6 OF THE BEST
“Gent is special. Most six days you do40,50,60ka night. Gen t you do 140. The Belgians love it. There’ s nopomp. It’s justracing. MC
On entry to the first curve at ’t Kuipke velodrome, four boards down from the sprinters’ red line, an inch and a half of badly hammered-in nail glints in the light. And moving around the track, past the cabins that line the straights, the splintered boards sparkle with their imperfections: nails and screwheads are all worn silver and flush by the riders’ ceaseless parabolic trajectories. At one end, the underside of the track banking abuts the inner concourse. Passers-by finding their seats can put a hand to the 50-yearold boards and feel them creak like old stairs under the weight and strain of rider, bike and centrifugal force hitting the 48-degree curve at close to 70km/h. And as the track grumbles with age, so around this temple to cycling, unused the rest of the year, paint peels off walls and dust gathers in the corners of steps.
A man who knows every nail and niggle in the famously short 166.67m track is Iljo Keisse. “Everything is like it was back in the 70s,” he told Procycling in a small, black-curtained bay that felt like the wings of a theatre. Even the pink floral cushion he propped his head on while he had a massage looked like it had been threadbare during the career of the Zesdaagse’s most prolific winner, Patrick Sercu, who won 11 between 1965-81.“Everything’s just old and a little bit dirty…” said Keisse.
To him, it’s more than just an audience that fills the 5,031 varnished plywood seats and stand shoulder to drunken shoulder in the middenplein, the velodrome’s infield. Sometimes, in the most literal sense, they’re kin. He lives in Gent and his dad, Ronny, runs the famous Café De Karper, a bar just over the way from Citadel Park, where ’t Kuipke – ‘the little bowl’ – is located. De Karper doubles as the velodrome’s unofficial clubhouse and after the racing, this is where the party is. “My father used to be a cycling trainer and they have this thing called the Vlaamse Wielerschule,” Keisse said. “You could come here and train. Half of it was in the park – running and jumping, more
like gymnastics – and then there was riding all together in a group on the track. My father was one of the trainers.
“The main part of winter was the sixday and I remember coming here after school from, say, seven, when the amateurs start, to after the first big madison around 10 o’clock when I had to go home to bed. I remember sitting on the balustrade on the infield, watching the guys and dreaming of becoming a six-day rider.”
Now, more than 20 years on, and with six Gent titles to his name, he is the lord of the manor. “If I have a good night you can hear it in the hall when they start chanting my name. It’s crazy.”
One of Keisse’s rivals, Kenny De Ketele, has a similar origin story and admiration for one rider in particular: Etienne De Wilde, who, when he attacked, got so low his nose seemed to touch his front tyre. “I never saw it before and I never saw it again, only Etienne could do it,” said De Ketele.
THE CAVENDISH CONNECT ION
Cavendish has figured in Keisse’s Gent Six past. They were partners in 2014 and finished second. But the first memory Keisse conjured was 2005, when the Briton debuted with Rob Hayles. The pair came with rainbow jerseys and big expectations...and bad form. “It was a disaster!” Keisse chuckled. “It was more like a swimming pool than a cycling track to Mark. He was swimming around, it was terrible!” Unfit and out of form, Cavendish and Hayles conceded a terminal “three or four laps” in the first madison. “Cav was already a big thing in cycling and we all thought he’s going to fly around the track and we would just be bystanders,” said Keisse. Cavendish came back two years later with Bradley Wiggins but again, they came up short.
And when Keisse and Cavendish raced together in 2014, who was the boss? “Cav’s always the boss in whatever he does,” said Keisse. “I have a special relationship with him and enormous respect for him. I think he’s a great athlete. He’s special and he’s funny. You see him sometimes and he arrives at training camp 10 kilos overweight