So while everybody's treating us to some big, testing routes through some glorious cycling terrain, I thought I'd try something less... well... epic. I do have a completed Vuelta to go, but with FTB in the midst of theirs and the real one about to begin, I thought to hold off for a little while on that one. I actually have two or three races ready to go but summoning up the strength for the formalities is a slightly different matter. Anyway, I've had a go at a race I've never done in the thread before, but which has plenty of tradition and possibility that it doesn't always use. It also has, thanks to its new sponsors, a very silly name. That's right... I'm actually doing a
Binck Bank Tour/Eneco Tour/Your Name Here Tour of the Benelux.
One of the issues I've always come up against when trying to design this race has been my determination to crowbar Luxembourg in, since it's right there in the race name but not getting to benefit from any race action. I've got some other ideas regards Luxembourg however, so for now I'm going to keep it moderately realistic and stick to the Netherlands and Belgium, the two countries that have hosted the race since its inception in 2005, as a replacement for the Eneco Tour of the Netherlands in a transparent bid to make the race legitimately tough enough for inclusion in the then brand new Pro Tour. The race was initially settled predominantly against the clock, but an improvement in the calibre of hilly stages especially since the Kapelmuur was removed from its prior position of importance in the Ronde van Vlaanderen and Geraardsbergen thus became an annual host of the Eneco/Binck Bank Tour has helped prevent it from becoming too predictable. However, big cities tend to be off the menu as they're too busy paying the Tour de France to start there every two years, or so it feels, and there's still myriad possibilities that the race doesn't use, and given that these are very traditional cycling countries, I thought I'd have a go at rectifying that.
Part of this will be a reduction in team size to six riders to make controlling the race, even on the flat, more difficult. Oh, and I'm including a GPM, even though "mountains" is an exaggeration for the most part and for much of the race is a pure joke of a suggestion. And I'm using conventional intermediate sprints, because **** the golden kilometre.
Your Name Here Tour of the Benelux
Stage 1: Hoorn - Alkmaar, 229km
In recent years, there has been a tendency in the route of the race towards repetition; I will use some of the race's regular hosts but hopefully a bit better than the current iteration of the race, but also it's been well worth noting that for most recent years the parts of the Netherlands in particular that the race has used have been fairly predictable - mostly Zeeland and Noord-Brabant for some flat stages before a predictably over-easy Limburg stage around Sittard-Geleen. For the most part, the north and centre of the Netherlands have remained fairly uncharted by the race, save for the occasional single-stage excursion, such as 2010's prologue and first stage beginning in Steenwijk and 2016's initial stage around Bolsward. Back in the race's early days, however, the race moved around the Netherlands a bit more, and in 2006 the race had its only visit to Noord-Holland, with an initial Team Time Trial around Den Helder, which was won by Gerolsteiner, before a first stage across into Friesland.
The stage was originally intended to start and finish in Alkmaar, but UCI stage length requirements put paid to that, as though the race opens up with its longest stage, I've tried to keep it realistic-ish. Hence the stage start has moved a few kilometres down the road to Hoorn.
This attractive port town is located on the Markermeer, younger sibling of the slowly-shrinking IJsselmeer, and was once one of the most important Dutch harbours, during the age when the Lowlanders ruled the seas. Eventually with the Golden Age subsiding and the North Sea ports increasing in importance relative to the inward-facing Hoorn, its importance as a port subsided, but it remained an important economic centre for West Friesland, as the region surrounding it and bounded by the North Sea and the IJsselmeer is known. Its most famous son is probably the colonial-era statesman Jan Pieterszoon Coen, but in recent years the footballing brothers Ronald and Frank de Boer, the twins who helped underpin Ajax's most recent golden era and between them amassed nearly 200 caps for the national team, run him close. Cycling-wise, all its most significant history is female; the city is home to two well-known pros of fairly recent history. The first is Adriana "Adrie" Visser (aka A3, derived from A-drie), winner of the 2007 Ronde van Drenthe and a well-established Classics hand with several major teams including DSB, HTC-High Road and Boels-Dolmans as well as a solid track palmarès.
The other rider has a much less common and more evocative name, this being Vera Koedooder, her surname rather glibly translating as "cow killer". Preferring the track to the road, Koedooder has nevertheless had a well-established career lasting 15 years before her recent retirement, spanning several teams, all based in the Benelux except for a short late-career spell with Bigla. Though World titles eluded her, she won several national titles and was always visible with her explosive strength underpinning regular activity in the attacks in Dutch stage races and one dayers.
