A week of muggy heat broke in Semur-en-Auxois, on the morning of July 6. The 2024 Tour de France was a week old by then – a jostle for supremacy that was still pregnant with possibility – and in the moment, there was excitement about the day’s racing to come. But then came the drizzle, turning into rain. We dumped our rented Citroën on a footpath near the Tour’s promotional village, fished around in our bags for rain jackets, and set off for the buses.
Spare a thought, then, for Semur-en-Auxois, a town that looks lovely on Google but about which I remember basically nothing about. Its people had paid thousands of euros in hosting fees and to make it look nice, only to have their parade pissed on. What was once crisp sandy gravel through a park turned into milky puddles of water through which ASO staff gingerly stepped. Some mornings at the Tour you take your time with a diabolical coffee, a paper cone of cold frites and chicken. Others, you just get in and get out. The weather made the choice for us.
I got rained on waiting to ask Mathieu Burgaudeau about a potato, rained on waiting to ask Alexander Kristoff about his birthday cake, and rained on as I hotfooted it for the car. But then I saw it: a Mercedes Vito van covered in graphics and pictures of Astana Qazaqstan’s lead-out guy Cees Bol, complete with a Belgian number plate reading CEESBOL.
Phone out of pocket, WhatsApp message written: “Sorry fellas, I’ll be back at the car late – I need to find out everything about what’s going on here.”
Cycling fandom is a curious thing. Call it a function of the sport’s fickle financial model, where teams change sponsors, kits and rosters from year to year, but it makes it hard to root for an entity* in the way that you might in football (*there are some exceptions: Canyon/SRAM and EF Education – EasyPost spring to mind). So how do you show your support? One answer: you follow the rider, not the team they’re signed with.
At big races like the Tour de France, the way this is expressed can vary: for every burly Dutchman in a Visma-Lease a Bike jersey hanging around the buses, there are many more signs on the roadside for individual riders, not teams. There are signs calling for Burgaudeau to be president, or caricatures of his little goatee. There are surnames inked in enormous white letters on tarmac. At Paris-Roubaix earlier this season we’d even shared a dire hotel with the Max Walscheid Fan Club, a bunch of earnest Germans in matching polo shirts who – by virtue of not being enormously tall – appeared not to be Walscheid’s family members.
The Cees Bol fan club seemed a step up in professionalism, however. At first – forgetting he’s Dutch, not Belgian – I thought this car might belong to Bol’s family, maybe even Bol himself. There’s precedent: at the 2023 Tour, Mathieu van der Poel’s partner followed the race in a Belgian-registered Mercedes Vito with the license plate MVDP-3. As I loitered around the Cees Bol-covered van (Bol on the back, Bol on both sides), a group of Belgian men of middle age arrived and shot inquisitive looks at me as I took photos. “Is this your van?” Nods in response. They weren’t related to Cees Bol, they confirmed – not “his dad or something”, as I put it in my enquiry – but they were his fan club. At the 2024 Tour de France, there were seven of them in attendance, an annual trip they’d made since his first selection (and first pro season) in 2019.
“There’s a certain level of love for a rider if you get a number plate in his name…,” I observed. “What is it you like about him so much?”
“He’s modest,” the de facto spokesperson of the group – a nice man called Mark Engelen – told me, as his friends, dressed in Cees Bol Fan Club hats and hoodies, stood around listening with amusement. “He likes the things we do, and comes every year to our fan evening. We have a very good relationship with him, and when he races in Belgium – sometimes he sleeps with us.” I raised my eyebrows but, as a Serious Journalist, decided to let this slide innocently through.
“So what was the moment that you first realized that Cees Bol was your guy that you wanted to make a fan club for?” A long and “very strange story”, I was told. Five seasons ago, “nobody knows Cees”. Key members of the future fan club were reading a newspaper and saw a name that caught their attention: Cees Bol. “For us, this name is the same as a bowl of cheese,” Engelen said. I’m trying to keep up with the twists and turns here, but this stopped me in my tracks. “Wait, what? His name is ‘Cheese Bowl?’” Engelen confirmed this (apparently it’s a regional dialect thing, and how it sounds rather than how it’s written [‘caas’ instead of ‘Cees’; Google Translate is in the dark about the ‘Bol’ bit], but still, I’ll take it.)
Soon enough, they would have the chance to meet the tall Dutchman in the flesh. At a minor race called the Napoleon Games Cup, Engelen and his pals decided to go behind the stage to conduct an impromptu interview with the rider who’d just captured their imagination. “We had a lot of beers that day,” Engelen reminisced, warming to the story. Their last question to young Cees Bol: “what’s your favourite cheese?” His answer: “I don’t like cheese.”
I could hardly believe my interview had taken this turn. Flabberghasted, I kinda parroted back what I was hearing: “He doesn’t like cheese?” “Yes,” Engelen said with a widening smile. “And his name is ‘cheese’,” I continued. “Yes. And he doesn’t like cheese.” My god. It’s perfect.
A few months later, Bol signed his first pro contract with Sunweb, and what would become the Cees Bol Fan Club went to see him at his first pro race in Belgium: Nokere Koerse. “We went over to the village before the race where there were some bookmakers,” Engelen continued, “and we had to put some money down. Five guys, we went there and we said ‘we want to put some money on Cees’. The guy said, ‘Who the fuck is Cees Bol? You can bet on whoever you want’ – Van der Poel was there, Philipsen was there – ‘and you choose this guy?’” The odds: 80 to 1, €20 times five. Engelen’s eye twinkled. “And who won that race? The first professional race of his career…?!”
