« You two sit down. I’m only the first reserve, aren’t I? », Remco Evenepoel said, according to Sporza. He is the world time-trial champion and can take a fourth consecutive world title in the discipline.
Television shows the table, the microphones and the people sitting down. It never shows who counted the chairs, or the moment when somebody in a corridor worked out that there would be three of them.
Two chairs, three riders, that’s arithmetic I know. In the club car it’s the same: there is always one seat fewer than there are people getting in, and nobody makes a drama of it, we squeeze up. At the front, I couldn’t tell you. At the back, I can tell you there is always someone counting the seats before we leave, and that’s the bloke who holds the Sunday together.
The setting is nothing like a hotel. After the Grand Prix de Montréal, a large part of the Belgian selection moved to Bromont, a ski resort about 80 kilometres from Montreal. The federation reckoned that spending two weeks each in your own hotel room was no good for the mood of the group. Evenepoel, Tiesj Benoot, Quinten Hermans, Alec Segaert, Maxim Van Gils and Rune Herregodts are staying in three big chalets, with a cook, a soigneur and an osteopath among the staff.
« It’s nice to be all together in a house, rather than in a hotel. It’s nice to build a bond », Alec Segaert said to Sporza.
The rulebook provides for a start order and a time limit. It does not provide for a number of chairs. I note the arrangement, I do not comment on it.
What Rik remembers is the group’s curfew: no playing after eleven at night. A house, a table, a game of Risk nobody had time to finish, someone putting the box away, and the coffee the next morning. That never makes it on screen, and yet that is where a week of racing holds together.
It’s true, we checked: Sporza.
