Tour of Flanders

There was something artistic about that image of Philippe Gilbert, wearing the skin-tight colours of his national flag as literally as a human being can, dismounting his bike and raising it to the heavens as he walked beneath the finish arch of the Tour of Flanders in Oudenaarde in 2017. This was a moment he and the experts thought may never come, and he chose to extend it liberally, freezeframing the elation for seconds longer than was his right.

The timelessness of the art, though, as with the layered detail of a Bruegel peasant scene, came with the double-take, the secondary viewing. There was poignancy, dissonance, even a modest repulsion, in watching Gilbert, awash with the emotion of a lifetime’s dream fulfilled, hold something of the air of a stranger in his own land. The winning rider’s race suit was in fact just about the only place you could see the Belgian colours, here in this world-famous race, in Belgium.

Belgium’s fraught political system made global headlines last May, when a triple-header of regional, federal and European elections – held under the national system of compulsory voting – yielded outcomes long assumed to be mutually exclusive: a consolidation of power for the right-wing populist N-VA (New Flemish Alliance) alongside sweeping gains for the far-right Vlaams