CYCLING IS RELIGION
We visit a unique exhibition in Belgium which explores the deep historical links between religion and cycling
Inside the confessional of a Catholic church in West Flanders, where the priest’s face usually looms behind a lattice screen to hear people mumble their sins, a TV screen shows Lance Armstrong admitting his doping past to Oprah Winfrey, on an eternal loop.
“Did you ever take banned substances to enhance your cycling performance?” she asks. “Yes.” “Was one of those banned substances EPO?” “Yes.” “Did you ever blood dope or use blood transfusions to enhance your cycling performance?” “Yes.” And so on, and so on.
When the tape finally cuts and you’re left sitting on a hard wooden bench in the claustrophobic confessional, for a moment you might idly wonder if you’ll see Armstrong getting prescribed some Hail Marys as atonement rather than a life ban from cycling. But, instead, the video goes back to the beginning, and we are dragged through the whole increasingly fakesounding procedure again.
This looping religious confession is surreal even by Belgian standards, in a country where offbeat and subversive art has always been a strong undercurrent beneath the mainstream. But for all the quirky humour of having a confessional draped in a black Radioshack jersey with the number 28, as used by Armstrong, it forms part of a very serious-minded exhibition, entitled ‘Cycling is Religion’.
Organised by the Belgian cycling museum in Roeselare in West Flanders, the exhibition does exactly what its title suggests. It studies the long-standing links between religious faith, in particular Catholicism, and cycling. By serendipitous
A cycling museum in Belgium is currently hosting an exhibition that explores the links between the sport and Roman Catholicism. There are more than you might think Wri ter: A lasdai r Fother ingham Photography: ECW Photo
coincidence, the exhibition is being shown in a deconsecrated Catholic church - a temporary location while the museum’s normal site is being renovated.
But it is no coincidence that the cycling museum is in Roeselare – a hotbed of cycling in a region where, as fans know,
wielersport rules supreme. Roeselare is the birthplace of several famous cyclists, including Patrick Sercu and Jempi Monseré, the ill-fated world road race champion of 1971. Cyrille van Hauwaert, Belgium’s first Paris-Roubaix winner in 1908, was from nearby Moorslede.
From the moment you step into the church, it’s pretty clear how determined the curators are to establish an association between cycling and the Catholic faith in your mind. The centrepiece of the exhibition, a massive iron cross soaring halfway to the ceiling and welded together from parts of bikes, is set right where the church’s main altar used to be.
This Croix de Fer is both a homage to the Alpine pass of the same name and a powerful fusion of the idea that aspects of faith and bike racing are sometimes so similar that they can be indistinguishable. As double Tour of Flanders winner Briek Schotte, a religious man, once put it: “We were like gods for the spectators, the only gods they could see up close and with whom they could exchange a few words.” This quote figures large in the exhibition.
If you accept that idea of Schotte’s, however, why should the cycling ‘gods’ be linked to a Catholic ‘God’? The answer is partly geographical. “Apart from being the hotbed of Belgian cycling, West Flanders is also still a deeply Roman Catholic area. And many local races, the kermesses, originally formed part of local religious festivals,” explains the museum’s researcher, Dries de Zaeytijd.
De Zaeytijd says, “A long time ago, the Church was very anti-racing because when people tended to see top bike riders as gods, as Schotte says, then they would go to races instead of to church. Here in Roeselare there are pre-World War II documents that show the priest was obliged, by official order, not to use a bike to get around
because it was judged to be unseemly. But after World War II the church began to change its attitudes, to use cycling as propaganda. For example, Schotte was very religious, so the church began to use the top racers to say they were very devoted, and that the fans should live like them too.”
It wasn’t just about the Belgian fans. “Just after World War II, in Italy there was a Pope who was a big cycling fan, and they used the sport there to maintain people’s interest in faith in the face of rising support for Communism. The priests there would point to Gino Bartali, who had a chapel in own his house,” says De Zaeytijd. Bartali, a two-time Tour de France winner, was even nicknamed ‘Gino the Pious’.
There are obvious verbal links to Christianity in general, De Zaeytijd says, like the seven days between the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix often being referred to as cycling’s ‘Holy Week’ in the press. Last winter, the 2015 Paris-Roubaix winner John Degenkolb described Belgium as cycling’s ‘Holy Land’. Belgium’s biggest bike race, the Tour of Flanders, is held on a Sunday and often coincides with Easter, too - Christianity’s most important day.
