For the Love of the Cobbles

By Chris Fontecchio

Join the author in a deep dive into the Cobbled Classic cycle races of Belgium and Northern France. For the Love of the Cobbles explores the races first hand, as well as cycling in Belgium and France across the unforgiving cobblestone roads and climbs, and tells the glorious history of these truly beloved events.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781365025037

Book preview

For the Love of the Cobbles

For the Love of the Cobbles

Only those who are in top condition can say that the Ronde van Vlaanderen is not hard. For all others, it is the Way of the Cross.   –Andrea Tafi

For the Love of the Cobbles

A Journey Inside Cycling’s Cobbled Classic Racing Season, and a Ride Across the Hard Surfaces of Belgium and France

By Chris Fontecchio

Founding Editor of the Podium Café

Copyright © Christopher D. Fontecchio, 2016

All words by Chris Fontecchio. Self-published by Chris Fontecchio, with assistance from Lulu.com.

All photos by Elizabeth Freer, Mark Blacknell, Peter Fontecchio or Chris Fontecchio, as marked.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic or photocopy or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of reasonable excerpts for critical articles and reviews.

ISBN 978-1-365-02503-7

For all my Podium Café friends;

For Belgium and France and their passionate fans;

And for Stacey, Sage and Sascha,

because it’s all about teamwork.

Prologue

On a spring afternoon in 1985, I did what I usually did when nothing was going on. I hopped onke and rode to my friend Steve’s house. It was spring break and I was home from college with no particular plans, so falling back on my high school routines was like slipping into an old sweatshirt. Those routines consisted of gathering across town -- biking on the nice days -- at either Steve’s house or another friend’s, and if anything like a quorum could be found, basketball or football or some warped rendition of baseball would happen. But on this day there was no quorum. Steve was home, hanging in his room, watching TV.

Check this out, he said[1] as he flicked on CBS Sports, showing a bike race from France. I’d caught a glimpse of the Tour de France before, enough to know the name and register some basic comprehension of the need for some people to race their bikes. Back then I poured over the sports pages every morning, and knew from the agate page  (the one with the scores, standings, etc. in small type) that Frenchman Bernard Hinault had won the Tour de France a few times, making him the top bicycle racer in the world. Honestly, I haven’t the slightest idea how I knew this, but somebody must have said it or written it, and I didn’t care to disagree. But this was April, the Tour was three months off, and the race we were watching, called Paris-Roubaix, was unlike anything else I had ever seen, or even expected to see.

Steve got me up to speed: Hinault wasn’t around,[2] but a group of international stars was at the head of the race, and an American named Greg LeMond was one of them. No American had ever accomplished anything in European cycling, the hub of the sport, until LeMond came along just a few years earlier, won a surprise world championship, and placed third in his first crack at the Tour de France. This information wouldn’t rock my brain for another season, but it was enough to bait the hook. And the roads of northern France proceeded to set it.

The 1985 running of Paris-Roubaix was a classic edition of the Hell of the North, the infamous race over rugged cobblestones through communities known mostly for the devastation they suffered in consecutive world wars. The dark legacy hanging over the region was greatly enhanced that day by intermittent rain showers and thick dark clouds. Mud covered enough of the road so that every spin of a bicycle wheel helped splatter the riders beyond recognition. Videos from that day might confuse a casual viewer as to whether color TV had been invented yet.  For the riders, navigating the cobblestones was a brutal, awkward exercise, and the constant threat of crashing kept everyone -- even us first-time viewers -- on the edge of our seats. People like me who hadn’t been to war are prone to thinking that the battlefields looked exactly like this.

The American broadcaster CBS did its best to enhance the drama. Anyone who got caught up in the LeMond Era of the mid-1980s will doubtlessly remember their approach: selective editing heavy on crashes, uptempo synthesizers, shameless use of dramatic language (you can say hell on TV, apparently... over and over...), and the tag-team of John Tesh and some unfamiliar British guy calling the action.[3] I don’t know how CBS tried to sell cycling to an American audience back then, but the race was a gift from the Cycling Gods: unfathomable visuals of riders so caked in mud that only their eyes and mouths could be recognized. Action that featured the sport’s biggest names, including our guy. And a fantastic slugfest of a race with all the drama, aggression, tactical nuance and brute athleticism that veteran cycling fans prefer.

