Revisiting The Lionel of Flanders

by Matilda Price

Photography by Simon Gill

We have re-released Lionel’s 2017 Friends Special The Lionel of Flanders, a five-part series centred around the races that form the run-up to the Tour of Flanders. Lionel and photographer Simon Gill spent five days in Flanders exploring the history and culture of the region and the three races Dwars door Vlaanderen, E3 Harelbeke, and Gent-Wevelgem. Four years later, Lionel reflects on making the series.

“I remember it very fondly. I remember the week really well. I liked what we did and that sense of being out there with a handful of ideas and trying to bring as many of them to realisation as I could.”

“It was an attempt to have a short travelogue almost,” Lionel says on the style of the series, which lets the listener join Lionel and Simon on their own tour of Flanders. “I wanted to make something that people might be able to go over and replicate. Pick a hotel or a base for the week and go and watch those three races.”

In Flanders and the surrounding regions, there’s certainly no shortage or races to see or stories to discover, the good and the bad.

“You’d be going along the road or following a cycle track and it would be named after a rider and you wonder why, and then you realise that his hometown is the next town. All of these thing you’re kind of conscious of, but it’s not until you slow down a bit by going on a bike and actually look round and keep your eyes open that you notice them. That’s what I was doing a bit more, I was just looking out for anything that I could think about and talk about.

“The day we went to Roubaix, it was like, ‘well, we're going to ride across the border from Belgium to France, where was the Festina car stopped? That rings a bell, it was somewhere around here’. So I looked it up, and then we took a small detour to go across the border on that exact bit of road. It's just another little five-minute story, that’s sort of the yin and yang of cycling.”

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Whilst Lionel and Simon didn’t cycle everywhere, out of practicality, Lionel points out that they certainly could have – Flanders’ wealth of history is packed into a surprisingly small area.

“Right from the very beginning, when I first went to the region in spring ‘99, what I hadn't realised was just how close and interconnected everything is. I went to Het Volk as it was then, and I knew from reading magazines that it goes up the same climbs, as the Tour of Flanders, maybe in a slightly different order, but I had no geographic awareness of the place.

“You come off the Paterberg and realise that the main road takes you either back to the Koppenberg or over towards the Kwaremont. So you could go and see the three races and the footprints of them all are very similar. They really are this mass of cycling history - on every road, every corner, it's all there in a really accessible place. And I tried to demonstrate that by going and doing it.”

“We’re not uncovering new stuff that no one knows,” Lionel says of the series’ content – it’s a challenge to find a new story in a region as written-about as Flanders – but the audio format brings a sense of immersion as you hear the sounds of the startline, the echos in the showers of the Roubaix velodrome, or the hubbub of a Belgian bar.

“Four years ago, I think it was probably only the second or third thing like this I’d attempted to do. So I was just kind of seeing what would work in audio and then handing it over to the producers. And they did a fantastic job, Tom Whalley and Paul Scoins, in coming up with a style to it which was a natural reflection of the stuff that we’d recorded.”

Unlike some Friends Specials and audio documentaries, which may be put together over a number of days and weeks, the Lionel of Flanders was released in real-time, with each day’s report coming out the following morning.

“I did the recording, I set the agenda every day. I wrote a little, ‘this is what I'm planning today’, or when I was sending the audio over to the producer, I'd write a little running order of what I wanted, and stuff to just to avoid. But they were the people putting it together that night, so that it would be out the following morning. And obviously, it's a lot more intricate and complex than a regular episode, where we're just recording 15 minutes of one thing, and then move on to another 15 minutes and they're stitching it all together. That in itself is challenging enough in real time. But to put this together pretty much in an evening, so it'd be ready to go out in the morning – it was a production job as much as anything, and they did an incredible job.”

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When listening to Lionel’s week in Belgium and the stories of how cycling is woven into the culture, it’s hard not to lament the fact there won’t be crowds of fans lining the routes of this year’s races. No wall of noise on the Kwaremont, no packed bars selling thousands of pints of beer, no crowd in Oudenaarde welcoming the Flanders winner: “It robs it of that atmosphere.”

“It definitely makes you realise that these races are part of the culture. They’re not just sporting events that happen every year. All of these races, they sweep people up in the excitement. With the Van der Poel and Van Aert rivalry, I just hope that next year, we get a normal year. That’s the sort of thing where you could be talking about this era as being up there with the big Belgian’s going head-to-head in the 70s.”

After covering the classics for over two decades, is Lionel now a Flanders expert? Perhaps in some ways – “I’m an outsider, but I like to pretend that I’m part of it. I’m ordering the right beer, I’m in the right café, I know the right bit of road,” – but there’s still an abundance of history and culture to discover and absorb.

“I suppose, in a way, it was a result of having been over there 20 years, back and forth every spring. But I don’t feel like I’ve cracked it and now I know everything, because if you go to the region, and just have a look around, you realise that there’s so many places that have a connection to cycling in some way or other.”

“It’s an incredible place. I can’t think of an equivalent in cycling, where there’s just so much sense of history of the sport that’s being added to year on year.”

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Four years on, though the race order may have changed slightly, the episodes are as relevant as ever, and Lionel reflects positively on making them.

“I’ve been writing the words for the mailshot that’s going out and just reminding myself what’s in each of the episodes, and thinking, I really enjoyed doing it.

“I suppose if there’s one regret, it’s that I can’t do it again. How can I engineer another five-day trip to travel around Belgium?”

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