Of course, let's be honest, there's a bit of wittering on going on here because, well, let's face it, we're racing in the northern Netherlands, so here are a few inevitable facts about the stage:
- it will be flat
- there will be a minimum of 8463 pieces of road furniture.
One of the big things about racing in the Netherlands is, however, the exposure to the wind. Totally flat landscape means that trees, shrubbery and villages are about the only respite from the wind if it does blow, and this waaijer-racing is a key feature of Dutch cycling. If the wind blows today, this stage will be hell. Part of that is because less than 15km in, we dispense with all trees, shrubbery and villages, and instead take the riders into full on echelon trauma, because we're crossing the Houtribdijk, a 26km causeway connecting West Friesland to the province of Flevoland, in the Polders. No shelter in sight.
Of course, when the race's predecessor, the Tour of the Netherlands, held its inaugural edition in 1948, the entire province of Flevoland didn't exist; for the most part the Zuider Zee was converted into the current polders over the ensuing 20 year period. This does mean we have a number of checkpoints in the stage that are below sea level, being as they are on the land reclaimed during this period as we head through the first intermediate sprint in Lelystad. The polders also give their name to the
Poldernederlands dialect, a contested linguistic convention that sees some speakers of Dutch "completing" vowel shifts that the language's near-relations German and English have both undergone at an earlier date. We move from Oostelijk Flevoland into the Noordoostpolder, through planned cities, and the race continues to be very very flat, but at least there is some vegetation and housing to offer temporary respite if the wind is blowing.
We only pass through the newest Dutch province however, and are soon back on Frisian soil - this time in the province of Friesland, rather than on historically Frisian land within another Dutch province. And, whilst on Frisian terrain, we pay tribute to another great Dutch sporting tradition with a nod to that most iconic and yet truly elusive of events, the
Elfstedentocht. Starting and finishing in Leeuwarden, this is a near-200km super-marathon speed-skating event that links, as its name suggests, no fewer than eleven key cities along the Frisian waterways. The Dutch love their speed-skating - indeed several pro cyclists got their starts as speed skaters, especially among the women - and all but one of their Winter Olympic medals (the exception being Nicolien Sauerbreij's snowboarding gold in Vancouver) has been on skates, with 105 out of 110 being in conventional speed skating, 1 more in short track, and 3 in figure skating. When the canals and dijks freeze over, skating competitions proliferate all over the area. Of course, the problem with an event of such marathon proportions as the Elfstedentocht is ensuring reliable ice over such an enormous area as that required, and the low-lying nature of the land in the Netherlands makes periods of sub-zero temperatures long enough to make the competition feasible a comparative rarity. Therefore, no matter how iconic, it is an impossible event to train and prepare for, since if an Elfstedentocht is announced, it is generally contested only a smattering of days afterward, before the ice conditions deteriorate, and many years can pass without a suitable period of weather to make the race viable - indeed it is now 20 years since the last edition of the race, with well over 16000 participants taking on the endurance test to end them all on skates.
(Come on, you knew I'd get some wintersport in somehow!)
Anyway, we pass through three of the eleven cities, these being Hindeloopen, Workum and Bolsward, which hosts an intermediate sprint on the site of the finish of the first stage in 2016, which was
won in an inevitable sprint by Dylan Groenewegen. And then, it's time for our second monster test of endurance against the wind, 32 (!) kilometres of causeway as we cross the Afsluitdijk, the most integral part of the Zuider Zee Works, turning the former salty inland sea into freshwater; the causeway is wider and taller than the Houtribdijk, with slightly better wind protection, separating the Waddenzee (known as de Heef to Frisians) from the IJsselmeer. You know what we're talking here - it's like the Neeltje Jans stage of the 2015 Tour or the Middelburg stage of the 2010 Giro, only more brutal because there's OVER 30KM UNINTERRUPTED of this.
Once we're back in Noord-Holland, there are 56km remaining, so there should definitely be some tired legs out there, if the weather plays ball there will be some riders who are already minutes off the back, it could get all 2016 Tour of Turkey if we're honest, or make the Tour of Qatar look like child's play. However, the direction of the prevailing wind is such that for much of the Afsluitdijk it will be more like a diagonal headwind, so not quite as dramatic as if the riders were being pummelled side-on, but still enough to make this really tough.
