By Chris Baldwin

Do a google search for “lance armstrong wannabe”. 653 results.

Do the same search for “niko eeckhout wannabe”. Nothing.

Fact is I would rather be Bob Dylan than Niko van Eeckhout, the buck-knife-wielding, tree-trunk-legged Flandrian nicknamed Rambo who now rides for Sean Kelly’s An Post team, but old Bob don’t exactly look like the kind of guy who can kick ass on the Kwaremont.

So if I have a choice for wannabe-ness, let it be Rambo. Lance Armstrong is a munchkin twittering pixie, who looks so dainty he probably has a Peter Pan outfit in his closet.

Eeckhout is the manliest man of Flanders. A man who has won all those races that lead up to the Belgian cobbled classic. The Dreidaagese, the Harelbeke, the E3. A man who has survived in the Belgian Congo on bug juice and leeches grown fat on his own blood. 

I heard van Eeckhout read ‘Heart of Darkness’ and laughed at that pansy Kurtz.

I rode 140km on Saturday at the Tour of Flanders citizen sportive ride.  The full course of 260km was an option, but at 38, with amateur fitness and a fragile truce now holding in the Perineal Homeland among the warring tribes of Anus and Scrotum, 140 ks of cobbles, hills, dust and other cyclists was just fine.

And so I rolled in to Brussels-Midi at sometime after six p.m. on Friday, bicycle bagged across my shoulder, daylight still a surprise at this hour after another London winter.

The Eurostar punches my eardrums under the Channel, which seems to help my understanding of spoken Flemish.

“Ach, de Ronde Van Vlaanderen?” the 4-foot-9 train agent asked when he took my ticket.

“Yo,” I said.

“Hacke hache bech heche neck bache back, Tom Boonen,” the train agent replied, punching the slip, winking and then moving on.

Last year I tried to make the journey across Belgium by bike, that time coming from Dusseldorf on my touring rig.  I flew on a Friday from Moscow, got about 60 kilometers closer to Maastricht by the time it got dark, then ate a bunch of asparagus soup in a country hotel somewhere on the German-Dutch border.

The next day, fragrantly fresh from the bathroom, I realized that covering the 380 kilometers from where I was to where the Tour of Flanders was going to be in 24 hours time was impenetrable. Impermeable. Impossible. As if it were a river, leading back up into some primordial time. Some primordial place.

Das horror, I imagined.  Das horror.

Plus last year it was raining, my gloves were soaked and I had even less fitness then than I do now. On that cloudy Sunday in 2009 I watched Stijn Devolder, the man in black Belgium national champion kit, kick ass on the Muur and take the big win all from the beery comfort of a couch in the Maastricht StayOkay non-youth youth hostel. Orange-skinned Dutch 30-somethings kept passing me to hit the bar.

This year I booked a guest room in Ename, just outside of Oudenaarde, where I arrived Friday night by bus, the fifth form of public transport used since leaving Canary Wharf that afternoon.

On the bus I met a sallow-skinned Belgian adolescent, carrying a full backpack and an oversized skateboard.

“Big wheels,” I said.

In his Euro-schooled, internet-honed English, he told me it was a mountain kite board.

“They was for 300 euros new, but I got it from a rich bastard for 150 euros,” he said.

“You can do tricks, there is a kite.  Kicktails, swingbacks, kneedrops.”

“Do you take it downhill?” I asked.

“Where de fuck you gonna do dat? It’s too dangerous…..”

He eyed my bikebag.

“De Ronde van Vlaanderen?”

“Haake beck beche beck breakaneck Filippo Pozatto,” I said.

“What da fuck is dat?”

“I think Pozatto will win,”

“I don’t give a fuck,” he said, with a surprising grasp of rather esoteric interjective English grammar.

“I hate cycling. The tourists they don’t respect the road. They piss all over the lawns, they think they are cars. They fall over on the, what you call, the stones….

“The cobbles?” I offered.

“They gonna come dirty dousand of dem on Saturday past my house where I live, I just gonna hide.”

Later he emailed me, having gleaned my address from a business card I handed him on his way off the bus.

