Races Are Coming Your Way — Beer and Cyclocross in Belgium and The Netherlands
Near the startline of Namur’s citadel cyclocross course in Wallonian Belgium, two women with dark-dyed 80s bouffant mullets wander towards me, a beer apiece. It’s 10.30am. I take this as confirmation I really should be moving on from coffee by now.
At a cyclocross race it’s not just Belgian culture and a sense of civic duty that keeps the pints coming. Beer has been essential to the sport since its inception thanks to local brewery sponsorship deals. Even now, podium finishers often receive beer-related prizes, whether that’s an oversized glass of locally-brewed blond, or a keg to take home.
As a spectator, beer serves another important purpose.
“Against this gloomy backdrop a bike race is a vibrant thing, full of colour and noise and life,” cycling journalist Paul Maunder says in his book Rainbows in the Mud. “...There are roadside food stalls, beer tents in fields, banners, costumes, decorated villages… through this the tough men of cycling come charging.” I’d add that the women are just as tough. Chapeau, Lucinda Brand.
It’s these food stalls and beer tents that transform bleak midwinter races into bright celebrations. Under greyscale skies and in near-freezing temperatures, it’s the beer and the frites that get you through.
“The beer tents offer shelter, and of course a couple of beers is going to take the edge off of the misery of standing out in Belgian weather conditions all day!” says Katy Madgwick, cycling broadcaster, and owner of Write Bike Repeat, a cycling news and fan community website.
They fill up quickly. At Zonhoven, one of the most intense races in the cyclocross calendar due to its setting inside the vast, sandy bowl of a former gravel pit, torrential rain sent Tom—my husband—and I, and my tinfoil-wrapped butties, scurrying inside. Inside was a bar the length of a Dutch barge, with perhaps a thousand people standing shoulder to shoulder drinking solidly while a DJ blasted Sandstorm by Darude. Steam rose as the passing shower belted down.
llustrations by Fe.tte
“It's hard to pick apart whether it's cyclocross that's associated with beer… or just the region—it's kind of a chicken and egg scenario,” Katy tells me. “It's a beautiful symbiosis that is intertwined with Belgian cultural heritage. One is very much linked with the other.”
***
Sliding down a muddy embankment in the dark surrounded by a cloud of my own frozen breath, I can’t believe I’m really here. I’ve just arrived after hours of driving, the LED lights of the Namur start-finish line are hazy in the drizzle, and I’m sick with excitement, and worried I’ll be chased off the course by a security guard. I snap a picture and head to the stairs section over the steepest climb, wondering how in God’s name anyone could be bothered to walk up here once, nevermind cycle it as part of a race circuit, over and over again.
The next morning, the Belgian drizzle solidifies into a crisp winter’s day, the promise of a few passing showers hanging in the air. After Tom makes coffee in the van—our home for the next 10 days—we put on our boots and head towards the sound of loud Dutch being spoken over tannoy, and the smell of frites. Cyclocross racer Annmarie Worst’s RV parked up next to us overnight. Her dad fettles one of her bikes as we walk past with an ill-pronounced “Goedemorgen.”
How very cyclocross. You can be the best in your sport, on the podium every race, but you’re still in an RV at the end of the day, either sleeping off the cramps and the bruises, or heading towards yet another wet and muddy corner of northwestern Europe.
It feels like the lower-league football of cycling—cyclocross might have millionaire racers like Mattheiu Van Der Pol rocking up in their brand new Lambo, but in comparison to the money spent on road racing, it’s peanuts. There’s a definite feel of back-to-basics about every race, from the parents helping out in pit lane to the local DIY company sponsorship inflatables. The riders aren’t here for fame and fortune. They do it because they love it. It’s what they live for. The maniacs.
The fans are just as devoted, and you’d have to be, hanging out all day in a wet park or an old quarry with only beer and chips to warm you up. To the spectators, this isn’t just a sporting event, it’s a festive gathering, and that means lots and lots of beer, silly hats, and party tents. Plural.
““Under greyscale skies and in near-freezing temperatures, it’s the beer and the frites that get you through.””
“Lots of cycling nations around the world are envious when they look at the Belgian races… because cycle racing is a national institution,” says Jez Cox, a former elite cyclist and GB team manager, now a pro-cycling commentator. “Non-cyclists also go and watch the bike races. They see it as sporting entertainment rather than a pastime they’re really into, that is the big, big difference.”
Jez is a familiar voice to anyone who watches cycling coverage on the television, and cyclocross is his favourite discipline. He adores it. There is no football in Belgium over the Christmas break, and the fact that every cyclocross race happens on a weekend or during a national holiday creates the perfect storm.
