Luca Vierstraete is twenty, she comes from Heule, and she has just finished on the podium of the under-23 time trial at the Worlds in Montreal. “Unexpected, this,” she told Het Laatste Nieuws. “Secretly I was hoping for it anyway. But it really is unbelievable.”
Before the bike there was ballet, then tennis. Tennis ended on a question: “But at a certain point they asked me whether I was hitting past the ball on purpose,” she told Het Laatste Nieuws. She started cycling at twelve, out of boredom, tired of standing around watching her brother Maxim’s races go by. Her first bike cost seven hundred euros.
Roadside boredom, I know it by heart. You plant yourself on a corner, you wait, it goes past in eight seconds, and then you wait another twenty minutes for it to come round again. Me, after twice I go home and get the bike out of the garage. She did the same, except she came back with a medal.
Ivo Lins, her very first coach, spotted that she could ride against the clock and found her her first time-trial bike. She now rides for AG Insurance Soudal U23, Jürgen Foré’s team, where they call her the “Young TT Engine”. In Montreal she was only ninth at the first check before moving up to a virtual third at the second. National selector Ludwig Willems told Het Laatste Nieuws that she had lost a lot of time in the corners, something she accepts as a thing to work on.
Corners are my chapter. I’ve got a time of my own, from the Lasne sign to the wood, and I lose the lot at the roundabout in the middle: I brake like a man going out for bread. Take off the roundabout, take off the backpack, take off the coffee afterwards, and we’ve got a time we can talk about. I’m not saying I get a podium in Montreal. I’m saying the corners chapter, we all have it.
She rides the track too, where Willems sees her as one of the engines of the team pursuit, and she is aiming at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028. “I dream of becoming world champion myself one day,” she told Het Laatste Nieuws. “This is the first step towards the top.”
At the café the argument ran till noon: how much time you really lose in a roundabout, and who in the club brakes even earlier than Xavier.
It’s true, we checked: Het Laatste Nieuws.
