The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman: A Bone-shaking Tour through Cycling’s Flemish Heartlands

Coming off of (the disconnected mess of) Bobke, Bob Roll's 90s scrapbook of cycling in Euro races, A Dog In a Hat (American Joe Parkin's account of a career spent racing in Belgium), and Phil Gaimon's Draft Animals (where you can take the jock out of America, but you can't take the "bro" image out of the sport), I found myself wanting something from a real journalist on the scene rather than a rider looking to supplement his retirement. After all, the autobio accounts were good and sometimes funny, and taught me that A) Drugs are commonplace, B) there was once a place in the world for a cyclist who really got after it and wanted to sign on for low pay with a European team, C) these athletes simply cannot write with much wit or insight about their sport -- the few who are educated enough to turn a phrase weren't trained in it... They trained in cycling, else we'd have nothing to read about.

So here's Harry Pearson with a recent (2018 I'm assuming) account of real races and their history and their current state, right down in the rain and grit and broken cobblestones of Belgium's national sport.

He's got some great insights many non-Europeans wouldn't know: Showing up to win a stage of the Tour de France/ Vuelta España/ Giro D'Italia is partly how you cement your name as a winner, but these aren't the real contests. They're like the Superbowl and World Series when we're maybe more interested in the little pennant runs and rivalries that led up to the championships. Those being these one-day circuit or city-to-city races where you're in it for yourself, not necessarily the team, but some combination of prestige and pay and résumé building. And of these, Harry concentrates on a subset run through cold, wet, dirty Belgium countryside and no-account towns.

(If you're familiar with the culture and the classic races, you'll probably find even more to love.)

And it's this place, particularly Flanders (the Dutch-speaking industrial region of northern Belgium) that he's so adept at illustrating in his accounts of hardscrabble farm boys winning town square races to move up in ranks in hopes of keeping the family farm in business. The pre-WWI and WWII countrified bulwarks of the bicycle scene gave rise to the sport, the business, and the idolizing of the riders to the point where the early champions from humble beginnings inspired neighboring cities and countries to churn out their own more sophisticated riders, though by now the idea of powering your simple machine through bad weather and hardship to prove yourself was a point of Flemish and Belgian national identity (the region never being fully independent and having been batted about between different European rulers is part -- Pearson convinces you -- of the people's need to claim something uniquely theirs.)

Don't want to sign up for a history lesson (though it's quite a good one)? Okay, well picture this Englishman who presents himself in this very Jeremy Clarkson/James May way, stumbling through small-b Belgium, chatting up townsfolk, and making jokes about the Belgians' tone-deafness to pop culture (a passage about the loudspeakers playing American hip-hop but the locals not understanding what it was saying still brings tears to my eyes 🤣) or their general other-worldliness in American/British eyes. It's really quite funny. He has three modes: history, current state of cycling, and the musings of a man trying to understand it by living amongst it. There's not much cycling action to be had... there's Velo News or something for that. But if two out of those three appeal to you, you'll probably love it.