It’s a narrow road up a mountain at the end of a fjord, nothing much beside a few hiking trails and huts at the top, but on today’s stage of the Arctic Race of Norway it’s a decisive spot. Barriers are still going up as we drive to the finish, a couple of hours ahead of the race, and after getting our bearings, we mull the racing situation on the big screen with the company of a bowl of elk stew (delicious) and an Isbjørn lager (less so).
Local politicians and dignitaries – captains of industry, business owners – are here too, waiting to see what the local heroes can do: the Coop Repsol boys who’ve been active in the breakaways, and especially the Uno-X Mobility triumvirate of Alexander Kristoff, Andreas Leknessund and Danish import Magnus Cort. So when Davide de Pretto (Jayco AlUla) and Kamiel Bonneu (Team Flanders-Baloise) are stubbornly off the front for the length of the climb, their lead shrinking but not fast enough, there is a patriotic frisson in the air.
Kristoff’s lost the leader’s jersey, but Uno-X are chasing hard, trying to set it up for Cort. De Pretto pops at 500 metres to go. Bonneu doesn’t. The road flattens then pinches up again for the last 250 metres, 9.5% of pain lined by Norwegian flags and people looking for a vantage point amongst the birch and the scrub. An Uno-X-led peloton charges behind but they’re not going to catch him. Bonneu crosses the line looking a bit solemn, a finger pointed at the sky, whooshing past the waiting media and up the road to compose himself.
The Arctic Race of Norway is a bit of a leveller in that everyone’s got the same cars and there are no buses to show the haves and the have-nots among the teams, but if you know a bit about them, you know that Team Flanders Baloise are a relative minnow of the Pro Continental circuit who typically score invites to most of the Spring Classics where the inequality is laid bare. At the Holy Week of the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, they’re the team with a camper van instead of a huge colourful bus; they are there not to have the fancy things but to develop the next generation of Flandrien riders, to give them a springboard to bigger and better things. This is their role, joyfully taken, but the script does not, typically, end with a win.
That makes success like Bonneu’s – Flanders-Baloise’s first win of 2024 in a UCI-rated race – all the sweeter when it does happen, though. As the rest of the team trickled over the line, they didn’t fist Haribo into their mouth and dash off to the team car as quickly as they could: they celebrated the moment, waiting for the presentation. That’s something that doesn’t seem like it would be rare, but at big races like the Tour de France I’ve only seen it happen once, maybe twice.
I walked over to have a chat to the reliably lovely Lars Craps to get his thoughts on what something like this means for the team, and he tells me that “this is pretty special … it’s just a great day.” The Team Flanders Baloise secret is, he says, that “we are all good friends together, which is maybe different to bigger teams where it’s more like colleagues. We are just a group of friends. We all speak the same language, we train together, we do all the races together – also the staff, it’s every race the same. It’s more like a small community.”
Across the road, Bonneu waited behind a fence to get called up onto the podium. For the stage win, he picked up a marble slab with an inscription, a golden medal and a bouquet of red roses. As his teammates cheered, he lined them up with the flowers, tossing them across to more big Belgian cheers and applause. The outpouring of genuine happiness: honestly touching. The vibes: absolutely immaculate.
After the podium duties were done, Bonneu waited on the side of the stage signing jerseys and taking a couple of interviews for Norwegian TV. The easy majority of the media were over talking to Magnus Cort, who now holds the race lead over Bonneu by just one second after leading the chase home just a few meters behind.
I like Magnus Cort, but in this moment, fresh off a conversation with Craps and having watched the wholesome Flemish boys revelling in their teammate’s success, I didn’t want to write a Magnus Cort story: I want to talk to the young Belgian man who has just taken one of the biggest wins of his career and celebrated it with his friends. Bonneu is quiet, a little withdrawn, but opens up as the conversation goes on. He’s grown up with most of these guys, he tells me: most of them have ridden together since they were 12 or 13. That’s something decidedly uncharacteristic of the pro peloton, which is usually composed of teams which are a hodgepodge of ages and national identities: in comparison, at Flanders Baloise “we always have so much fun, we all speak the same language … it’s really an amazing atmosphere and I don’t think any other team actually has it like us. Everyone is always happy for someone else if they can do a great result. The atmosphere at this team – it’s amazing.”
The brotherly support comes through good times and bad: “We don’t win a lot … it doesn’t happen that often, so I think it’s special for a team like us to together win in a nice stage race,” Bonneu said. Even so, it seems like there’s something lurking under the surface: something symbolised by the victory salute, even if I didn’t really clock it at the time. Bonneu keeps talking, though. This win, he says, comes at the end of a “lot of bad luck the past year and a half.” I’m about to ask him what he means by that when he pauses for a moment and elaborates, his voice shaking slightly. “In the last three months I lost both my grandfathers … I got the news yesterday evening in the hotel that my other grandfather died. So today, it was all for him,” he tells me. He swallows, his eyes welling up a little bit.
“No wonder you had good legs today,” I say, which is kind of a stupid thing to say, but the man has just told me that he is recently bereaved. “Good legs? Today I had really good legs. I think I had four,” he tells me. I thank him for his time and for opening up, and he thanks me back. The rest of the media turn up as he grabs a bottle of water from his soigneur. As I walk away, the questions begin again.
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