This final* post is appropriately dedicated to, uh, for shorthand let’s call it Belgium and the Classics. Shorthand because if naturally includes France and the Netherlands to a significant degree, not to mention riders from around the globe. To the extent that concerns the thing I wrote about the most, that would be the cobbled classics, though it’s hard not to loop in the Ardennes as a necessary tangent. And cyclocross as another necessary tangent. You get the picture. The purpose of this post is just to play a few of the hits, nothing more.
[* Nothing is ever final!]
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Cycling’s Mooiste
My cycling fan origin story is one I’ve mentioned a few times. It was the 80s and Greg LeMond was everywhere, including this weird looking race over cobblestones where everyone looked like they were performing in a minstrel show by the time they reached the velodrome, in a place I’d never heard of, a town in France’s industrial north. The gloomy skies, the early spring atmosphere, hardly alive with greenery — it seeemed like something else, especially when photographed in European cycling mags I bought in Harvard Square, my only access to the images of the sport in spring.
It is really an aesthetic thing. There is a still, peaceful beauty to rural Flanders in Spring, the mud, the small roads, the dour churches, it all seemed very authentically Belgian to me, even before I knew anything about the country (it was a pretty good guess though). Add in a dash of mystery to this area of Europe, an artifact of my American cluelessness, and I was hooked. You might say they had me at “cobble.” That this peaceful bliss is sporadically shattered each spring by the cycling traditions (and in winter by cyclocross) just made it all the more exciting to me.
And the racing. Pitiful as it was, my own racing experience enabled me to see these places as the setting for fantastic events. I had spent enough time on odd, technical surfaces or going up stabby climbs to understand that you didn’t need majestic mountains to have a thrilling race. Even without that background, I doubt it would take long to get what makes de Ronde special, but anyway for me it all clicked into place. By 2006, I had begun to see the classics season as par with a grand tour for fun, intrigue and glory. From a blogging perspective, it helped that nobody was saying all that much (in English) back then, as compared to…
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