“It’s a season-long, winter-long sporting soap opera,” he tells me.
“There’s a narrative to follow each weekend—there’s a swing and a balance between somebody coming into form, somebody having a bad time, somebody having a crash and coming back the next week.”
“You get to know the characters along the way.”
It has hardcore fans—just look at me and Tom in our van for reference—but cyclocross in the UK is what you’d call a niche sport. 20 year-old Welsh rider Zoe Backstedt recently won gold in the U23s UCI World Cyclocross Championships for Great Britain, a phenomenal achievement, but you probably didn’t hear about it. In Belgium, the heartland of the sport, it’s a beloved national institution. Given the country’s deep love of beer, it makes sense that the two are inseparable.
However, there are no oud bruins here; not a single lambic nor abbey tripel to be found at the bars around a European cyclocross event. If you want something other than lager, bring your own.
Back in Namur I buy a round of Maes. It’s a nondescript 5.2% pils brewed by Alken-Maes (Carlsberg/Heineken) in Mechelen, the Flemish part of Belgium. They are a key sponsor of this particular race, and so despite being in the heart of beer nerd Disneyland, this is the only beer available. It’s fine. In fact, the sponsorship marketing works well—I now have a Maes cup to prove I was part of the crowd.
Jez agrees that the atmosphere is a huge part of cyclocross’ wide appeal in Belgium and the Netherlands. “UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale) races have what they call a party tent, or two, with two or three different DJs spread around the event,” he says.
There are two types of people at a cyclocross race—those raving to techno at 4pm in a party tent, or those who never stop moving. Half the fun of watching a cyclocross race is racking up ludicrous step counts in the most precariously steep situations as you try to catch the riders at a different section of the course while holding beers and wearing a hat designed to look like a rubber duck. You do all this while screaming “ALLEZ ALLEZ ALLEZ” and trying to get on the live TV coverage.
““It’s a season-long, winter-long sporting soap opera.””
“It’s held as such a hard sport,”Jez says. “It’s in the parkland, it’s grey, and cold, it’s winter... We need to lift spirits with whatever it takes.”
He makes it sound gruelling.
“It’s Type 2 fun but that’s why it’s so damn good,” he continues. He’s on about the racing, not the spectating, but I can empathise. “You get cold, you get wet, you get muddy, if you’re unlucky you’ll fall off, but you’ll get back on again and keep going… and as soon as you’ve finished and you’ve had a hot shower you’ll be going, I loved that, when’s the next one?”
A hot shower? Chance would be a fine thing. A quick change, a nip of whiskey (Redbreast 12—an early Christmas present), and a cheese and ham sandwich for tea. That’s the true cyclocross dirtbagger lifestyle.
***
“Cyclocross is the elemental, mindful version of cycle sport,” Jez says. “You’re like a needle on the record, always dealing with that moment, always thinking about that corner, and that little dismount, and the running section, a bit of sand. You are living in the moment at all times. It’s a wonderful isolation.”
While the riders zone into their quiet, calm inner worlds of focus and preparation, the more beer the crowds drink, the more animated they become. Cheering gets louder, awkwardness becomes laughter. The cold becomes a minor detail rather than the main topic of conversation. I dance to the start line music as the tension builds, the huge bobble on my woolly hat bopping in time with the countdown. When the lights go out and the riders race past and up the brutal cobbled stretch beside the ancient Namur citadel, a man in the crowd revs a chainsaw engine.
The women's sport is just as well-attended and respected as the men’s. At Hulst in the Netherlands, a race that uses the historic fortress walls of the town and a real-live windmill as circuit furniture, I watch wide-eyed and agog as Hungarian rider Blanka Vas tackles an intensely steep slope on the side of a dike with all the ease of her mountain bike pedigree. Spectators pack around me to watch the carnage, shouting encouragement (and Dutch jeers) to the many riders who slip and fall on the same descent.
I’ve always enjoyed the World Cup more than the Premier League, and I think that’s why cyclocross is for me. I just love a pageant. Seeing Puck Pieterse, Lucinda Brand and Ceylin del Carmen Alverado neck Kwaremont—a 6.6% Belgian blond named after a brutal cobbled climb—on the podium in 2023, I thought: this is my sport.
Cyclocross is living, air-siren-blaring proof that it’s possible to be deeply invested in a technical, elite sport, and still be the life and soul of the continent. Enter the brass band. Start up the Euro-Donk set at the podium. Tap that winners’ keg of Super 8. Let’s get this party started.
