Building a Miguel Indurain replica Banesto Pinarello

 The Kattekoers.

My cycling career may not have been overly glorious, but there are a few moments and wins that are particularly close to my heart. This is one of them, and it has a bit of a story behind it....

My junior and U23 years had been pretty successful, a national championship and selection to national teams for world championships, etc. But the step up to the pro ranks seemed a mile away, and I was starting to think I would never get there. It seemed almost unreachable.

Then the stars aligned, and some events unfolded that gave me my first pro contract for the 2000 season. It was a disaster. I was so far out of my depth that I could barely even finish a race, let alone think about any meaningful results. At the end of the season, I was not offered a contract renewal from the team, and it seemed that my professional cycling career was over after one year.

I went back to racing as an amateur and spent the following season racing in northern Europe, mainly Belgium and Holland. The racing there seemed to suit me better than in Italy, where I had spent most of my European career before that. I had some decent results but didn't win anything, and then I also found myself labeled as one of those "ex-pro's." One of those guys that had a chance and didn't make it. I was 22 years old.

2002 came around, and I didn't really have much else going on in my life, so I headed back to Belgium/Holland to give my pro cycling dream "one more shot." This was about the 3rd "one more shot season" I had been through! I was back in northern Europe doing many of the same amateur races I had done the previous year.

I had trained hard that summer back home in Tasmania, but I hadn't really done anything different than any other summer of training. But when the season started, I was just flying. It was the period of the best form of my entire cycling career, and no matter how hard I tried, I could never replicate the form that I had that year; it was my annus mirabilis.

One of the races I had targeted in early 2002 was the Kattekoers. Translated to English, it is called the Cat Race, so named because the city of Ieper where the race was held has a tradition dating back to the middle ages where the residents would throw live cats out of the bell tower (to their death) to ward off evil spirits. The tradition continues today, but with stuffed toy cats. The race is one of the biggest of the spring for "beloften", meaning up-and-coming amateur riders.

I didn't like racing in the rain, I don't think anyone does. Anyone who says they enjoy racing in the rain is probably lying. But I seemed to be good at it, and I often had better results in cold, rainy races than in the summer. Another thing I have never been able to explain. On the day of the Kattekoers it was raining and freezing cold the entire day. Of the 200 starters, only about 20 finished.

Coming into the closing km's there were 4 of us left in contention. One solo leader, with three of us chasing only 20-30secs behind. In our threesome was a local rider named Stefaan Vermeersch. I had no knowledge of this at the time, but he had won the Kattekoers twice previously, and no one had ever won it three times. He wanted to win badly, so he offered to pay me and the other rider in our group to pull back the solo leader and give him the victory. We all agreed. 

Vermeersch stopped working with us, and he sat on the back while the other rider and I reeled in the leader right at 1km to go. If I wasn't going to win, at least I would get paid. Money was pretty tight as an unpaid rider living week to week off prize money!

Then I changed my mind. As we swung into the final km it dawned on me that I may well have been riding the last race of my life. No one really knew it at the time, but I was racing under the appeal of a 2-year doping suspension given to me by the KBWB, the Belgian Cycling Federation. The week before the Kattekoers I had been at a hearing in Brussels where a lawyer my friend had generously organized (and paid for) had lodged my appeal. While the appeal was pending, I could still race, but any day I would hear the result of that appeal, and for an ex-pro who was already at the crossroads, a 2-year suspension would have certainly been the end of my cycling career.

The suspension came about from a race the year prior, in a small town in Flanders called Sleidinge. It was a mid-week kermis race, I was about to return to Australia to race the Sun Tour, so I was in Sleidinge that afternoon more for training than anything else. Again it was raining, I finished 2nd in the race, collected my small amount of prize money to cover some groceries for the week, and hopped in the van I borrowed from my friend and drove home. A few days later, I was at another kermis race when a race official pulled me aside and told me they had selected me for an anti-doping test after the race in Sleidinge, and that I had failed to appear and missed the test.

My stomach sunk. A missed test is the same as a positive test in cycling, so I knew I was squarely in the shit. This gentleman was extremely helpful and suggested that I may be able to beat any penalty I might receive as the race organizers didn't follow the correct protocols in announcing and posting who was selected to be tested. I honestly had no idea I had been selected for an anti-doping test that day. He told me to sit tight and wait for notification from the federation and take it from there.

That notification never came. I thought they realized that they hadn't followed the correct protocols, and the whole thing had just never turned into an issue. I was back in Australia and had almost forgotten about the entire thing when I received a registered letter from Belgium saying that I had been given the maximum penalty of 2 years for not appearing at an anti-doping test.

So, fast forward back to the Kattekoers. There I was, thinking this might be my final bike race. I started my sprint from a long way out. I didn't have a blistering kick, but a sprint at the end of a long, cold race in the rain is more of a glorified grovel to the line than anything. Vermeersch came up alongside me, thinking I would slow and give him the victory, as we had agreed to. Instead, I sprinted hard and won easily.

It's customary in Belgian races that all the riders assemble before and after the race at a sports hall or rec center called the "kleedkamers." When I walked into the kleedkamers, Vermersch was waiting and jumped me. I was a much better cyclist than a fighter, so I attended the prize-giving ceremony shortly afterward with a split lip! I learned that I was the first foreign winner of the Kattekoers in its 70-year history and talked to many lovely older Belgian locals who recalled stories from their families about the brave Australian soldiers that fought in that area to protect the Western Front from the Nazi's.

Stefaan Vermeersch, understandably, didn't hold me in such high regard. We crossed paths again the next week at a race in a small town called Trognee in the French-speaking region of Belgium. I was still racing under appeal, and, again, we exchanged a few haymakers before the race, and he told me I would never win another race in Belgium. I attacked from a small group just outside 1km to go and won again that afternoon.

The next week I was called to Brussels to have my appeal heard. It was brief, and not a word was spoken in English. I never really understood the reasoning behind the outcome, but I won the appeal and my ban was dropped.

I went on to win ten races that season and earned myself another shot at a pro contract. I did a bit better at pro cycling the second time around and was able to spend eight years racing professionally all around the world. A couple of years after this all happened, Stefan Vermeersch finally won his third Kattekoers and is still the only person to have won it three times.