Under-23
Het Volk
Saturday 30th June, 2007
by Ed Hood
Continental TV may be dire, but there's a good
choice of radio stations; Percy Sledge is telling us about "When
a man loves a woman", as we jump back into the VW after
paying homage at the Karl Buyse monument in sleepy Wontergem. Buyse
was a son of the Flanders sod who won the Tour de France in 1926.
A long time ago maybe, but not forgotten here in the heartland.
The Karl Buyse monument in Wontergem
The destination is Zottegem and the under-23 Het
Volk.
In days gone by, this was run on the same day as
the pro semi-classic of the same name, on the first weekend of the
Belgian season, but now it's held in sunny June.
A win or a podium place here goes a long way to
securing a pro contract, so it's a 'death race'.
The roll of honour is impressive; Freddy Maertens,
Eddy Planckaert, Paul Wellens, Andre Dierickx; or take a more recent
edition - 2001, first: Gert Steegmans, second: Tom Boonen. Enough
said.
To the uninitiated onlooker, this could be a pro
race, only the team coaches and trucks are missing. There are swarms
of professionally-liveried team cars; mechanics working on rows of
gleaming, identical machines; masseurs applying exotic compounds to
ripped, prominently-veined, tanned young legs, and cigar-smoking managers
strutting their stuff.
Unibet and QuickStep have immaculately turned-out
'feeder' squads here, and it would be difficult to tell the U23 bikes
and riders from their elite counterparts.
The Quick-Step HQ
It's one of the Unibet lads - managed by former
Tour winner, Lucien Van Impe - who is leading the season-long Belgian
U23 series; Kenny Van Der Schueren, and he's already proficient at
striking poses for the camera.
Kenny Van Der Schueren (Unibet)
It's a huge field - 186 young men, all desperate
for glory - which lines up in the main street, protected by barriers
and a police presence which would do justice to Paris-Roubaix. The
armada which roars-out behind them is pro-sized too.
It's a complex parcours to follow, so we elect
just to watch the start, and have a peek at it on the roads up on
the ridge above Oudenaarde where so many of the world's great races
are contested - Het Volk, Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, De Panne and the
Tour of Flanders all use the network of roads up there.
We catch the bunch just after the Eikenberg climb,
a huge mass of riders, gutter to gutter. It has split already though,
and there's a big group chasing furiously as that chat with the Predictor/Lotto
talent-scout disappears up the road.
It would be Monday before we confirmed that 18
year-old Gert Dockx (Beveren 2000) took the honours in his first season
- remember the name.
