Among the true believers

The first step in addressing any addiction is admitting you have a problem. Here goes: I am an addict, a fiend, a nay-user junkie. I am a slave to physical suffering. I put my body through hell just for the high. I love to suffer. I live to suffer. 

That’s why I recently went on holiday to Belgium — another example of the depraved lengths I will go to to get my fix — to ride the Ronde van Vlaanderen and Paris-Roubaix sportive. Some people snort coke on a beach in Bali, I was grimly checking the weather reports for rain in Flanders. 

These rides have been on my must-do list for years. They are the Palm and Easter Sundays of cycling’s Holy Week: kilometres and kilometres of roads winding through the beautiful Flemish country, as well as industrial estates, towns I’ll never know the name of and never go back to — and cobbles. Unrelenting, unforgiving, unforgettable cobbles, each one a clenched fist waiting to thrust up through the surface and clatter you across the road or grab your wheel and drag you down. 

I rode the Ronde first. 164KM long, and the cobbles are a less dangerous category of weapon.  But with 2,000 meters of climbing most of them are on tight, narrow, windy uphill climbs. The climbs read like a how-to list of ways to destroy your legs: the Molenberg, Muur van Geraardsbergen, Koppenberg, Taaienberg, Kwaremont and Paterberg. A wretched thing, I ground up each one, wondering why I hadn’t lost an extra 10, 20, 30 kilos beforehand. The pain then would have been immeasurably less than the excruciating agony in just keeping my wheels turning. The pain was deep so consuming it was all you could think about. Wretchedly labouring at my cranks, I kept telling myself to dig deep. I dug deeper than the Mariana Trench. 155KM in, on the 20% cobbled incline of the Paterberg, the last climb, as I stood up just to keep the pedals moving over, I wondered how a loving God could allow me, his precious creation, to be as wretched as I.

The cobbles in Roubaix were much, much worse, I knew: but it was at least flat, I told myself. Riding through the Trouée d’Arenberg, It felt like the cobbles were being smashed against my forearms. They were. I was trying to shake the ache out of my forearms for the next 100 KMs. I couldn’t. Kilometre after kilometre of cobbled farm tracks were ahead, the crown — the smoothest part — rising like a kerb in the middle of the road. I saw three people in front of me fall off trying to mount it. Overtaking meant you needed to drop onto the even rougher cobbles off the crown, then re-mount: anything that wasn’t taped down flew off. Spare inner tubes, bottles, tool kits and food littered the sides of the road. By the time I finished in Roubaix, my wrists felt worn smooth and my biceps like they’d had granite injected into them.

Riding the Ronde is like being punched in the face by the friendliest man you’ve ever met. Riding Roubaix is like being punched in the face by a man who warned you half an hour beforehand he was going to do it. Both immediately buy you a beer afterwards.

In fact, I was offered a beer on route. On the Kwaremont crowds had gathered, three of four deep at the side of the road, to cheer on the riders: one held out a beer for me. I went to grab it, and he snatched it away. Similarly, at every famous climb, corner or landmark, there were crowds three or four deep drinking, cheering us on, drinking, waving flags, drinking, playing infectiously awful Low Countries Eurodance and drinking. Along the Roubaix route, one group had even bought an old sofa to watch us from. Bearing in mind this was not a race but a sportive: just normal people, riding on famous roads to say they’d done it. They weren’t gathering for the spectacle of elite sport, but simply because they loved cycling. And drinking.

A common kind of claim you see these days is that some culture is unique, and the evidence provided in support of this is that they like eating together and respect their elders. I’ve heard this claim about Greece, Ukraine, Ghana and various Latin American nations —‚ which suggests it isn’t that unique. But it is not overwrought to say that Belgium’s cycling culture is totally distinct (whilst Roubaix is held in France, it is very close to the Belgian border, and spiritually Flemish). There are other nations that are cycling-mad, sure: France, of course, Italy, Holland, Eritrea. But nowhere else treats cycling as such an intrinsic part of their national culture that they will open football stadiums to watch races, or that they will line the route of a race the day before the event to cheer on random amateur enthusiasts. This year they were rewarded by a victory for national hero Wout van Aert, who — by winning his first cobbled Monument and preventing both Matthieu Van Der Poel and Tadej Pogacar from achieving almost otherworldly accomplishments of wins — has etched his name even deeper into the heart of his nation. Expect further awful Eurodance tunes in his honour. Unmatched in its depth or fervour, bordering on the fanatical, only in Belgium do you feel that cycling culture is vigorously expressed, rather than just alive and well.

There are, of course, threats to this. Newcomers are less enthusiastic about cycling, and Belgium has a high rate of new arrivals, even for Europe. Migration has been the driving force behind population growth in Belgium over the last decade: 19.9% of the population were foreign-born in 2024, an increase of 33 per cent since 2014. Just 64% of the population is Belgian with a Belgian background: 22.1% are Belgian with a foreign background and 13.8% are non-Belgian.

Migrants — particularly those from Africa and the Middle East — tend, quite naturally, to gravitate towards football: a global game with low barriers to entry and immense cultural reach. In doing so, they do not so much reject local sporting traditions as bypass them. In a genuinely multicultural society in which cultures are transplanted wholesale and the sheer demographics bends the existing culture to those of newcomers, the idea of an idiosyncratic national culture begins to thin out, aligning what emerges closer to global norms than local peculiarities.

For Belgium, this shift carries a particular poignancy. The country’s distinctive sporting life is not easily transplanted or recreated. Culture is a precious thing: even the most vigorous element can, once thinned out, be disposed with as easily as a spent energy gel wrapper.

Since I have some back, I have spend hundreds on other races. Running races, cycling races, duathlons, aquathlons, triathlons. I have relapsed: I have Belgium’s love of cycling to thank. May it never change.