As the 100th Tour of Flanders nears, Rupert Guinness turns back the clock to reflect on the impact of his first day following the race in 1987 as a wide eyed arrival on the European scene when coverage like what we receive today would have been a pipe dream
It is April 5, 1987. Allan Peiper sits down to explain how the Tour of Flanders just unfolded.
I have little comprehension. It was the first staging of the great Classic that I have seen, let alone followed as a journalist. Suffice to say, my only knowledge of it is due the features I read and photographs of the race that I look at over and over in the cycling magazine Winning Bicycle Illustrated that lands on Australian news stands six months after the race.
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After following 7 hours 15 minutes 30 seconds of racing in a media car over a trail of cobbled 'bergs' on narrow farm roads littered with sharp lefts and rights and lined with a cycling crazed crowd like none I had ever seen, my mind is simply awash with confusion.
I am a long, long away from the grassy knoll and a handful of spectators at the finish line to the 1984 Victorian road championships back in Australia – the first road race I have covered.
Peiper's offer to talk of the Tour of Flanders – locally named the 'Ronde van Vlaanderen', or 'De Ronde' – is a blessing, especially considering that I have just taken up the editorship of Winning's English edition published in nearby Brussels and face the task of putting together the magazine's next coverage of the great classic. But Peiper's is no ordinary race account.
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