The race lead changed hands numerous times, not in the mundane way of cyclists in a break taking turns but in a more serious manner. With the race winnowed down to a dozen or so guys in contention, attacks happened in small groups and failure was constantly an option. At one point mega-stars Eric Vanderaerden of Belgium and Francesco Moser of Italy had broken away from the field, the young Belgian clinging to the wheel of the cagey Italian -- known as the Sheriff -- who’d won three previous editions. But suddenly Moser lost his rhythm, veered into a deep puddle by the side of the road, and keeled over. Watching on Youtube thirty years later I still can’t believe what I’m seeing: one of Paris-Roubaix’s greatest champions unceremoniously kicked to the curb by the infamous cobbles. Vanderaerden, game for a two-man attack, knifed through the headwinds alone, but with 15 miles to go he eventually succumbed to an eight-man group of riders poised to duke it out for the win. The powerful Renault-Elf squad in their black and yellow stripes were the home team, and they now had two guys up front.

Eventually Renault’s young French star Marc Madiot went clear with a well-timed winning attack, step one of his eventual ascent into the pantheon of Cobbles Riders (two Paris-Roubaix wins, marriage to a former Miss France, and knighthood in the French Legion of Honor). Bruno Wojtinek, Madiot’s less heralded teammate, escaped for second, and Irish master Sean Kelly outsprinted LeMond for third after the two swerved around a pileup that happened as their six-man group swung onto the wet velodrome track. Intrepid to the last drop, this race. Afterward LeMond was among the 35 riders who survived to finish (officially, at least), out of 172 that started. As he talked to Tesh on the velodrome infield, the layer of mud on his face made the young American look like he’d just stepped in from a minstrel show. Through this mask of shit shone his clear, wet eyes and his satisfied smile, a bizarre juxtaposition of human and inhuman that further drove home the beautiful madness being celebrated on this day. It gets better though: Tesh also interviewed Theo de Rooy, a Dutch rider who occasionally led the race in the final 90 minutes before succumbing:

de Rooy: It's a bollocks this race! You're working like an animal, you don't have time to piss, you wet your pants. You're riding in mud like this, you're slipping, it's a piece of shit...

Tesh: Willl you ever ride it again?

de Rooy, not hesitating for a second: Sure, it's the most beautiful race in the world!

Punctuated by a borderline-insane laugh by de Rooy. I don’t remember if this exchange aired in real time, but thankfully it’s preserved in legend now. Like the shattered Dutchman, I honestly didn’t know quite how to respond to what I’d just seen, but Steve did. He’d talked to some guys who knew about a weekly circuit race in the Boston suburbs maybe ten miles from home, and by summer we were on our beater bikes trying out the sport of cycling. Within a year I had embarked on a fund drive and picked up an entry-level Bianchi racer, gotten completely hooked on the soap opera of LeMond’s career, and eventually made myself into a hack racer and permanent cycling fan. The Tour de France was as much the centerpiece of my viewing as it is of the cycling calendar, and with other fans like my big brother Pete and my friend Drew I celebrated the glorious battles on the slopes of the Alps and Pyrenees. We heralded Lance Armstrong’s arrival at the front of the Tour, delved deeper and deeper into the sport as the internet grew and dramatically expanded the level of available information. I’m now nearly a decade into hosting the Podium Cafe, a website and community of cycling fans, where we obsess over cycling 365 days a year.

But as great as all that has been, I never forgot that first brush with the sport. I never forgot the sights, the result, and most importantly I never got over the sense that, however great the Tour was, racing on cobblestones was something else entirely.

