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Belgian Cobbles http://web.archive.org/web/20050507005537/www.onethreefi...

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Belgian Cobbles Present See Normally it was the tour that got Read you into cycling when I was a kid. It did with me as well, but Future only in so much as an introduction to the sport. It was Check these... the Classics that were the races that had the mystique, that Rat Patrol intangible essence to them that Klunker League made your palms sweat and your Bez heart race. They gave you that Singletrack feeling of love at first sight, the Rhodri knowledge that they were Kitta special. Tan Johnny Payphone Back in the late 80's there was Chocolate Foot little media coverage of cycling as a sport. Channel 4 covered the Hmmmmmm Tour de , along with a Weebls couple of the broadsheet Newgrounds newspapers, didn't Howies exist and the only magazines No.8 Wire Company were and the US-produced monthly, Winning. Copyright 2005 - Me This meant that the Classics It's all valid and were all the more significant tested as well because despite the little space allocated to them, they were always evocativily and emotionally reported leaving you longing for more. Perhaps that what made them so desirable, so glamourous, what little material that was available just acted as a teaser.

One of the best articles that I remember from those days was actually about legendary mountain-biker . He was spending his second season as a part- member of the 7-11 team - the team that eventually mutated into 's US Postal Service team. When Tomac wasn't racing mountain bikes he joined the european road peloton and that season, 1991 I think, he was in the squad for the Belgian classics and Winning followed his week in . It was the first real insight I had into the other than the race reports in Cycling Weekly, which never revealed anything more than the mechanical details and final result. The Tomac article struck me mostly because he too was an outsider. American riders, unless based in , generally knew little about such events

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and, as a mountain biker, Tomac was from a different culture to the road pro's and so hadn't grown up surrounded by the history. At one point he was stuck in the middle of the bunch on one of the cobbled climbs when a few riders crashed in front, this caused more riders to stop, yet with the road virtually blocked Tomac, with the aid of a few trackstands, leaning on other riders shoulders and the occasional bunnyhop, weaved through the wreakage and on his way. If I recall the pictures correctly, that year the weather was dry and sunny.

Winning always had great colour photos, something that Cycling Weekly was still a good few years away from doing, and although with Cycling you got the report the following week, the one or two newsprint style black and white pictures they printed rarely managed to capture any feeling about the event. Winning on the other hand, generally printed a handful of colour pictures that caught, if not all the emotion, then at least the spirit of the events. Tomac bouncing through a crowd of fallen riders, Jean Pierre Heynderickx (an obscure Belgian rider from the lower leagues - yes I really do remember him...) foot out, sliding down the gutter of a cobbled road and stomping up the Muur-Kapelmuur in the sun, on his way to victory.

The mid-90's came and went and my holy grail was still out of reach. New magazines had appeared, but so too old ones had vanished, replaced Winning on the shelves of newsagents. This new magazine, dedicated to covering professional cycling gave away a free highlights video of some of cyclings greatest moments. Again it was just a teaser, tantilising images of Paris-Roubaix and Liege- Bastogne-Liege. A video I would dig out at the start of each season as a motivational tool, as although all to brief, it kept

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the fire burning.

Back when I first started riding properly as a seventeen year old, I was always out in the bad weather, I loved it and while I was riding I was always picturing myself in one of the classics. I found beauty in the harsh conditions, one man alone in the elements, the desire to train in this marked you out as a hard man and the Belgians were always the hard-men of the pro peloton. I had ideas of going to to race, not France like most others, but the harsh grimness that I saw in my training rides, of how I envisaged Belgium to be. A home from home almost, my daydream while I trained and until I realised I just wasn't good enough. It took Eurosport to rekindle the dream.

It drove my training, I watched and re-watched every race that I taped, taking note of every move the winner and his team made. I lapped up the hills, the cobbled sections, the names, the nostaglia..... I now had everything but the smell. Every time I rode a bike after 1999 I did it with the classics racing through my blood and brain - on Easter Sunday in '99, I had been out training with a couple of others from the club, there were no races that weekend, we only did 3 hours instead of the usual 5 because I wanted to be back to watch the Tour of Flanders. Three hours later, after watching chisled-jawed hero Peter VanPetergem outsprint and Frank Vandenbrouke, I was back out on the bike for another two hours training, in what was now a torrential downpour and with Flanders in my head.

Now? Well now I get to go to watch the Ronde

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Van Vlanderen, after this year everything will change; the generation of riders that I have grown up with are coming to the end of their careers and the sport itself is changing. This year I'll be there with them on the bergs watching through rose-tinted glasses as my heroes and villians, battle each other, elbow- to-elbow, up mystical climbs, fighting for their seats with the gods.

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