'Faith and Chips' by Tim Krabbe

As I waited for the starting shot of my very first race in the Netherlands I noticed a rider eating a packet of chips. It was Koninginnedag – the Queen’s birthday – and there, in Raalte, it was literally a kermis, a fair, with shooting galleries, carousels and, by the start, a frites stall.

Nervous as I was, I didn’t immediately appreciate the significance of that gesture. I was shocked. For months I had closely followed all the prescriptions of my new life: no ice creams, no vegetable fats, no alcohol, no 45 per cent fat Camembert - though 35 per cent was OK. I had assumed that every rider did the same. What I saw there, on my first acquaintance with the group to which I wanted to belong, was forbidden on three counts: the frying fat, the mayonnaise and the time.

Later I was to discover that riders enjoy breaking their so-called codes. The changing rooms were always buzzing with tales of debauchery. Somebody had spent the previous night partying to four, somebody else was a practicing wine connoisseur, after the race, a third would ask you for a light for his cigarette, especially if he’d ridden well.

You find the same thing in cycling literature. The day before his first professional road race, the 1969 Omloop Het Volk, Roger de Vlaeminck spent the afternoon swimming. As everybody knows, swimming and cycling are like fire and water – which is precisely why he told everybody when he won.

There are as many regulations about nutrition as superstitions. I’ve lost count of the number of riders I’ve met in France who would have been totally helpless without their sticks of quince confit in the back pockets of their jerseys. Knetemann recommended yogi-drink mixed with crushed Liga toddler biscuits to me personally, and Anquetil had to have a bidon with champagne 50 kilometers before the end of absolutely every race.

Riders will believe anything. For a while there was a rumour going around that a dose of sperm did the business. I never saw anybody putting it into practice. There was probably a demand for donors, which would have brought an extra dimension to the duties of the domestique.

The promising amateur Jimmy K. once told me how, before the Dutch championship of 1975, he had tried a totally new miracle drug, and swallowed forty sugar cubes sprinkled with eau de cologne. But he’d obviously misunderstood something, or somebody was just playing him for a fool, because he never even made it from the changing room to the starting line, and then he was seriously ill for two weeks after. There’s one born every minute.

Last week there was a symposium on `Sport and Nutrition’. My contribution would have been that eight years of cycle racing is long enough to hear at least once that every type of food is vital for a good result. Apart from chips. Ruud Bakkers, the soigneur of the Raleigh team, revealed that instead of anabolic steroids you could just as well take cream cakes. This immediately made me think of the glory days of the Amsterdam `Molenploeg’, an age old training ride which dated from before the War. Anybody could join the ride until they were dropped: in the winter there would be a peleton of some sixty riders including every name in the area. In the early 1970s they would always make a stop at a cafeteria in Bentveld , and to my amazement dozens of `bear-claws' (chocolate mounds squirted full of whipped cream) would pass openly over the counter.

Some riders would take two. I asked them if they knew how unhealthy these were? It soon transpired that they were like the babies in a well-known experiment, who were offered a wide variety of foods at each meal. Quite soon they learned to choose the right things; not what they liked, but what they needed and in the right quantities to boot. With their bear-claws my training mates were thus anabolic avant la lettre.

The only world-class sportsman at the symposium, Gerard Nijboer, said that moderation was the key, even when the food taken in moderation was itself less than sensible. He hit the nail on the head. A long time ago I interviewed the swimming coach Wil van Breukelen. I used her expression `Girls with painted fingernails never win’ as my headline. At that time I didn’t practice any sport, and thought her observation amusing. When I did, I realised she was right. The painted nails betray interests beyond sport – the worst thing that can happen to any sportsman or woman. The abiltiy to relativise is the mortal enemy of sport.

The secret is that it also works the other way. If a girl was actually prepared to believe Wil van Breukelen when she said painting one's nails would jeopardise her chances, then that would actually increase her likelihood of winning. If you are convinced that you must eat a bear-claw to become a better rider, it will help. But if you're convinced that you should avoid them that will help too. It's a question of faith. The rider with the chips didn't believe in anything. He was just showing off, he was pointing out the relativity of all our foolish rules about nutrition. Consequently, he'd already ruled himself out of contention.

Translation: Niall Martin, 2000.