THE ZONEHOPPER
The day before Omloop, Procycling crossed the border into Holland to meet Evert de Moor at his neat home in Hulst. Weekdays, the dapper dressed De Moor writes communications statements for his local town council. But on most Saturdays and Sundays during the Classics he’s a ‘zonehopper’, one of the army of gilet-clad volunteers seen holding spare wheels and bidons aloft at the ends of climbs or cobbled sections. On the eve of the opening Classics, De Moor’s excitement was already at a rolling boil. Through a longstanding personal friendship with the 2001 Paris-Roubaix winner, Servais Knaven, which came about when De Moor asked for a couple of Domo-Farm Frites bidons to adorn his team replica Merckx bike, De Moor now applies his deep knowledge of the region’s back roads for Team Sky. He has worked the Classics for them since 2011. He did a stint for Milram too. Tales from his “rodeo car” careering about the Flemish Ardennes tumbled out as he flicked through his pile of precious, marked-up road books. He had also printed off detailed instructions of where and when he would be in action the following day if we wanted to follow him.
De Moor was the navigator for the team’s spare car, which also carried bikes. We caught him outside the Petit Cochon, an upmarket restaurant on the N8, the well-surfaced, west-east spine road that crosses the Flemish Ardennes. De Moor was in the zone. News comes through that Christian Knees needs a bike change and he hurries along with the mechanic. “Full speed, full speed! No bidons here, no way! Too fast! It’s crazy!” he says, grinning, as the peloton’s draft sweeps past him. Seconds later, he slurps half a coffee and he’s on his way. “See you!” His enthusiasm is bottomless: a pure racing fan who happens to have the best seat in the house.
Pieter Vanhessche, the burly chef of the Petit Cochon, specialises in côte à l’os and other huge slabs of beef. There was nothing in the room to give away the fact racing had any meaning to anyone behind the counter. But the restaurant was very close to the summit of the Kokkerelle and its more famous neighbour, the Eikenberg, so we take a punt. It turns out Vanhessche, like many Belgians was plugged into the vast community created by bike racing. He explained how he became an acquaintance and then friend of Steffen Wesemann, the German who broke Belgian hearts in 2004 by outsprinting Leif Hoste and overshadowing the last appearance of the old lion, Johan Museeuw. Wesemann stayed with Vanhessche for a month in 2004 and the chef’s photos, kept to hand behind the bar, soon come out. “Cyclists are like superstars in a certain way but you can still touch them,” he said. “Cycling is still the working man’s sport. Sep Vanmarcke’s brother lives on the Edelareberg and if he stops here he always asks how the restaurant is going. We know lots of them. Scott Sunderland, but he’s in Ghent now. Peter Van Petegem is close. The riders… they know who you are.” In the denes of the Flemish Ardennes and wider afield, the professionals aren’t just admired by the community from afar, they’re part of it.