardenberg & De Jong, a celebrated duo whose mercilessly madcap theatre shows were the talk of the Netherlands in the 1980s and into the following decade. With partner in crime and fellow Rotterdammer Martin van Waardenberg, Wilfried wove the absurd and the insane into onstage creations that always threatened to burst at the seams. While their work was rooted in the real world, it was abundantly clear that this pair of outlaws were intent on stretching reality to its limits and peering at it from all kinds of weird and wonderful perspectives. To see Waardenberg & De Jong in full flow was to enter a dreamworld in which their every thought, association and mad idea had come to life. Time and again I left the theatre utterly exhausted after an evening spent convulsed with laughter. Later Wilfried confirmed my theory of the creative drive behind the shows: they were born of the belief that chaos and confusion are a rare source of beauty that should never be stifled by an excess of rational thinking.

Chaos and confusion reached a new extreme one fateful evening when Wilfried came crashing to the stage from a height of five metres. A wave of hilarity swept through the audience: this was the kind of stunt only Waardenberg & De Jong could pull off. Until it became clear that we had just witnessed a near fatal collision between fantasy and cold, hard fact. The rest of the tour had to be cancelled and Wilfried spent months recovering from an unnerving collection of fractures.

Once his bones had healed, Wilfried de Jong could have spent the next three decades making show after show, before retiring as an eminent man of the theatre with a bank balance to match. But even the absurd and the insane begin to pall when its your job to bring them to life on stage night after night. There comes a time when the sparks no longer fly. At least, thats my interpretation of what happened when Wilfried decided to take things in an entirely new direction.

Even at the peak of his theatre career he had found time to make radio shows and write a book of short stories. Now he added television to his repertoire. It gave him the chance to pursue another of his passions: sport. He began with a series called Sportpaleis De Jong, and followed that up with Holland Sport, quite possibly the best sports show the Netherlands has ever seen. It revealed a new side to Wilfried: the storyteller who lovingly combines words and images in the portrayal of the total dedication shown by athletes. He instinctively understood that top athletes who sacrifice almost everything to achieve a single goal victory offer an unrivalled perspective on passion. The artist in Wilfried struck up a unique rapport with these sporting heroes: a mix of admiration and journalistic curiosity enlivened by an irrepressible urge to present sporting passion in the most aesthetically pleasing way possible. Many of the items he made for these programmes along with the sports documentaries he makes to this day have become classics of Dutch narrative journalism, thanks in no small part to his inspired long-term collaboration with peerless cameraman Rob Hodselmans.

Wilfried de Jong is also an actor. In this capacity he played a leading role in the film adaptation of my novel Ventoux. One of the films finest scenes came about when Wilfried decided to abandon the script briefly and allowed the real Wilfried de Jong to take over from the character he was playing. Anyone who understood what was going on witnessed a remarkable feat of self-characterisation: a balancing act between fact and fiction, sublimely executed.

The readers of his weekly sports columns in leading Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad can count on Wilfried to lend a heightened air of drama and intrigue to the weekends main sporting events. He achieves this not by distorting reality or resorting to cheap tricks but by zooming in on telling details that come to symbolise a deeper truth that could so easily have gone unnoticed.

It is as a writer that Wilfried de Jong unites his theatrical roots with the documentary maker, the sport lover, the columnist and the journalist. Perhaps theres even a hint of Wilfried the jazz aficionado in the capricious rhythms of the tales he tells.

Theres a good reason why cycling takes pride of place in Wilfrieds sporting prose. For writers from countries with a strong cycling tradition, the sport resonates in the same way as boxing resonates for many an American man of letters: Mailer, Talese and Liebling to name but three. The two sports share a lyrical quality. In both, the dividing line between harsh reality and the stuff of fable is often tantalisingly thin, a feast for the imagination. What you see is not what you get. There is more going on beneath the surface of the visible. Such hidden depths are a gift to writers with the presence of mind to take raw fact as the starting point for the yarns they spin.

Wilfried de Jong is just such a writer, in this collection of stories and beyond. Sometimes he takes on the role of protagonist. The man loves his bike, and I know from experience that even on the saddle he likes to take reality in our case middle-aged boy racers on pricey cycles and enrich it as only a natural storyteller can. Join him on a training run and before you know it, youre part of a decisive breakaway in a legendary stage of the Tour de France. In other stories he handpicks his heroes from the broodingly romantic side of cyclings history: Coppi, Bartali, Pantani. He is besotted with Italy, a nation where truth is so often stranger than fiction.

Some of his work sticks close to the facts. A story like Mist on Mont Ventoux unfolds without much in the way of embellishment. In others, Munkzwalm for example, his memories take on a new dimension. But embracing the fictional is not the same as twisting reality: by freeing himself from the tyranny of the factual, a true writer can come closer to the heart of the real world and bring to light a fresher, more rewarding reality.