This book is a journey to the cobblestoned classics, a series of races in Belgium and France that begin with a late February sneak preview and meaningfully unfold over three weeks in March and April. They constitute a season within the season, drawing certain riders (including some who structure their entire year around this period) and certain fans to ride in a particular style of races. They live among the more broadly-defined Spring Classics, which include ancient events like Milano-Sanremo in Italy and the Ardennes races in Wallonian Belgium and the Limburg region of the Netherlands. To people waiting for the grand tours to begin, the Spring Classics are what you watch and celebrate while you wait. But the Cobbled Classics are the heart of spring racing, and they are as unique from Milano-Sanremo or Liège-Bastogne-Liège as the Tour de France.

Apart from the racing style is the fact that they are centered in the Flanders region of Belgium and nearby northern France. The races are inseparable from the area, with its biking culture, its passion for cycling, its endless riding routes, and for a lot of people its massive contribution to the beer brewing universe. The Cobbled Classics aren’t merely a thing to watch, but to cozy up to on the streets of Flanders, side by side with many of the sport’s most devoted fans. They are a place to visit with your bike as well — the important streets and climbs get reused year after year and have themselves attained legend, even UNESCO heritage status… but they are public streets which you can ride for yourself 364 days a year. Experiencing the intensity of riding the course, of cheering with the home fans, and of absorbing the competition over three weeks — it’s a package deal, a cultural and sporting festival that’s so memorable, unique, and yet still (for now) so accessible, that it resembles few other sporting events anywhere in the world.

This book is about the whole package. It’s a mix of first-person account and something resembling sportswriting. It falls short of being a definitive guide to race history, but deals with enough of the history to (I hope) give readers the full context for the experience of the Cobbled Classics. It was started in 2010 and focuses on those rather memorable editions as a vehicle for telling a more timeless story of the races. And I’d better hurry up and put it to bed before it’s time to update it, again, with the 2016 results.

-Seattle, Washington, April 2016

Kopp sign

Photo by Elizabeth Freer

---

[1] If you think I, or anyone else writing a book from memory, recalls mundane conversations verbatim from 25 years ago, then... cool! But hey, this is probably pretty close.

[2] Bernard Hinault only appeared sporadically and swore off riding Paris-Roubaix after 1981. Ever the diplomat, Hinault declared the race bullshit to the waiting media, seeing no reason to hide his feelings. And he’d just won the race. In 1985, explaining why he was home rather than in Compiègne, Hinault remarked, I have a wife and two children, so I don’t want my skin ripped off.

[3] Phil Liggett, who’s no longer even slightly unfamiliar.

1: Arrivals

My head reeled from the deadly combination of sunlight and sleeplessness as I got off flight... whatever it was in Brussels to face my first real Cycling adventure.  Lo! the banality of adventure. Airports almost never fail to dampen the excitement of a really cool trip, and for one of the world’s great transportation hubs the Brussels airport is drab and disappointing. I’d hoped that the runway would be made of cobblestones, or that Sporza announcer Michel Wuyts would deliver the recorded multilingual messages to people in the immigration line, followed by a video of Peter Van Petegem reminding us to fill out a customs declaration. No such luck. A smattering of Dutch and French reminded me that I was in Belgium, but just barely. The airport had been tastefully renamed Brussels International Airport (from Zaventem, I think) just to remind you that you were, in fact, in Europe. And from what I can tell, that’s the airport’s claim to fame. It’s in Europe.

But the reality was that I had just traveled from the non-cycling universe to the cycling one, and things picked up in a hurry. As it was Thursday, I was both early for the big crowds of cycling fans, arriving the day after the initial cobbled classic (Dwars door Vlaanderen), and late for the influx of riders, who trickled into Belgium beginning Monday morning. I’d heard tales of the departure scene at the airport the day after Paris-Roubaix, where the entire sport is being airlifted from Zaventem, but this was something of a dead zone for cycling-related arrivals.

