The Tour de France is drawing to a close, and Dutch cyclists and teams have so far failed to put their mark on the great race. Local sports writers have started to look elsewhere for heroic stories, and one of those places is the past. And the one story inevitably to be rediscovered is … dun! dun! … The Day the Grown Men Cried.

A story “from the old box”, as we say. On 5 June 1988, the Giro d’Italia was to climb the Passo di Gavia in the Italian Alps. A somewhat ordinary looking stage on paper, but when the cyclists woke that morning, they heard snow had covered the road at the top.

Dutch cyclist Johan van der Velde broke away from the pack at the start of the climb and was the first to cross the pass. But he paid a price! Just before his breakaway he had given his raincoat and sleaves to a surprised team-mate. Rain had already plagued the cyclists, but now, a few kilometres before the top, a blizzard hit the mountain.

Van der Velde managed to get over the top, but two kilometres into the descent his cold body started shaking uncontrollably and he had to stop for fear of falling off his bike. He never finished the descent on his bike, instead he drove in his team manager’s car to a point three kilometres off the finish, where he got back on and cycled the last bit. Van der Velde eventually lost 47 minutes to the winner, but wasn’t disqualified—the jury understood.

The conditions were so harsh that many cyclists had to stop for cognac, hot tea and massages. It was so cold that two of the former Giro winners cried in pain. The snow froze the cyclists’ hands and clogged up their brakes, turning the descent into a dangerous undertaking.

Only two of the cyclists in front finished the descent without stopping and without help. Andy Hampsten of the USA and Erik Breukink of the Netherlands raced off the mountain as fast as they could towards the finish line in Bormio. A couple of kilometres before the end, Breukink sped past Hampsten (PDF) and won the race by 15 seconds. Hampsten however won the pink jersey, the mark of the race leader, and he wouldn’t let go of it until the end, competing a fierce battle with second place Breukink in the remaining stages. Hampsten became the first American to win the second most prestigious bicycle race in the world.

Breukink admitted that it was only the thought of being in contention (Dutch, Real Media) that kept him on his bike during that brutal descent. Until then, he had had the reputation of being a bit of a softy, but the Gavia Pass win rid him of that moniker forever.

Through some miraculous stroke of luck, none of the cyclists died that day, although Hampsten’s team-mate and countryman Bob Roll suffered from hypothermia and an extremely low heart rate of 27 bpm.

There are very few TV images I can show you of this stage. Like today, the major bicycle races then had extensive TV coverage, shot by cameramen on motorcycles often taking even more risks in slippery descents than the cyclists themselves. The images were supplemented by video shot from helicopters that doubled as flying relay stations. The signal from a motor camera will not travel through mountains, and on that day it was discovered that blizzards have the same effect. The only moving images made of this climb were those of a solitary land-locked camera at the top of the pass.

Watching that video made me realise that in those days you could play another game of Spot the Dutchman. French team La Vie Claire (Bernard Hinault, Greg Lemond) wore jerseys inspired by Piet Mondriaan’s paintings.

(Photo of the Passo di Gavia by Marco Mayer, some rights reserved.)

Amsterdam slid from 25th most expensive city in the world to 29th, according to a recent Mercer study, as Dutch News reports. The one cost with which Amsterdam tops every other major city in the world is parking.

Other Dutch cities did not even make it into the top 50, with Berlin being a ‘cheap’ European capital at 49—is East Berlin dragging that number down? The top three of the Cost of Living list this year are Tokyo, Osaka and Moscow, in that order.

Car owning visitors to Amsterdam* are out of luck though. According to Parool (Dutch), quoting a study by Colliers International, Amsterdam proudly leads the list of most expensive cities in the world when it comes to parking, with a daily rate of 70 USD. The second city on that list, London, only charges around 55 USD a day.

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Everytime I see parents with unprotected small children on their bikes, sometimes two, or when I see small children riding hard and recklessly in traffic without helmets, I cringe. And everytime single time I have brought this up at parties, the Dutch tell me to shut up because they know better and that no one gets hurt since they were all born on bikes.

If that really was the fantasy world we lived in, then handing out 35,000 free helmets to children in Zeeland would be a total waste of money, right? Over the next five years, the Zeeuws Coördinatiepunt Fiets (ZCF) in the province of Zeeland will be doing just that, handing out free bicycle helmets to stop children from getting injured or killed.

Last year, the emergency wards in Zeeland treated 4,000 children up to age 17 for head injuries. On an annual basis, 10 to 15 children under age 13 die in traffic riding bikes. About 20,000 children between age 0 and 12 get treated in hospitals as a result of a traffic acccident.

Imagine your cute kid dying because you think no one gets hurt on bikes. Blame all the cars? Write off Zeeland as a ‘different’ part of the country?

And then, the best argument of them all: snowboarders and mountainbikers use cool, hip helmets, what’s wrong with doing so on your bike? It’s not ‘tradition’? The statistics are wrong? Kids just don’t really get hurt?

Bravo Zeeland!

(Link: ad.nl, Photo: holcus.nl)

No news this weekend about the record attempts of Edwin van der Sar, the Dutch keeper playing for Manchester United who hasn’t conceded a goal for more than 1,300 hours. There’s nothing to report, because Van der Sar was rested during yesterday’s league game. His replacement promptly let a ball past, so that if Van der Sar keeps his net clean for at least one more minute he no longer has to share his league record with the rest of his defense.

