“A Sunday in Hell”: Broom wagon has something to do

Each week on Sunday, Waffles & Steel puts a segment of “A Sunday in Hell” under an electron microscope so that we can better appreciate what’s arguably the best cycling documentary ever made.

Last week, the riders finally hit the first patch of pave, and Roger DeVlaeminck caused panic and chaos in the peloton with a breakaway. It didn’t take long for his nemesis Freddy Maertens to catch him. In today’s segment, we learn that Francesco Moser and Eddy Planckaert are also in the lead group of about 20 riders.

Merckx is in a chasing group with Walter Godefroot, another one of my all-time favorite riders, a man who for me personifies the Belgian hardman. I also love his name: Godefroot.

As the riders jidder and jadder over the cruel cobblestones, we see some more great shots of the fans standing on the embankments along those medieval roads. Farmers in sweaters and tweed hats. A guy in a tie. A little girl in a cycling cap. A 70s style hipster wearing a spectacular orange leisure suit and what appears to be a white beret. Did disco really suck that bad?

Then we see more carnage and misfortune. The side of the road is lined with riders waiting for a spare tire. Two Brooklyn riders are hunched over a bike trying to fix it themselves.

The narrator says, “In the rear, the weak and less fortunate are being left behind, while those who don’t like cobblestones prefer riding on the road side. An accident here on the first stretch of pave can be disastrous. This is where the broom wagon has something to do.”

Next comes one of the most mundane scenes. But it’s one of my favorites. The camera is suddenly inside the broom wagon, an aging vehicle that clatters down the road. Why spend money on a fancy ride for the domestiques, men who would probably be working in a grimy factory if they weren’t on a bike team?

One of the riders from Merckx’s Molteni team barges through the broom wagon’s doors. With black smudges under his eyes, he looks like he just finished a shift deep inside a coal mine. He’s speaking in Flemish and there are no subtitles. The tone of his voice and his angry, unsmiling face shows that he’s unhappy. He’s dropping out of the race too early – a really bad move when his boss is already in difficulty. I can’t identify the rider by name. When I watched the DVD with my good friend Jan Kole – a retired Dutch pro who now makes beautiful steel frames under his own brand, Colossi – he knew the rider (and everyone else in the peloton) but I forgot to jot down the name. (Sander, can you ask you dad for me?)

The Molteni cyclist tilts his head and we can get a good look of what’s under his jersey collar. Just below the fabric is white skin, the kind found on Northern Europeans at the start of spring. Above the collar, pinkish orangish red flesh – the tone common on Northern Europeans after their first day of a Thai beach holiday. After he sits down, the Molteni rider has to close the door himself. It emits a tinny sounds, like a cheap aluminum storm door on an old home. He slams it once…twice…and again…and finally gets it to close with the fourth try. These men are workers, not sports celebrities. They slam their own doors.

Now my favorite part. He rips the leather hairnet helmet from his head and reveals a spectacular two-tone brow. The top part is a pinkish white. The bottom part is dark, a mixture of sunburn and pave grime: dirt, cow manure, diesel drips, sweat and other sorts of rural Euro filth.  He says something else in Flemish, but we don’t need subtitles. His face says it all.

Book Review: Thumbs up for "A Dog in a Hat"

Joe Parkin sums up his professional career in Belgium this way: He could ride hard when called upon, but at the end of the day, he had more desire than natural ability. The American journeyman never had a win while riding on mostly second-tier teams in 1987-91. But he left Europe with loads of fascinating, colorful anecdotes about the sport’s personalities, customs and its holy land – Belgium. These descriptions and insights make his book “A Dog in a Hat” (VeloPress, US$21.95) well worth reading.

Parkin won a few races as an amateur in Minnesota and California before he decided to skip college and try to turn pro in Belgium. He was taken in by a bike mechanic, who rented him a room and served as his coach in the town of Ursel. Pro teams got interested in him after a few good results, including a third place in the amateur version of the Het Volk Classic.

He says he achieved a high degree of fluency in Flemish, and he sprinkles phrases from the language throughout the book. One of them is “een hond met een hoed op” or “a dog in a hat,” from which the book gets its title. The phrase means something that looks out of place, like an American racing with the pros in Belgium in the late 1980s.

One of my favorite anecdotes comes from Parkin’s description of his first pro classic, the 310-kilometer Paris-Brussels. Parkin said he was still in the peloton with Sean Kelly as the riders were sizing each other up for the final push with 20 kilometers left. But at the 10- kilometer mark, he got dropped and eventually got swept up by the bus just kilometers away from the finish. The winner – or the “man with the hammer” – was Wim Arras. Parkin ends the chapter with a great statement about how cruel life can be – how the sport and world move on no matter how fast you were on the bike. “Four years later, he (Arras) would be turning wrenches on my bike,” he says.

Parkin can turn a nice phrase when he’s inspired. In a chapter about kermis racing, he says, “If the grand tours are like classical music, kermis racing is punk rock, Belgian style.” He notes that the races are all about the same length, between 150-180 kilometers, and involve circuit courses of about 10 kilometers. He says he figured out why the circuits are this length after watching a race from a café. “The time it takes for the pros to cover 10 kilometers is almost exactly the time it takes to order, receive and drink a beer.” The drinkers can hear the race coming, drain their beer and step outside to watch the riders speed by.

In 1989, he signed up with the ADR team, which also featured Greg LeMond, who pulled off his amazing Tour de France victory that same year. But LeMond rode on the A team, while Parkin was relegated to the B team – a bunch of misfits he describes as ADR’s “redheaded stepchildren.”

Another of my favorite anecdotes involves the Belgian great Eddy Planckaert, who also rode for ADR. Parkin says he once arrived at Eddy’s farmhouse about 9 a.m. for a ride and had to wake him up. It was January and Eddy’s last ride was sometime in November. His bike was still caked with months-old mud. But as soon as Eddy started riding, he began complaining about the speed wasn’t fast enough. “A few minutes after we started, he attacked …. Less than a minute after the attack, Eddy was back with us, cursing his bike, his legs, the food he had just eaten, the cold, everything.” He complained they were riding too fast so early in the season and that he wouldn’t train with them again. Parkin insists they were only going 25 kph.

Parkin ends his European career with the IOC-Tulip team. He he constantly battled anemia and low testosterone levels. He recalls that after one tough climbing stage in the Tour de Suisse, he was famished and searched through his jersey pockets for leftover snacks – “squished little sandwiches and pastries in foil wrap” – when he returned to his hotel room. Still hungry, he began digging around in the trash can looking for food that his roommates had discarded. He passed out while still wearing his race kit and later woke to the sound of the team doctor trying to wake him up. The physician said, “This is not good,” before leaving the room. He returned shortly to give Parkin a big injection of Intralipid, which was mostly fat.

After going back to America for good, he rode for U.S. pro teams, including the Coors Light squad. When his road racing career ended in 1994, he recorded some solid results as a mountain biker. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t provide many details about how Parkin settled into a civilian life and how he earns a living now. It’s also a shame that Parkin didn’t stay in touch with many of the people he knew in Belgium, so the book provides no updates about them.

Next: Parkin’s low down on Euro doping.