Everything factual on this site is true and sourced. Everything funny comes from these four, who don’t exist, who have never seen the front of a race, and who each have an opinion about your tyre pressure.
The Newsroom
They comment on cycling. Cycling never asked them to.
The Sunday Rider
Xavier
47. Rides every Sunday at nine, twenty past nine in practice, with the club, from the square in Lasne, and on Monday compares what the pros did the day before with what he did himself, on roads he has ridden too. He has the segment on the Kwaremont, the one on the Mur de Huy and an Alpine col climbed in July “with the backpack”. The gap to the winner always comes with a column of explanations: the backpack, the café stop, the red light in Oudenaarde, the wind he had against him both ways. Three editions of the Tour of Flanders sportive, the day before the real one, “the 140, well, the 74 last time”. Four bikes in the garage, the car outside. He says he rides for pleasure while watching his bike computer, and talks about it at the café while watching everyone else’s. You recognise yourself in him, or you recognise the one waiting for the group at the top of the climb, pretending not to wait.
“I have the segment.” · “Take off the backpack, the café and the red light in Oudenaarde: then we can talk.” · “I did it in July. With the backpack.”
The Mechanic
Sandrine
39. Sells bikes during the week in a shop in Mouscron and repairs the kermesse club’s at the weekend, in a van with a workstand, a radio and, from October to February, a garden hose for the cyclocross races. She watches the Ronde from the workshop, spanner in hand. To her, a rider who wins had a clean bike, a rider who gets dropped had a dry chain, and a rider who “joins a project” has mostly changed saddle, “six months to find his bearings”. Watts are “for people without a pressure gauge”; the mental side is “a cable rubbing in its housing”. She tunes a derailleur by ear and judges a fifteen-thousand-euro bike as a bike. She never talks about riders’ bodies: she knows nothing about them, she says, and has no wish to. Her one question about the pro team bus: who rinses the shoes? You recognise yourself in her, or you recognise the person who fixed your bike with a sigh.
“That’s a derailleur problem.” · “Fine. But at what pressure?” · “A clean bike is half the race already.”
The Commissaire
Myriam
52. Regional commissaire for “a length of time the rulebook does not measure”, posted on Sundays to the province’s kermesse races and, every spring, to a station at the top of the Mur de Huy, “with her back to the race, which is how you see it best”. During the week she issues identity cards at the town hall, where everything is already compliant or is not. She does not judge the race, she judges compliance: sock height, hand position, a bidon held out too long, arms raised before the line, the time limit. A feat exists only once classified. She has never used an exclamation mark, nor a superlative, nor the word “panache”, which she regards as an unsanctioned breach of conduct. What passes for tenderness with her: “compliant”, with nothing added. You recognise yourself in her, or you recognise the person at the club who does the paperwork and whom nobody thanks.
“I do not judge the race. I judge compliance.” · “Time cut is time cut.” · “I note. I do not comment.”
The Domestique
Rik
63. A professional for two and a half seasons in the early nineties with a Belgian team “sponsored by a window-frame company, we had the heaviest jersey in the peloton”. Carried bidons for people who are remembered, without being remembered himself, which suits him. Best result: a hundred and twelfth in the Tour of Flanders, “inside the time limit, look it up”. These days he drives the car for a club in Ronse on Sundays and watches the rest on television “looking for the gruppetto, the camera never shows it”. He never says it was better before: at the back it has always been the same, and the front he did not see. He is on first-name terms with the riders, formal with the sports directors, and lets slip “de koers” when he forgets himself, because in Ronse the language border runs through the middle of the climb. You recognise yourself in him, or you recognise the one who waited for you at the top and never said so.
“At the front, I couldn’t tell you. At the back, I can.” · “A hundred and twelfth. Inside the time limit.” · “A bidon has to be earned.”
Transparency. Xavier, Sandrine, Myriam and Rik are fictional characters. Their reactions, like the rest of every dispatch, are written by an artificial intelligence, with no human review before publication; the editor sets the rules and can pull a dispatch. The facts, results and quotes of real riders and sports directors are checked and sourced in every dispatch.
How a dispatch gets here
A day in a newsroom that doesn’t exist
Everything that follows is true, and nobody here is real: every desk is staffed by a program, the columnists are characters, and no human reads anything before publication. Every half hour, from 6 am to 11 pm, the same scene plays out. Of a hundred piles, five or six become a dispatch.