Further afield, quite apart from the large number of stages or races in Spain and Italy that finish next to a church or sanctuary on a hilltop, there are cycling pilgrimages – such as trips to the Tre Cime di Lavaredo for Merckx fans, to the summit of the Galibier for Marco Pantani’s tifosi, to the seventh hairpin on Alpe d’Huez for the Dutch (about the unholiest place within hundreds of miles on the day) and to the church of the Madonna del Ghisallo, patroness of cyclists, for almost everybody. Another part of sport’s fandom will visit graves such as Frank Vandenbroucke’s in Ploegsteert or Jempi Monseré’s roadside monument in Retie, where the young Belgian was hit by a car while riding his bike and died. For British fans, a trip to Simpson’s memorial on Mont Ventoux remains a popular choice, and some detect a religious aspect in that. Writing in The New Yorker magazine in 2000, the British novelist Julian Barnes described the way tribute had been paid to the memorial by mourners with “a jumble of cycling castoffs – water bottles, logoed caps, T-shirts, energy bars, a saddle, a couple of tyres, a symbolic broken wheel”. Barnes described the memorial as “part Jewish grave, part the tumultuous altar of some popular, if dubious, Catholic saint”.
“Some aspects of this connection are fading, of course, because society as a whole is more secular,” says De Zaeytijd. “But nowadays the suffering of the cyclist is something that can’t be lost, and that helps to maintain the link, in particular with Roman Catholicism. There are lots of parallels between racing cyclists and Jesus – for example, like when they cross the line as winners and throw out their arms, it can form a shape of the cross.”
Specifically Catholic associations include the faith’s strong links with the Amore e Vita cycling team, the blessings that teams like the now defunct Euskaltel team would receive in Spain each time they left for the Tour, or the way some more religiouslyminded Tour winners have offered a yellow jersey to their local Roman Catholic church.
With that in mind, on either side of the church nave, the ‘Cycling is Religion’ exhibition has constructed a series of chapels with different themes. One is dedicated to places of cycling pilgrimage, another to doping confessions and their consequences - “a very Catholic theme, with its idea of forgiveness of the sins,” observes de Zaeytijd. Others explore religious artefacts carried by bike riders, like the rosary which Johan Museeuw (whose confession to doping has, according to the exhibition, allowed him to be re-admitted to the Flemish cycling ‘flock’) always took with him, and superstitions, such as the Matryoshka (Russian doll) bidons the Katusha team used in 2014. The greatest of the local cycling gods, Eddy Merckx, unsurprisingly, has a chapel all to himself, with his bike acting as a mobile exhibit in more than one sense: the bike is changed weekly, so that one day you’ll turn up to find you’re looking at the machine on which he won his seventh Milan-San Remo title and on another it’ll be the last bike he raced on as a pro in 1978.
Some of the ideas, such as the insistence that the Liège-Bastogne-Liège cup is similar to a church chalice or that road
Nowadays the suffering of the cyclist is something that can't be lost, and that helps to maintain the link, in particular with Roman Catholicism. There are lots of parallels between racing cyclists and Jesus
cyclists act as ‘missionaries’ of an ascetic lifestyle to inspire cyclotourists, seem more than a little forced. Selecting pictures of suffering in cycling and then juxtaposing them with the 14 Stations of the Cross during Christ’s crucifixion is an interesting idea, but may not convince everybody of its validity. But the images the exhibition shows are never less than striking, and for the fans who would run a mile from a normal art gallery or exhibition, the huge collection of racing bikes in the centre, belonging to just about everybody who has been anybody in cycling - almost all the recent Tour and Monuments winners – are worth seeing for themselves. There’s also a huge wall display of champions’ jerseys.
De Zaeytijd recognises that the Roeselare museum is not as well known as the Tour of Flanders museum in Oudenaarde, but points out that they are operating in different fields. “Oudenaarde is focused purely on the Ronde van Vlaanderen, they want you to be able to experience the race no matter the day. Ours is more historical, less to do with experience. I don’t think there are any other museums like ours in the world.”