Fresh Belgian blood
"Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae". Of all these, the Belgae are the bravest/strongest, Julius Cesare in Gallic wars book. And he had never heard of Eddy Merckx.
We’ll be announcing some exciting new developments at Café du Cycliste in the coming months and to make sure some of them stay on track, we’ve welcomed a new member to the team. Philippe is bright, imaginative and a cycling fanatic. Oh, and he’s …Belgian.
A Belgian who’s a cycling fanatic now there’s a thing. Except it’s not actually very much of a thing at all, rather just the natural way that things are.
In France we’re lucky enough to have a pretty rich cycling history, a special place in the sport which looms large in the national consciousness. But Belgium is on a whole different level.
It’s a place where cycling is bordering on a religion. In fact, scrub that, for many it is a religion. There’s a national obsession with everything two wheels - the routes, the races and of course, the riders. And Philippe’s no different but what we wanted to know from him was why.
Where does this passion for the sport we all love come from and how has it managed to permeate what seems like the whole of an, let’s face it, otherwise fairly unremarkable country?
If you’re looking for a clue in the Belgium landscape, you’ll probably be disappointed. At first glance it might not strike you as obviously made for extraordinary racing. Of course there are the infamous cobbles and the many bergs but there are no mountain ranges to play host to epic stages and never to be forgotten climbs.
In fact quite the reverse, Belgium is flat, almost totally so. The highest point in the whole country is the Signal de Botrange at only 694 meters. There are buildings taller than this in the rest of the world.
So perhaps the key is buried in the history of Belgium cycling. With a population of not much more than eleven million Belgium has five World Tour early season classics, some of which go back over a hundred years. To put that in to some kind of perspective the UK and the USA with a combined population approaching four hundred million have precisely none.
And they don’t just host them, they win them as well with a remarkable sixty one percent win ratio for Belgian riders across the five races. Yet surely this feeds the obsession rather than explaining it, a consequence rather than a cause?
Which leaves us with the population itself who are obviously what this is all about. After all it’s an individual obsession when you break it down, a country made up of obsessives rather than an obsessive county. The obvious truth is that the love of cycling doesn’t come from the landscape or the history, it comes from deep within the people themselves.
And as we ride we experience this passion for ourselves in the best possible way. Almost every stop in almost every village turns into a friendly question and answer session. Kids want to look over our bikes, old women smile knowingly and men want to offer advice.
People want to know where you’re going and where you’ve been. They have tips about the next part of your route and suggestions about the route you should be taking. They want to tinker with your set-up or ask about your shoes. They all want to talk bikes.
So what did we learn on our all too brief trip? Lots of things, some more interesting than others. Who knew Belgium has a hundred and eighty different breweries and makes eighty percent of the world’s billiard balls.
But what about the answer to the question we started out with, what drives this Belgium obsession? We still have no idea except to say there probably isn’t one single answer and why should there be. And of those things we did learn the most important of them was probably that it simply doesn’t matter in any case.
Belgians are fanatically passionate about cycling just like a lot of the rest of us. Isn’t that great?