The clippings reader
Every half hour, the clippings reader opens the papers
From 6 am to 11 pm, he reads what RTBF, DH, La Libre, L’Avenir, L’Équipe, DirectVelo, Velo 101, Sporza, HLN, Het Nieuwsblad, WielerFlits, Cyclingnews and Belgian Cycling have published since his last coffee: headlines, summaries, links. He knocks under his real name and never goes in where he has been told not to.
The clippings reader
The sorting, on the corner of the desk
A Ronde Sunday has arrived from twenty directions at once, and an August transfer from thirty. He makes piles: one event, one pile. Several hundred piles a week in spring, fewer in November. Most of them will never move again.
The copy editor
The laugh test
He takes each pile and asks himself one question: is there anything in it? A score from 0 to 10 and a house mechanism: the absurdity of the rituals, Belgian self-mockery, the view from the roadside, the liturgy of marginal gains. Below 6, the pile goes to recycling. Crash, health, doping, bereavement, private life, betting: red light, he closes the pile. A stage profile is never a subject; neither is a list of favourites; nor a rumour, unless the soap opera itself is the fact. And he keeps count: no more than two piles on the same person per day, and four to ten dispatches a day depending on the quality of what comes in.
The researcher
The facts, on an index card
For what remains, he opens the articles where the outlet allows it, sticks to the summary elsewhere, and writes the card: who, what, which race, which gap, which exact quotes, which source. That card is law: nothing in the dispatch may say more, and no climbing time gets in unless it is already there. A rumour is written as a rumour, with the outlet carrying it. Two sources that contradict each other? The card waits.
Xavier, Sandrine, Myriam, Rik
Four columnists, three drafts
The card goes to three of the four columnists; those who signed the latest dispatches sit this one out. Each hands in a draft, in their voice, with their tics: a headline in a single movement, 60 to 90 characters, and their reaction, the only invented thing in the whole affair. Xavier compares with his segment, Sandrine looks for the part, Myriam rereads the rulebook, Rik looks behind.
The editor-in-chief
The editor-in-chief decides
He reads the three drafts and scores them on five criteria: funniness, faithfulness to the card, accuracy of the voice, good nature, and the retweet test — could the rider, sports director or team quoted share it with a laugh? A score below 3 and the draft falls. A word that casts doubt on a performance, even as a joke, even to dismiss it: the draft falls too. He keeps the best, or none: the least bad is never published.
The checker
The checker takes out the red pencil
He compares the chosen draft with the card, sentence by sentence. An orphan figure, an approximate quote, a rumour turned into a fact, a headline tic already seen in the last ten dispatches: back to the author, two rewrites at most. A false headline, a jab at someone’s body or weight, private life, a crash, a crowd or a town: the draft goes in the bin, no appeal, and he reads the editor-in-chief’s second draft instead.
The art director and the illustrator
The illustration, one per dispatch
The art director writes the scene that tells the dispatch’s punchline — a commissaire alone with a tape measure at the top of a wall, a whole peloton staring at one bidon — and the illustrator draws it flat, characters included. The riders are drawn figures, never portraits, never a real kit, and nothing is about anyone’s body. On a delicate subject, the scene stays on the bike and the objects. No image, no dispatch: it waits.
The transcreators
The dispatch goes out, in three languages
The dispatch is published with its source at the bottom: “It’s true, we checked”. Within the same half hour it is rewritten in Dutch and English — not translated: the joke is remade in the language, and the koers stays the koers —, each version goes back past the checker, and the three are linked together. Nobody presses a button. A day without a dispatch is a normal day; so is a Monday in November.
Jules, the feed-zone helper
The next morning at 7, the feed zone
Jules walks through yesterday’s feed zone and picks up what was left there: the dispatches published yesterday. He fills musettes with them and hands you three — the best rated by the editor-in-chief, a different columnist each —, right arm out, strap open, with a few lines on why those three, and posts the mail at 7am to whoever left an address. He never writes a dispatch: he fills, he counts, he hands over, he goes back to the van.
The stringer, the copy editor, the researcher, the editor-in-chief, the proofreader, the art director, the illustrator and the transcreators are programs; the columnists are characters, and so is Jules. No human reviews before publication: the editor sets the newsroom up — the bible, the thresholds, the rules — and keeps the power to pull a dispatch. None of this has a desk.