Pezcyclingnews: Ed’s Belgian Weekend

Belgium, or more precisely Flanders, in the third weekend in November is the place to be, a mecca for winter cycling fans. With the Gent ‘6 Day’ and two top cyclo-cross races it’s the centre of the universe. Ed Hood is usually working in the bowels of the velodrome, but this year he was there just for the fun.In theory, with 15 minutes to go in the final madison of the Six Days of Gent, there were three possible winning teams: Vergaerde/De Buyst, Van Hoecke/De Ketele and. . . Keisse/Mrkv.But in reality there was only ever going to be one winner of this race; ‘King Keisse of Kuipke’ backed by the only man who can match Gentenaar flyer Iljo for smoothness, Copenhagen’s Prince of Denmark, MichaelMrkv.The flying pair took a late lap to seal it and the crowd went home happy; we’d have preferred it to go down to the last sprint – it makes for a better show – but knowing Michael as we do he’d want to be sure of the win, you just can’t trust those Belgies in a sprint. . .Iljo took his sixth Gent Six Day win to go fourth in the overall list of winners behind Patrick Sercu on 11, Etienne De Wilde on nine and Danny Clark on seven.We’d arrived on Saturday morning, into Amsterdam airport, picked up our hire car and headed for Hasselt in Belgium and once the venue for a short lived six day race – and the Category 1...

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