From the rigamarole of entering the country I proceeded downstairs to the rail station, dragging my massive, corrugated white plastic bike box that exceeds the size, weight and inconvenience of just carrying my bike around by several orders of magnitude. But I like train travel, even grimy stations and trains, and the Zaventem station didn’t disappoint. Better still, I found an outlet for my undampened excitement -- an American guy dragging a bike box of his own. I’d spied him in the baggage area, we were the only two guys grabbing bikes in that locale, so when he was waiting to catch the same train to Gent, we naturally got to talking.

My immediate assumption was that he was like me, headed over for the classics, joining a new wave of American cobbled classics tourism that I was sure was building and ready to slam into the Vlaamse Ardennes -- the range of small hills in East Flanders -- at any moment. Instead, he was cut from a much more relevant cloth. Steven Gordon was a racer who had left northern Virginia behind for Gent with the hope of chasing a ride in the pro peloton.

In a way Steven’s story is both reminiscent of the old days, and something completely different. Like a zillion other would-be pros, ranging from great champions to that universe of guys who remained anonymous, Steven was traveling with little more than his bike in tow and the promise of a place to stay. He had a referral to a team that would give him a jersey and an entree into races, but the rest was up to him. But in 2010 the differences maybe outweigh the similarities. Steven isn’t running away from a farm or the mines or some other dead-end life; he’s a middle-class kid, I gather, with an MBA. In the world of high-speed networking, he has very real assurances that his team, Kingsnorth International Wheelers, exists and plans to give him a spot. He has sophisticated communications, bank machines that can instantly withdraw cash from his bank back home, video cameras to document his travels and races which he can share worldwide in a matter of minutes. He’s American, and that alone would have been astounding 40 years ago before any of the other things I just mentioned existed.

*****

A lot of the old stories have been well-documented: guys arriving in mainland Europe from the UK and eventually the US, but who would grow homesick and struggle to make the cut in the elite peloton. I used to do a podcast with a guy named Graham Jones (not to be confused with the Pugeot rider of the same name from the 1980s), who left London in 1966 after one of his co-workers, attempting to congratulate him on completion of his apprenticeship in electrical engineering, welcomed him to the rest of his life, a/k/a a factory job. Graham fled this shrunken future in horror, quitting virtually on the spot, grabbing his bike and informing his parents that he needed a ride to the Dover Ferry, which they gave him after they picked their jaws off the floor.

Jones got to the railway station in Gent before the adrenaline gave way and the isolation set in. He had enough money for a short hotel stay, quickly found some races to ride, and before long had moved in with a group of fellow Brits to a building that had been slated for condemnation some time earlier. There was one electrical outlet, a faucet and squat toilet in the courtyard, and that was pretty much it. Graham and his mates raced for prize money to buy food, swarming the kermesse circuit where, nearly every day in Belgium, you could find a purse, hopefully several placings deep. His run lasted two years, cut short by the death of Tom Simpson and pall it cast over the hopes of several young British riders then in Europe, and Graham fell back on his engineering degree to a successful career and life in America. But his and other stories prove that if you were strong enough to leave the nest and fast enough to hang with Belgium’s best, you could get your foot in cycling’s door.

The better known American stars who made it -- like Greg LeMond, Andy Hampsten, Bob Roll, Lance Armstrong, Tyler Farrar -- all had some form of institutional help to launch their careers in Europe, be it the US National program, the 7-Eleven squad, or what have you. Their talent and the existence of organizations dedicated to willing it out helped shorten the transition and smooth out some of the rough edges. Belonging to a big national program or trade team means you know where your next meal is coming from, at least. And the number of top European teams dedicated to nurturing young American and other foreign talent through high-level development programs continues to grow.

