Vlaanderens Mooiste — Tour of Flanders 2023
A personal ride · 1 April 2023 · Words by Miguel Santos
Five minutes after leaving the hotel in Bruges, I was soaked. I had brought winter cycling kit, and the rain went straight through it. Ahead of me lay 242 kilometres, a succession of cobbled climbs and a finish in Oudenaarde that I had watched on television for years.
Photo captions give local capture times where available and approximate kilometres remaining along the route where known. The order of untimed riding photographs is provisional. The Paris–Orly photograph is from the week before the trip.
The Tour of Flanders was first held in 1913 and is the youngest of cycling’s five Monuments, alongside Milan–San Remo, Paris–Roubaix, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Il Lombardia. In Flanders it is known as Vlaanderens Mooiste, or “Flanders’ Finest”. On Saturday, 1 April 2023, I took on its long-distance amateur ride, We Ride Flanders.
From Lisbon to Bruges
My wife came with me, as did a cycling friend and his wife. The sky over Lisbon gave us a fair idea of what to expect. By the time we landed in Brussels, the rain had arrived in earnest. We picked up a hire car and drove to Bruges.
Cobbles before the climbs
It rained through the night. At 07:28 I was in the Markt, Bruges’ central square, surrounded by riders and umbrellas. My gloves were already wet. Over the course of the day I would come to judge the difficulty of a stretch of road as much by what I could feel through my fingers as by what the elevation profile showed.
The roads towards Beernem and Aalter were relatively flat. The cobbles changed the character of those opening kilometres. On the downhill sectors, the stones were slick and my cold hands made every touch of the brakes more deliberate. There were still hours to ride before the famous climbs.
The road into the Flemish Ardennes
Around the 100-kilometre mark the climbs began coming in succession. The Leberg, Berendries and Parikeberg were names I knew from following the Ronde. Riding there, I noticed what the profile could only hint at. The descents offered a break for the legs, but the cold returned whenever I stopped pedalling hard.
The Muur of Geraardsbergen
The Muur rises for just over a kilometre to the Oudenberg, where a chapel stands above the town. For years, the cobbled approach was one of the decisive climbs of the professional race. I had seen riders disappear around the bend by the chapel many times. On the Saturday, I stopped there for a photograph of my own.
Geraardsbergen was a point of difference between the two rides that weekend. The long amateur route went over the Muur, while the men’s elite race followed a different route through this part of Flanders. The Koppenberg, Oude Kwaremont and Paterberg were among the climbs we shared.
The effort starts to add up
On the Koppenberg and the other steep climbs, the gradient was only part of the problem. Once the road pitched up, it mattered where the tyres met the stones. On the longer Oude Kwaremont, the effort built over the course of the climb. The Paterberg compressed it into a short, steep ramp.
By then, eating and drinking had become awkward. Mud had coated my bottles, and I was struggling to get the bars and gels down. I would have welcomed some proper food. With every hour in wet kit, it took more effort to do the ordinary things that keep a long ride going.
The finish in Oudenaarde
My finish was on Lindestraat. I was shaking by the time I came through the finish area, and the shivering did not ease when I got off the bike. There was time for a few photographs with the medal before I went back to the car.
Back at the car I peeled off the wet kit, put on dry clothes and turned the heating up as far as it would go. It took a while before I began to feel warm again. Of all the things I had imagined about finishing in Oudenaarde, I had never thought that getting warm would be the one I remembered most clearly.
The following day, Tadej Pogačar made his decisive move on the final ascent of the Oude Kwaremont, held off Mathieu van der Poel and won alone in Oudenaarde. I had watched that finale for years. After riding those roads myself, I could picture the work that goes into even getting to the foot of the last climb.
My ride in numbers
242 km · 2,273 m of climbing · 10h 06m 50s · 23.9 km/h calculated average