BURIED TREASURE
HERBIE SYKES SOMETIMES THE THINGS THAT ARE WORTH THE LEAST ARE THE MOST VALUABLE
ADutch friend got wind of it. He told me there were some jerseys “near Kortrijk” and gave me a name and an address. A postal address, that is, not an email address. So I wrote the bloke a letter. I crafted that letter and then, because he didn’t craft one back, I crafted another one. Eventually he wrote that yes, there were jerseys. He didn’t state how many, but he inferred – though no more – that he might just be prepared to sell. Then I rang JJ.
JJ is from Provence, and he grew up with Anquetil and Poulidor. He has a prosaic job as a financial advisor, and like me he collects old cycling jerseys. He and I agreed to fly to Brussels – he from Marseille and me from Turin – and then to drive to near Kortrijk. We didn’t really know what we’d find when we got there, but that was kind of the point. The anticipation is easily the best part where cycling jerseys are concerned, because they’re only cycling jerseys.
There were about 20 wool jerseys that we really wanted, and about another 30 that were worth having. Then about 150 that weren’t, and 300 ghastly synthetic efforts which weren’t worth anything. There were 800 caps, 700 bidons and 200 musettes, and some car plates. There are a lot of weirdos out there who collect that sort of stuff, grubbing around at the roadside picking up discarded feed bags. That is beneath JJ and me. We may be idiots, but we’re not without shame.
We danced around it a bit, and eventually we told the bloke what we wanted. Then he told us what he wanted, and that was for someone to take it all away because he wasn’t interested in selling it piecemeal. I said, “We’d need a truck to transport all that”, and he said, “This is correct.” He was Flemish, you see.
Me and JJ went for a pint, and he said he’d take half the wool jerseys, but no more. He didn’t say that his wife would divorce him if he turned up with 400 caps, 350 bidons and 150 lousy modern jerseys, but he didn’t need to. I understood. The upshot was that when I got home I chose my moment perfectly, and informed the wife that a “great opportunity” had presented itself. I then tried to decode whether the look she shot me was of pity, contempt or (most likely) a mixture of the two.
I hired a bloody great big van in Turin, and picked JJ up near Dijon. We drove to near Kortrijk, which is a hell of a long way, and got the stuff. Then we congratulated ourselves, because it’s not every day you get your hands on Roger Swerts’ 1970 Faemino jersey or Roger De Vlaeminck’s 1974 maglia ciclamino.
I set about trying to offloading the spare jerseys, because I’d told the wife it would be a doddle to get the money back. A bloke from near Antwerp contacted me, and asked me whether I still had the Buchmann Sunglasses jersey. That had been one of the ones which weren’t worth having, because Buchmann hadn’t been a pro team and nobody cares about amateur jerseys. He told me he cared about it a very great deal, because, it transpires, Buchmann had sponsored the Royal Lierse Bicycle Club in the early 1970s. His aunt and his mum had ridden for them, and his aunt, Mariette Laenen, had been Belgian national champion four times. His mum, he said, was Eveline Laenen. She’d been 19, but she’d had to stop because she’d been pregnant. Pregnant with him.
He said he’d been trying to find that jersey for years. I thought that was brilliant, and so did he.
Most sports are binary; one winner and one loser. Road cycling, on the other hand, tends towards the subjective. Races are a constellation of success stories, and their constituents are drawn from all corners. Cycling fans tend not to be adversaries; there’s little tribalism. There are any number of sports which are more viable, but - and here, finally, is the point - I can’t think of one which is more ecumenical.
Cycling is a 19th century construct, but it’s just the sport we need right now.