But the story of the marginal or unknown prospect, the long-running tale of local cycling heroes from Europe’s quiet corners trekking to Belgium or France with no real lines of support, is an ongoing dream in modern Flanders. In cycling terms it resembles the story of my Italian immigrant ancestors coming to America: the idea that, if you can stomach the process, you can escape the limitations of your inherited situation in favor of a place where you can succeed on your own merits. Not to be confused with some sort of meritocratic utopia, mind you. The locals probably have a leg up regardless, as do the intrepid travelers with a lifeline of support. My entrepreneurial grandfather fled his boring life as a shepherd outside Naples, in part because his brother had already set up a job for him. But he parlayed this start into a dozen small businesses or more, and the rest is history.

In cycling, the past lives on. This land of wieler-dreams lives on in modern Flanders, where you can get race starts, and if you’re fast enough, someone will eventually notice.  Steven Gordon was off to pursue his own dream. A professional life awaited him back home, but Steven wasn’t ready for that, not until he could answer the question: am I a professional cyclist?

****

I didn’t see Steven again for the rest of my trip, but I did catch up with him at the end of his season in Flanders. His dreams didn’t turn into a movie script, but he had a lot to say about what it’s like to pursue them in the Land of Cycling.

First, with a little groundwork and some strong legs, you can start the Belgian chapter of your cycling career pretty easily. With USA cycling, you get an international license, which if you’re racing in America you would only need if you’re going to be pro or if you’re racing UCI races like Philly or the Tour of California. And then when you’re in Belgium all you really need is a $5 card that people just scan at the start at every race and then you’re good, then you race. It’s really simple. You do need a letter of permission, they’re really strict about that. Basically I think what that is, they will only give it to you if you don’t have any suspensions for doping or any other suspensions or fines. And then you have permission to ride.

You can ride solo, but finding a team is a viable option too. Steven rode for two of them, Kingsnorth International Wheelers and Team Deschuytter, having been referred to the teams through a friend back at Virginia Tech. This was actually his second trip, having tested the waters for a few weeks the previous year. "There are a bunch of different teams in Belgium, and some of them are targeted toward in international riders, and team Kingsnorth International Wheelers is one of them that has taken American riders, Britsh, Australian, New Zealanders, a Russian here and there, but mostly English-speaking riders. You have to pay for your housing and food and entry fees which are very small, but other than that they have support at the races, they have a guy there to give you water bottles and stuff. You don’t have to sign anything, you just tell them how long you’re gonna be there, and they tell you where the races are, you just ride there and they’ll meet you with the car. There have been some well-known foreigners that have come through the team, such as Freddy Rodriguez and Henk Vogels, to name two.

We also raced for another team called Team Deschuytter, and that team was a little bit higher level in that that team had invites to some top races. For the other team Team Deschuttyer, the inter-clubs required that a team be invited to the race. And I had two copies of licenses, one copy that said my team was Kingsnorth, and another that said I was Team Deschuytter. So we’d go and do the inter-clubs once in a while. And those are like the longer ones, the races that mimic the classics. We did one race that was like the amateur Het Volk. Another we did was in northern France.

What Steven found, from this daily drumbeat of small races mixed with some bigger, harder events, was a massive opportunity to be racing. Kermesses -- a French term for the town fairs that happen all over Belgium and the rest of Europe in the warmer months -- are a racing staple, offering a constant slate of easy-access races in the 100-140 kilometer range. Criteriums, the staple of American racing, exist too, and even the crits are a robust 90+ minutes long. This simply isn’t the case in the U.S., with its smaller scene dispersed across the fifty states, and riders limited by the distances to how many races they can attend. The way people discuss it, it doesn’t appear to be the same elsewhere in Europe either. There’s a reason why so many development programs from overseas make Belgium their first stop.

The availability and length of races were only a few of the major differences compared to racing back home. "The only place where Belgian racing is at all like the US is circuit races. And they take the corners a lot differently, so it’s not the same feel. Like a twilight kermesse, it’s just not the same. Everyone wants to attack and everyone does. The mentality in Belgium is, I can win by going to the front and attacking and riding harder. Whereas in America the mentality is, I can win by being smart and staying out of the wind and not do any work unless i have to, and saving myself for the end. So it’s a huge difference in mentality and it makes the race totally different.