He expressed worry that in my guesthouse there was inadequate broadband coverage (which I think goes a long way in explaining his sallow skin and generally tubby demeanor) and clarified his hatred of De Wielertouristen, the amateur cyclists streaming in from all over to come suffer on his home roads.

Sorry i was so impolite to don’t introduce myself,my name is Tim.
Btw what i meant on the bus about hating cyclists is:Thru the year they(amateur cyclists) don’t respect the rules.
That one day for “de ronde van vlaanderen” i don’t mind.I think it’s the only bicycle round that organise a day before the real race a round for the amateur bicyclists. If they respect the rest of the year the rules.But that’s the problem, from my point of view there are like 20% of the amateur cyclists that don’t respect the rules thru the year.

My guesthouse was a friendly retired couple with limited English. We made hand gestures and pointed at clocks and found cognates and generally agreed on a time for breakfast (7:45) and directions to the tiny town’s only restaurant (out, right, left, just 10 minutes).

I ate, slept, woke, assembled the bike and headed off into Ninove by car with the other guesthouse guest, a Dutch banker with enormous teeth and marginally better English.

And we drove and got entirely lost on Belgian roads and arrived with 10 minutes to spare before the 10 a.m. cutoff for tourist starts.

And then we started on the course.  We rode together about 3 kilometers and I never saw him again.

It took five hours to ride 140km. I figure I stopped about 30 minutes for food and peeing.  The hardest bits were the crowds on the climbs, which is to be expected when 30,000 weekend warriors break out their grimy bikes and take to the roads for a fun-filled Saturday experiment on the roads of Flanders.

But let me get back to the peeing. 

Every time we hit the cobbles my fingers and wrists exploded in tingly pain.  Like somebody had inserted a small needle into the skin on the tops of my hands and injected high-pressured air in jerky spurts into the crevasses and crannies of my knuckles.

It hurt so bad I wanted to stop.  I wanted to take my hands off the bars and cry.  I wanted to crack my knuckles and smoke mind-numbing bongfuls of Dutch weed and smuggle oxycontin from my dying grandmother’s palliative care home and beat myself in the face and rejoin the Army and go to Ranger school this time and jump out of a C-130 at 900 meters in flipflops and a shitty parachute to deaden the receptor cells in my brain.  I wanted to punch out the motherfuckers going faster than me who obviously did not respond to pain in the same way I do.

But I didn’t.  Instead I felt a rapid tugging at my bladder as the enormous paving stones shook loose from my guts all the combined coffee, orange juice, water and Isostar energy drink I had swallowed since breakfast.

In total I peed al fresco into the West Flandrian watershed 12 times that day.  Certainly moreso than had I stood around my London apartment and done espresso shots before riding out into the Kent downs for a Saturday spin.

The best part of the day was just before the Kwaremont, when we hit a flat patch of smooth, car-free asphalt.  This was just after the first refreshment zone, a feedlot herd of clip-clopping cyclists bungling through a donated warehouse to grab sugary waffels, banana slices and more Isostar.

On the flat asphalt ahead of the Kwaremont I jumped out of my slowly digesting gruppetto to bridge up to the next one.  I had three kilometers in which to close a gap of one, meaning I needed to chug along in full pursuit mode, a la Niko van Eeckhout, he of the Rambo mystique, in order to bridge.

Alas I did not, and the leading gruppetto disappeared into a quick left-hand turn before I joined them.  Then we all went up the Kwaremont together and who knows what happened.

Lots of people get halfway up those climbs, stop, fail to unclip, then fall over, blocking the road to all behind. 

Through a managed effort of shouting, hissing, grunting and weaving, I never came off my bike on Saturday on any of the hills.

And in the end, when the sun came out and I charged up the very narrow, very cobbled Muur, twisting left then right then left again as thousands of tourists stood to watch other tourists ride their bikes, I let out a kind of yell as I crested and began a smooth descent to the finish.

Like I said. Five hours.  I got a t-shirt.  There’s a website offering to sell me a picture of myself for 29 euros.  I saw the proofs.  If don’t mind saying I look a little bit like Rambo in that picture.