horscourse.be is a Belgian cycling news outlet with a humorous treatment, published from Brussels by Second Shift in French, Dutch and English.
What is true. Every dispatch starts from a real, sourced and verifiable fact. The main source is linked at the end of the article. Quotes attributed to real riders, sports directors or officials are reproduced as they were said. A transfer rumour is presented as a rumour, with the outlet reporting it; a transfer is a fact only once the team announces it.
What is invented. The reactions of Xavier, Sandrine, Myriam and Rik. They are fictional columnists, presented as such on The Newsroom page. None of them rides for a particular team or rider: the newsroom teases races, rituals and itself, never a rider, their fans or a town.
What we don’t cover. Crashes and riders’ health, doping ongoing or insinuated, betting, private life, minors. It isn’t our subject. Nor is amateur and provincial cycling (kermesses, interclubs, sportives, youth racing): our columnists come from there; we don’t write dispatches about it.
How it is made. Dispatches are written, checked, illustrated and published by a chain of artificial-intelligence programs, every half hour from 6 am to 11 pm, with no human review before publication. A human editor sets the rules (the editorial line, the thresholds, the forbidden subjects), adjusts them, and can pull a dispatch at any time. The full circuit is told on The Newsroom page.
Images. The visuals are illustrations generated by an image model from a scene written by the site, in a flat drawing style. Riders are generic characters in them, never portraits; no photos, no synthetic images imitating a real person, no real kits, nothing about anyone’s body.
Legal notice
Publisher. horscourse.be is published by Second Shift, Avenue des Franciscains 40, 1150 Woluwe-Saint-Pierre (Belgium). Company number: BE 1042.505.322. Responsible publisher: Jean-Philippe Roisin, same address. Contact: [email protected].
Hosting. Hetzner Online GmbH, Industriestr. 25, 91710 Gunzenhausen (Germany), servers in Germany; the site is delivered through Cloudflare, Inc. (San Francisco, United States).
Corrections and removal. Dispatches are written by an artificial intelligence under rules set by the publisher, with no human review before publication. Despite checking and sourcing, an error remains possible. Anyone quoted, or anyone who spots an error, can ask the publisher in writing to correct or remove a dispatch; the publisher replies and acts without delay.
Intellectual property. The texts and illustrations of horscourse.be are the property of Second Shift. Facts and quotes come from the sources given in each dispatch. Any reproduction beyond a short quotation with attribution requires the publisher’s prior consent.
Personal data and cookies. The site sets no tracking or advertising cookies and embeds no audience-measurement tool. The browser only remembers the chosen language (cookie “pll_language”, one year) and the light or dark display mode (local storage), without sending anything to third parties; Cloudflare may set a technical security cookie. The e-mail address left for the newsletter is kept with the date of consent and passed to Brevo, which sends the e-mails; every e-mail contains an unsubscribe link. The technical logs of the server and of Cloudflare (IP address, page requested) are kept for the security of the service. Under the GDPR, anyone can ask the publisher in writing for access to, correction or erasure of their data, and lodge a complaint with the Belgian Data Protection Authority (dataprotectionauthority.be).
Applicable law. The site is governed by Belgian law; in the event of a dispute, the courts of Brussels have jurisdiction.