Jan van den Berg

j11g.com

Tag: cycling

  • Thomas Dekker: The Descent (Mijn Gevecht) – Thijs Zonneveld

    I finished this book in one sitting. Partly because Zonneveld has a pleasant writing style. But also because the rather recent story of a hugely talented and (very) young cyclist who early on in his career got involved with dope and raced towards destruction is fascinating.

    Thomas Dekker: The Descent (Mijn Gevecht) – Thijs Zonneveld (2016) – 220 pages

    It’s the (auto)biography of Thomas Dekker but it is just as much the biography of the cycling world in the early 2000s. And this world, as we now know, was rotten to the core. This book helped uncover parts of it when it came out in 2016. And many more books about this subject have come out since and around that time.

    The book is telling and doesn’t hold back, for anything of anyone. Even Dekker himself doesn’t come across as a particular likeable character. Arrogant, cocky, egotistical and self-destructive to a fault. A very bright star who burned out VERY quickly.

    He only did one Tour de France and his actual relevant career was only a few short years. The book came out three years ago, and even this year’s Tour de France will have riders older than Dekker is at the moment. So there is a sense of what could have been.

    One important takeaway is the notion that using dope is a gradual (non-conscious) thing. Driven by ego and desire to win. But even more important is the notion that there is no such thing as a casual doper. You either dope or you don’t.

    As a cycling enthusiast it’s not necessarily what you want to read. But it is what it is.

  • The Fall (De Val) – Matthias M.R. Declercq

    Matthias M.R. Declercq pulled of two remarkable things. Not only did he manage to find this extraordinary story about friendship, ambition and sacrifice, he was also able to write it down in exceptional fashion.

    De Val – Matthias M.R. Declercq (2017) – 296 paginas

    The events described in ‘The Fall’ (‘De Val’) are real, but the book is not necessarily a biography. The story revolves around a group of five Belgian riders (flandriens) who are pretty well known in the cycling circuit. Some are even minor celebrities. Their lives and events — and especially the fall — are pretty well known and in some cases were front page news. As a writer you could easily overlook these stories because they were already so heavily documented.

    But Declercq shows to have a keen eye for the story behind a story, and he was able to look past known facts and look for a deeper, collective connection between these five riders. And from their humble shared beginnings, Declercq takes the reader on a journey for each individual rider.

    He does so with finesse. There is a dignified distance in his writing style (like a reporter) and this strikes the right tone of being an interested witness rather than a thrill seeker (the latter being the fate of many sport books of recent years). By doing so we get to hear the human perspective behind the stories. All these riders have lives, parents, wives, children and they sacrifice a lot. Which might be easy to forget when watching the Giro.

    The fact that the often dramatic and heroic sport of cycling is a central subject, of course helps the book, but it is mostly Declercqs’ writing that make this book stand out. I love cycling and I love good books by good writers. This book has both.