The Flyswatter bridge we wrote about has been getting quite some attention in the blogosphere. Popular Mechanics talked a bit longer with architect Van Driel than we did and discovered some more flyswatter bridges in the Netherlands and France. But why, when mentioning in passing Dutch bicycle paths, do they link to a website about biking in Copenhagen?

Speaking of bikes in the Netherlands: people from Amsterdam use their bicycles more often than their cars. Worldchanging.com reports:

Between 2005 and 2007, Amsterdam residents rode their bicycle 0.87 times a day on average, compared to 0.84 trips by car. It was the first time on record that average bike trips surpassed cars, the research group FietsBeraad reported last month.

The ‘box of pixels’ at the top of this posting is not the lazy work of a photoshopper, but an actual office building made in 2007 by Dutch-Austrian architects Splitterwerk, and forms the headquarters for a firm called Prisma Engineering in Graz, Austria. Link: Bright.nl.

In 2008, according to figures published in Dutch daily De Telegraaf from the RAI association, about 120,000 electric bicycles were sold, which is almost 10% of the total amount of new bicycles sold. Also last year, the amount of bicycles sold were the same as in 2007, about 1,4 million. Owing to the popularity of the expensive electric bikes, the turnover rose and bikes in general have gotten more expensive.

Electric bicycles used to be sold to the elderly only, but apparently buzzing around town is not just for them. I for one want proof of this, as I do not know anyone with an electrical bike. I automatically associate electric bikes with the elderly, but then the trend of driving electric cars meant for the disabled sometimes has the male youth in my neighbourhood doing top speed.

(Link: telegraaf.nl, photo: fietsen.web-log.nl)

The Olympic athletes arrived home today, and they were given a warm welcome at the 1928 Olympic stadium in Amsterdam. I live right around the corner, and decided to take my crummy old digital camera there. As luck would have it, the organizers had decided that the athletes would enter through the front gate, where there is ample opportunity for non-accredited press (i.e. l’il ole me) to climb onto flowerbeds and the pedestals of pompous statues.

Below you see Anky van Grunsven (gold, dressage) being interviewed by famous sports presenter Tom Egberts. It was very hard to get a photo of her not grinning like a maniac, but here she had to be serious for a moment. She was one of the first there, and being a gold medal winner had to wait until the end to enter the stadium, and she was all smiles all the time.

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As any European can tell you, nothing says “Dutch” more than caravans … except bicycles. And so it was bound to happen that somebody would try and combine the two. That somebody was design agency Reggs’ Thijs Bouman, whose Fietscaravan reached the final round of design competition Het Beste Idee van Nederland last year. Two of these trailers can be connected to form a double bed. For something so small this looks mighty comfortable to me, although I could use some pockets for books and a reading light at the head end.

You can view this trailer and many, many modern bikes at the Designhuis exhibition Fiets, from June 22 to October 5 in Eindhoven. Via Trendhunter, which has also got photos of the bicycle roller coaster that anybody can try at the exhibition.

Photo by Designhuis / Patrick Meis. See also this Youtube video of the bicycle travel trailer.

I came across a 1908 illustrated magazine yesterday at a second hand store. It opened with an article about the festivities surrounding the 25th anniversary of the Dutch automobile association ANWB (Dutch), then just a bicycle riders’ union. Part of these festivities was an exposition of both old bicycles and the very newest ones. Displayed here is the folding bike (second photo) of captain Van Wagtendonk, with his newly invented folding bike stand. Or, as the magazine writes it:

A steel rod which under ordinary circumstances is attached next to the frame, but which is lowered when the bicycle is parked. This way the bicycle can be parked freely, resting on this rod as a third leg. In order to prevent the wobbling or even keeling over of the front wheel, the lowering of the rod also causes a small metal brace to be released which locks the front wheel into place and protects the bicycle from falling over.

I’ve been scanning the magazine while typing this, and will upload it to the Internet Archive either today or tomorrow. Expect ads for oriental breast enlargement pills and Swan fountain pens. Has anything actually changed in the last hundred years?

Update: scans of the magazine Het Geïllustreerde Leven can be found at www.archive.org/details/het_leven_3_30.

A proposal for a temporary solution for an ill lit, scary little bicycle tunnel in Zoetermeer, until the city would have the time to fix it for real. Artist Supergoed (super good) suggested that people go through it as quickly as possible. Hence the race track feel. Both entrances have the word “Start” over them.

Via Trendbeheer (Dutch).

On Saturday 7 June, Utrecht will play host to the World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR) to ‘attract some attention’ to the environment and our bodies by biking around naked. Utrecht was chosen since on the same day there will be a concert entitled ‘Geen halve maatregelen, Klimaatwet nu!’ (roughly ‘No half measures, an environmental law now!’) with performances by De Dijk and Stevie.

Besides Utrecht, more than 15 cities in 20 countries around the world will have people demonstrating for a more positive attitude towards our bodies and the environment. “But no one has to go naked”, according to the WNBR.

And now my two cents: besides posing for Spencer Tunick) or some church calendar, many naked events tend to attract white, middle aged heterosexual men, like at the naked fitness (not really mentioned, but on Dutch TV not a single other type of person could be seen). And if the white, middle aged heterosexual men are not in the event, they are the ones gawking on the sidelines. It’s just an observation, folks. If anyone qualified has a real explanation, I’m very interested.

(Link: frontpage.fok.nl, photo treehugger,com)