Is this a cultural difference or just the result of having stronger riders? Both: The fields there are deeper at any given amateur race, there are always a few guys who are really strong. But it’s also just the way they like to race, they way they’ve seen everyone else win, and it’s the way they win. And since everyone else is going to be attacking, I’ve got to attack. if you want to stay where you are you’ve got to keep moving up. If you’re not moving up, you’re moving back. So if you want to actually move up, you’ve got to attack. because everyone else is doing it you have to too. I don’t know how it got started like that, but that’s the way it is, and it’s not changing. To them that’s what racing is. Racing is hard, racing is all out. In the US it’s meant to be more of a tactical game where you only go hard later.

The result? Steven returned to the US putting his MBA to work, not cracking the Garmin lineup at Paris-Roubaix. It was always a longshot, but he took his shot and had a good time. He rode the amateur Het Nieuwsblad classic, a race that uses the climbs and cobbles of de Ronde van Vlaanderen, where Steven finished in the main field. In another race he found himself on the Paterberg, where he got caught up in traffic and left behind. Kermesses filled in the spaces in between.

About the only real downside was that he got sick several times and rarely felt like he was truly at his best. Racing three kermesses a week wore him down, and while he was glad for the experience, the cultural exchange and the improvement as a rider, he knew he was heading home to a different life, not to a cycling dream. But cycling is still very much ingrained in his life.

Back then I thought I would check the box and not want to be racing after. But now I realized, I checked the box saying I don’t want to be a pro, that’s not really one of my goals anymore, I don’t want that for a career, but I do still want to race and train. That’s a difference. I could see myself in five years racing pro again, but right now I’m happy to have it on the side.

Frites EF

Photo by Elizabeth Freer

2: Riding the Canals

For us slower, fatter visitors (by cycling’s emaciated standards), riding in Flanders[4] is both more mundane and just as mythic an experience as Steven’s racing pursuits. American and other non-European cyclists have all figured out that there’s great riding to be had in the old cycling nations of western Europe, be it tours of Tuscany or Alpine ascents like you’ve seen on TV. Further north, the word on the street isn’t so much spectacle but proliferation, Go to Belgium, the Netherlands, or Denmark and you’ll be blown away simply by the place cycling occupies in daily life, as well as in athletic competition. It hits you the second you exit any train station and see all the bikes lined (or piled) up. And though I was laden by luggage, I was impatient to get going.

Not that it was as simple as it sounds, at first. Getting my bearings after reaching the Gent railway station was the usual tale of traveller’s woe: struggling to make sense of transit maps and dragging a massive load of luggage around like a pack horse, trying vainly not to look stupid. The streetcar line fortunately ran from the train depot to the Gravensteen Castle, an unmistakeable landmark in the middle of old Gent, forming the western boundary of the Patershol quarter in which I was staying. So I was quickly within range of my B&B, even if it took another 20 minutes of clueless spectacle to finish the job.

The main culprits were the usual narrow, winding streets typical of old Europe, and my discount bike box which managed to exceed the size of a lot of bikes, without the benefit of anything resembling a handle. My best hope was that people would relate to the sufferings of a would-be cyclist, but I happily settled for my second-best hope on finding that the good people of Gent weren’t out and about at 2pm on a quiet, overcast Thursday.[5] I found my place, met my friendly host for the next week, and with no time or energy to summon the bike, I opted to stumble around looking at old buildings and art for a while, hoping I could stay awake til dinner.

It took only minutes before I wandered into the cultural heart of old Gent. I knew nothing about it before landing, but Gent is home to a Flemish primitive painting of the highest order, and I figured out somehow that this should be my first stop. [The soaring belfry and that stands in the old square and dominates the cityscape was a hint.] I’d forgotten most of the content of my art history college survey courses from a couple decades hence, but access to great art was a void in my life now and I wasn’t going to miss my chance.