The loop around Noord-Holland takes us through Anna Paulowna, named for Willem II's queen consort, and then towards Schoort where the stage's only categorized "climb" (and I use the inverted commas advisedly), Klimduin, takes place. Coming with 11km remaining, this "ascent" has around 300m at 4 to 5% and a bit of false flat, reaching the dizzying altitude of 20m above sea level. There's actually a better climb around here which features a few gradients that might actually test somebody with an eighth of the climbing talent of Kenny van Hummel when faced with a pro péloton, but it's a dead end, so unusable, and really its best use is as a springboard for somebody who isn't a sprinter to take advantage of bonus seconds at the intermediate sprint in Bergen, which has been chosen for one very important reason: Gerrie Knetemann.
Born in Amsterdam, Knetemann's adoptive hometown of Bergen is where he died of a heart attack while out riding at the age of just 53, another great of the 70s leaving us too early. A fearsome racer with a keen eye for the finishing line, Knetemann won 127 races across his fifteen-year career in the 70s and 80s, none more legendary than the World Championships, which he won at the Nürburgring in 1978, pushing Francesco Moser down to 2nd after an attritional seven and a half hour race on the hilly, twisty German race circuit. A strong rouleur with a more than useful sprint, he also won a record number of Tour de France stages for a Dutchman, mostly in stages we'd call "flat to rolling" nowadays, including the Champs-Elysées in 1979 and a near-60km chrono in 1982. He also won the Amstel Gold Race twice, once as one of his first major victories in 1974, and a second in 1985, arguably his
final hurrah. His career, as so many, had been derailed by one terrible crash, for him in the Dwars door België one-day race in the 1983 early season, after which the 32-year-old Knetemann rather faded from past glories. He also won the Ronde van Nederland, which my race is the successor to the successor to, four times, and remains one of the country's most enduring cycling stars.
The Knetemann name lives on in cycling, of course; like many other riders, Gerrie married a fellow cyclist, Gré Donker, and shortly after Gerrie's retirement they had a baby girl, who was called Roxane, and went on to become an established part of the pro péloton, and though she hasn't quite inherited her father's nose for the finishing line, she has become one of the most respected domestiques of women's cycling, after several years being one of the riders of choice to accompany stars like Marianne Vos, Anna van der Breggen, Annemiek van Vleuten and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot to international success, before striking out on her own with FDJ. She's also inherited her father's knack for plain-speaking, and can be relied on for a good quote here and there. Here's an adorable picture of a very young Roxane with her dad - she was 17 when he died.
From here, it's only a fast and flat 7,5km into the finish in Alkmaar (which was, incidentally, Roxane's place of birth, not that that's exactly surprising since the family lived in Bergen and it's the nearest place with a hospital). It's also got a fair bit of cycling heritage outside of the family; it's also the hometown of one of the most surprising World Champions ever, and the last Dutch rainbow jersey before Gerrie Knetemann - Harm Ottenbros, when a strange miscalculation on a pan-flat Zolder circuit saw Ottenbros outsprint Julien Stevens for the shock win.
Other cycling hometown heroes in Alkmaar include former classics hardman turned DS Steven de Jongh, track sprinter turned road wrestler Theo "Big Bos Man" Bos, who demonstrated why match sprinters tend to convert less often to the road than pursuiters due to his struggles with durability; while he was fast enough to contest any sprint he made it to, his top end speed was called on less often than he would have liked and of course his road career is destined to be best known for the time he physically dragged Daryl Impey down after panicking during a bunch sprint in Turkey and making possibly the worst of all decisions available to him in that moment. There's also Kai Reus, a phenomenally talented young rider who also managed to be a magnet for all the bad luck in the sport of cycling for several years, preventing him from ever reaching the kind of heights he had the capabilities of reaching had the stars aligned for him, veteran helper Bram de Groot, and 70s Olympic track rider Gerrit Slot.
Inevitably this should be a sprint after a loop around the outside of the Old Town, to ensure a safe run-in, but the wind will dictate who contests it, so this shouldn't be your usual Eneco/Binck Bank stage 1 with 140 riders on the same time.
make it 210-220kms and we're in heaven 
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