LITMIR.BIZ

      1993 Belgian champion’s jersey

      This was the point at which I began to understand that cycling mattered a lot in Europe, that it was very much a mainstream sport. I remember looking forward to Milan–San Remo, as well as the feeling of disappointment when I heard it wasn’t going to be televised. I had to wait until the Thursday, when Cycling Weekly came out, to discover that an Italian named Maurizio Fondriest had won it. That waiting seems incredible now, because you can get the results of the races within seconds, but that’s the way it was back then. It really was a different world.

      The first live road race I watched was the Tour of Flanders. Hitherto I had really no idea that so many people would come out to watch a bike race, but there seemed to be seas of them. Nor had I any real appreciation of just how fast it all was and how ferociously the professionals raced. Johan Museeuw won it in this beautiful tricoloured jersey – red, black and yellow – and Mum told me he got to wear it because he was the Belgian national champion, which I thought was a really wicked idea. She explained some of the rituals around De Ronde, as the Tour of Flanders is known in Flemish. She said it was the highlight of the year for Flemish people, almost irrespective of whether or not they were cycling fans. She also told me that Museeuw would be like the king over there. He was a Flemish rider wearing the national champion’s jersey to win Flanders, and nothing came close to that as regards performance or prestige. Thus Museeuw, the ‘Lion of Flanders’, became my first cycling hero, and so began the long and winding road that has been my journey in bike racing.

      It’s impossible to exaggerate how good Museeuw was, and how aggressively he rode. Almost any article you read about him at the time included words like ‘warrior’ or ‘fighter’ somewhere along the line. These were – and remain – the oldest clichés in the cycling book, but they fitted him like a glove. Other cyclists were more stylish, but nobody was ever as brave, nor looked as purposeful. The Flemish people identified with him because he was the identikit classics rider, the living embodiment of their cycling tradition. Where Boardman had been about method, science and discipline, Museeuw was an old-school blood-and-snot cyclist like no other.

      A few years later, when I was 16, I went to Belgium for a week with my mum, stepdad and half-brother. We went to watch the classics, and I saw Museeuw in the flesh. I’ve italicised that for dramatic effect, but only because dramatic is precisely what it was, at least for me. My mum still has a load of photographs she took that week. Some of them are a bit bizarre, but collectively they tell an unforgettable story. Most of them are of my eight-year-old brother, standing with the champions at the start of the Tour of Flanders. Like most 16-year-olds I was too cool for school, so I’d send him up to them instead. In some ways he was acting as a sort of proxy for me, because I didn’t want to come across as the smitten, star-struck teenager that I was. I feigned indifference and pretended to take it all in my stride, but in reality I was just overcome by the whole thing. Maybe I was afraid they might reject me or some such, but the long and the short of it was that metaphorically I was wetting my pants. I was at the Tour of Flanders, but I wasn’t of the Tour of Flanders. I was trying desperately hard to pretend it was just a normal day at the races, but the reality was I was all over the place. I’d been looking forward to the moment for years, but now that it had arrived it was too much for me to compute.

      During the race we went to the feed, and I remember grabbing all the musettes as they threw them away. I think I got about 20 of them from that one race – I had the others scrambling about for them as well – and the Rabobank one had a rice cake in it. I had to decide whether to eat it or keep it as a souvenir, and I can assure you that was quite a decision. I ate it in the end, and then we went to the second feed in Zottegem. We scrounged a load of caps from the soigneurs, watched the riders come through again, and then made for the bar to watch the last 60 kilometres on TV.

      At a certain point this guy walked in with long, curly, strawberry-blond hair. I realised it was Eric Vanderaerden, and I knew all about him. By then I’d amassed the world’s largest collection of cycling videotapes, and one of them showed him winning the race in 1985. Now he was getting towards the end of his career and he’d climbed off, got changed and just walked into the bar with his soigneur. He wasn’t one of my favourites, but I was blown away all the same. I was in the same bar as Eric Vanderaerden!

      Anyway, Michele Bartoli attacked on the Muur van Geraardsbergen and time-trialled to the win. He was a new star and I didn’t know much about him, but after the race we went and stood around the team buses waiting for Museeuw to emerge. When he came out he didn’t look happy – he’d been going for a third Ronde and had been undone by some sort of mechanical failure – but he had to walk 100 metres across the car park to get to his dad’s car. I didn’t dare speak to him, but I got close enough to be able to delude myself that I’d ‘met’ him. What I’d actually done was walk alongside him for a few steps, and my mum has a grainy old photo to prove it.