The full work is the Gent Alterpiece, a many-paneled 15th century assemblage by Flemish Primitive master Jan Van Eyck depicting various biblical scenes, including The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, featuring a rather nonplussed sheep in the center panel squirting blood into a chalice in front of a complex assembly of admirers. The painting is world-famous, but more importantly is considered a national treasure among Belgians. The tortured history of people’s schemes to possess or protect it is pure legend, detailed in a detective-style book called The Stealing of the Mystic Lamb. The Altarpiece now sits in an antechamber on the ground floor of Sint Baaf’s Cathedral in Gent. It lives in its own special space, where handlers occasionally close or open its majestic panels for viewers to take in its different presentations. Admiring all this kept my mind sufficiently boggled and awake until I could justify dinner, an amazing waterzooi van fis, a/k/a fish stew, and a beer that hit me like a sack of doorknobs, whereupon I called it a day.

gent scene

Thursday, 2pm in Gent. I want to live in such a place. By Chris Fontecchio

Friday was dedicated to finding my way around East Flanders before the races started on Saturday, with the E3 Prijs Harelbeke, and taking care of business. Part of my overall plan was to attend at least a few events as a journalist, and I’d made the minimal effort to get credentials via the race websites, ahead of my arrival. The key bit was my need for a press card, an I.D. issued by the International Sportswriters’ Association (AIPS from the French name), which certifies any applicant whose national association certifies them first. A month earlier I’d called the National Sportswriters and Sportscasters Association, the US entity in charge of unruly sports media types, and they’d signed me right up, with the one caveat that the AIPS cards were issued from Italy, once a month, on a somewhat less-than-reliable schedule. When my AIPS card didn’t arrive in time -- it made it to Seattle a full six weeks after my trip ended -- I knew I might have some talking to do with the race organizers. So the plan on day 1 was to eat some carbs and sugars, hop on the bike, ride to Harelbeke and Wevelgem in hopes of finding the race organization offices for the weekend’s two events, and beg for credentials before a human, face-to-face.

My host had some maps in the room, which were detailed enough for me to pick up on the fact that I hadn’t the first clue about how to ride around this country. I don’t know that I literally imagined cycling superhighways with neon signs saying Fietsroute This Way!![6] But I am sure I didn’t know how complicated things would eventually get. A friend from the Podium Cafe, my cycling website, had urged me to buy some fietsroute maps, and it was clear I would never get out of Gent without at least one.

Flanders has a system of bike trails known as the Fietsnetwerk,[7] which has to be on the World Podium of Great Biking Networks. Possibly the top step, though you’ll surely get an argument in Holland or maybe Denmark on that score. But to an American cyclist this is like the Ginger versus Maryanne arguments of my pimply youth -- as if anyone I knew had a problem with either. The Fietsnetwerk is a shockingly awesome glut of paths in every direction blanketing the country. The fietsroutes are, at their worst, perfectly acceptable painted lanes on the margin of secondary highways. More commonly they occupy smaller country roads, often barely wide enough for a car, traversing through farmers’ fields or up over the famous hellingen (hills), or just moseying across the landscape. A few bear the flatness and arrow-straight orientation of a former rail route. Some are simply dedicated bike paths of no obvious origin, apart from something to do with leisure -- being too lovely to have spring from any utilitarian design. Plenty of them are closed to cars.

Among the most notable and easiest to follow are the canal routes, in many cases former towpaths from a time when canals were cash and horsepower had a lot to do with actual horses — in this case, towing barges up or down the canal with ropes. While a lot of fietsroutes connect towns or paths a short distance away, canal routes go on and on, seemingly clear across Belgium, with little to no interruption. Their length, size, straightness and prohibition against cars make them the superhighways of the Fietsnetwerk. Like a good interstate, it’s a lot simpler to map out a canal route than using the minor pathways. And after a few hours, it gets pretty dull.

Canal route

A typical canal route, along the Schelde to Oudenaarde. Photo by Chris Fontecchio

Both of the weekend’s races started and finished along the Leie River between Gent and Kortrijk, a smallish city less