€8,000 in the pocket. The surrounding members of the Cees Bol fan club were delighted to retell the story, and I was delighted to hear it. “So did that money go to the car’s number plate?” Yep. “And the merchandise?” All of it. “Wow.”
I took a picture of a smiling Cees Bol Fan Club, and headed back to the car. To their credit, Jonny and Caley understood the importance of my fact-finding mission, and we set off on a long drive to the stage finish (Winner: Biniam Girmay. Personal highlight: seeing Groupama-FDJ boss Marc Madiot trudging solemnly up to pay his respects at the Charles de Gaulle memorial on the hilltop.) Bol – the man with the fans – came into the finish in 20th position, best of the Astana Qazaqstan team.
I’d planned to speak to him about his fan club then and there, but the team press officer wasn’t in the mood for my bullshit. Not that day, nor for more than a week afterwards. I cut out the middleman in Loudenvielle, finding Cees Bol signing autographs on the way back from the daily rider presentation. I wanted to fact-check some of what the guys had told me on the rainy day in Semur-en-Auxois, but didn’t expect Bol’s recollections to correspond so precisely.
A deep breath, and then it seemed to pour out of him in a torrent: “They were there to watch the race, and uh, in their dialect my name is like cheese sandwich” – we both had a little laugh there – “and they had had a couple of beers – a couple too many, probably – and they had a bet among each other to go and do an interview with this guy, so they interviewed me. And then they asked me what’s my favourite cheese.”
Taking it all in, I offered an open-ended question: “I’m told you don’t like cheese …”
“Not too much. I’ll eat it on pizza or whatever, but I don’t really like it. I don’t really eat cheese.”
“So Cees, is it ‘cheese sandwich’ or ‘cheese bowl’?”
“They’re Belgian, so in their dialect …” Bol trailed off unsatisfyingly, leaving my Important Question unanswered.
“Is it an unusual name you have?”
“Uh, no, not really – Cees is a traditional, common name in the Netherlands. Bol, not so much. But it’s also not like, literally ‘cheese sandwich’, but you could understand it like that.”
When the news of Bol’s first pro contract came out, he said, they had sent a message promising to set up an official fan club. “I was like, sure, whatever,” Bol continued with a smile. And then the first race win, the funds rolling in to organise things, the rapid progress from a silly cheese bowl/cheese sandwich bit of linguistic silliness into a Serious Fan Club with merch and a Cees Bol-wrapped van.
“I know the guys pretty well, actually. I have a lot of contact with them and I’ve been in their bar a few times where they have the [brief pause] meetings about the fan club,” Bol continued, conceding that “it’s pretty funny.”
Have you seen the number plate of the van?
“Yeah.”
Is your number plate in the Netherlands the same?
“No, no. My number plate is just random.”
Are you tempted to have a personalised number plate in your name?
“In the Netherlands you can’t do it. And also, I wouldn’t be tempted. I don’t think you actually can – you could buy a car that has a number plate you like and then use that number plate …”
That seems a very complicated way of going about it, I offered.
“Yeah, some people – if you buy a shitty little car and it has like ‘911 Turbo’ or whatever, you can sell the car [for more] just for the number plate.”
It was hot in Loudenvielle 15 stages into the Tour de France, and I think both Cees and myself would probably concede that the intricacies of Dutch car registration practices were getting some way out of left field for a cycling interview, so I wished him well and he rolled back to the team bus. I resolved to write up the story of the Cees Bol Fan Club, with responses from both the folks in it and the man himself, and raced off to jump into a waiting Citroën. Time is money, and all that.
The Tour went on. Tadej Pogačar’s stranglehold on the race strengthened; Jonas Vingegaard’s hopes faded. I kept meaning to write about Cees ‘Cheese Sandwich/Cheese Bowl’ Bol and his fan club, and kept running out of time. By the time we’d hit Nice, I had to concede that this might be one of those things in the big notebook of ideas and dusty archive of recordings filed on my phone that would never see the light of day. Cees Bol’s season continued, and at some point after that, it ended. I wrote other stories about Astana Qazaqstan and their new big sponsor. And then, the other day, I remembered something.
As I’d been leaving the Cees Bol Fan Club and thanking them for their time, they’d handed me a little present: a lanyard, complete with Cees Bol’s name and the commercial sealant company branding that was plastered all over the side of the van. I’d carried it around France and all the way to Norway in a big recyclable tote bag that I’d picked up from the Tour de France caravan. In there: all manner of shitty hats and t-shirts and lumps of sausage and keyrings, with a vague plan to distribute it to my assorted in-laws so I didn’t need to find suitcase space on the trip back to Australia. Some of the promotional items were snapped up off the family dining table quickly, others took a bit more time. And then there was a Cees Bol Lanyard, an item that doesn’t look like much and sounds like a Mountain Goats song title.
“What’s this?”, my sister-in-law Julie asked. “It’s … it’s a long story,” I began, before telling her about a Dutchman with a name that maybe sounded like Cheese Sandwich or Cheese Bowl, and his little fan club, and the thousands of euros they’d won from a bet that had set them off on a multi-year string of trips to France to watch him ride his bike because they liked his name and his humble demeanour. She looked at me in that way that people that aren’t into bike racing sometimes do when they hear something silly about it.
“… Do you want it?” I asked tentatively. “Absolutely,” she said.
Did we do a good job with this story?