Time to Fire Up The Belgium Block Is Here

There is a point in every season when the sport seems to collectively exhale, look north, and accept its fate. The sunshine of Australia is gone, the early European races have served their purpose, and suddenly all roads lead to Belgium. It is the only place in the world where cycling is not just a sport but a cultural heartbeat, a national obsession. Cycling is the number one sport in the country and locals feel like they are the epicentre of the cycling world. Back in the old GreenEDGE days, Belgium season meant settling into Hotel Lepelbed for three weeks and embracing everything that came with it. It became our home, our base camp, and our crash course in cobbles, culture, and calorie dense survival strategies.

The Lapelbed courtyard. I've probably drunk 1000 duvel's here.

Don't be fooled, Lepelbed wasn't 5 stars, but it was cosy, friendly and we were the only team staying there. When you spend around 150 days on the road that does make a huge difference as a lot of the time you're sharing hotels with other teams. And if you've had a rough day at the office, sometimes having to mix with 'the other mobs' can be a pain in the ass.

Life at Lepelbed had its own rhythm. You quickly learned that the holy trinity of Belgian sustenance consisted of Duvel, double fried chips, and Speculoos. Duvel tasted like a gift from the gods but hit like a sledgehammer. (Each beer was 8.5% alcohol content.) The chips were cooked twice because once simply does not cut it in Flanders. And Speculoos, which Australians now call Biscoff as if they invented it, became the unofficial team spread. On average I could easily stack on 4kg from the Belgium block. The Belgium fuel kept us going through long days, cold mornings, and the kind of wind that could peel the skin off your face. Belgium in March is a wind tunnel with pubs, and honestly, that combination suited us just fine.

But the real magic of Lepelbed came from the people. Our Sports Director, Laurenzo Lapage, happened to be best mates with Eddy Merckx, which meant that every so often the greatest cyclist of all time would casually wander into the hotel, grab a Duvel, and start telling stories like he was holding court at a family barbecue. I even convinced him to voice an intro for a Backstage Pass at the Tour of Flanders. There I was, editing away, and suddenly Eddy Merckx was doing my cold open. Only in Belgium.

Back in 2012, Belgium also served as the baptism of fire for a young Luke Durbridge, who made his professional debut at the Three Days of De Panne. It was the kind of introduction to the WorldTour that felt like throwing a toddler into the deep end without floaties. By the time he reached day three, after being rattled through tiny cobbled streets and spat out the back more times than he cared to count, he looked absolutely shell shocked. I honestly thought he might rack it right then and there. But like every rider who survives their first Belgian beating, he came out the other side tougher, wiser, and with a new respect for the madness of racing in this part of the world.

The season that really changed things for me was 2014. We were on the bus, the tension of Flanders week hanging in the air, when Matt Wilson turned to me and said, completely straight faced, that the videos were getting a bit stale. Same format, same rhythm, time to shake things up. I cracked it at the time, but looking back it was the best thing that could have happened. That moment pushed me to evolve the Backstage Pass into something more cinematic and emotional. I started creating directors cuts, proper doco style pieces that captured the chaos, the heart, and the sheer madness of the biggest races. That Flanders episode still sits near the top of the pile for me.

Belgian fans were another revelation. I had seen passionate supporters before, but nothing prepared me for the way Belgians engage with the sport. They would line the starting area for hours, not to scream for riders or chase autographs, but to stare at the bikes on the roof of the team cars. Not the riders. The bikes. That was the moment I realised that in Belgium, cycling is not entertainment. It is a lifestyle with carbon wheels.

There was also one particular character who became a personal favourite of mine, a bloke who would appear at races dressed in the full retro Eddy Merckx Molteni kit and sprint the finale like he genuinely believed he was Eddy himself. I remember sitting in the team car one afternoon and spotting him tearing down the road in this bright orange throwback gear, and I was laughing so hard I could barely speak when I asked Laurenzo who on earth this bloke was. Laurenzo just nodded like it was the most normal thing in the world and explained that he was famous in Belgium because he had been doing it for about thirty years, and the wildest part was that he even looked a bit like Eddy. The story went that Eddy was not exactly thrilled about the whole situation, because this guy’s devotion had drifted from enthusiastic into the kind of obsessive territory you would expect to find in a Stephen King novel. Only in Belgium could someone become a cult figure by pretending to be the greatest cyclist of all time and committing to the bit with that level of intensity.

And then there were our staff, the unsung heroes who could navigate Belgium with the precision of fighter pilots. I would sit there with Google Maps open, thinking I was being helpful, and they would simply shake their heads and take a series of back roads that looked like goat tracks but somehow delivered us to the perfect spot every time. Belgium is a maze, and our staff were the ones who knew every twist and turn by heart.

Belgium season is where the sport becomes real. The weather turns feral, the crowds become biblical, and the races transform into survival tests disguised as bike rides. It is where legends are made, where hearts are broken, and where every rider discovers what they are truly made of.

The next few weeks in Belgium are stacked with the races that define the spring. This is the stretch where the sport tightens, the roads narrow, and every rider starts to feel the weight of history on their shoulders. It's begun with the always brutal E3 Saxo Classic in Harelbeke and rolled straight into Gent Wevelgem two days later, then pushes on to the midweek knife fight that is Dwars door Vlaanderen. But the Super Bowl is clearly the Tour of Flanders. And just when you think the peloton has had enough, the sprinters get their day at Scheldeprijs before the whole block ends with the most iconic torture chamber in cycling, Paris-Roubaix. It is the purest run of racing on the calendar, and it is all coming at us fast.

Watch the Flanders 'Directors Cut' here