Enjoying the sunshine at the Tour of Qatar Photo: © Ken Ilegems

The Ken Ilegems Diary

Telekom mechanic Ken Ilegems provides an occasional look behind the scenes into the mechanic's truck at the races.

Index to Ken Ilegems diary entries

A hard week

Setmana Catalana

After the tours of Valencia and Murcia, and the GP Breukink, I had a few days off, so I was fresh and ready to go to the Setmana Catalana.

Julien Stevens (the other mechanic for this race) and I left home on Saturday morning. It was the day of Milan-San Remo, so we were a bit excited about what was going to come later that day. Everything went well for the first hours and we planned to arrive in our hotel in Lloret around 9pm. And then our luck started to turn. First there was a message about the bad crash from Schaffrath, and a little later came the news that Cipo had won and about the same time we ended up in a traffic jam for 15km.

An hour later we were on our way again, a little disappointed, but we knew it would get harder every year for Telekom and our man Erik (Zabel) to keep on winning the Primavera.

A few kilometres further on, people in passing cars started waving at us, trying to tell us we had a flat tire. We stopped to check it out, and one of the back tires on the inner side was totally gone. We didn't feel it before because of the hard wind in the south of France that day and there was still the tire on the outside that was ok.

We started working to change the tire, but after about 15 minutes we realized that it was no use to try it ourselves. The nuts were so tight that we couldn't get them loose. So we put everything back in the truck and drove very slowly to the next gas station on the highway. Some truck drivers who were parked came to help us, but none of them could get the nuts loose, so we decided to call the 24 hours road service.

One of the team cars was still behind us, so we called Bart (soigneur) to ask if he could stop at the parking area where we were waiting. When he arrived he was totally upset because his son had been admitted to a hospital in critical condition. We decided it was better that he return to Belgium immediately and after some back and forward calling we figured out a plan. The team that was coming back from Milan-San Remo could take him home, so we only had to take Bart 100km back north where we could meet them. I drove him back, talked a little with the guys there to tell them about our problem and drove back to our truck. When I arrived it was still standing there in the same condition as I left it two hours before.

After five hours waiting road service showed up. The truck mechanic tried and tried and after a while he managed to get seven nuts loose but two were still tight. He told us it was no use trying and that the truck had to go to a garage for repair. Unfortunately the next day was a Sunday and the garage was closed. We put everything back inside (again) and drove very slowly (again) to a hotel in Nimes. We arrived about 3am.

The next day I loaded the car with as much material as possible and drove to our hotel in Lloret. Julien stayed with the truck back in France. I took the race bikes and eight pairs of wheels. Just enough to start the race with on Monday in case we didn't get the rest here in time.

When I arrived, the mechanics from the CSC team immediately offered their help, so I had everything that I needed. Our soigneurs were also helped by CSC, so we were saved for a while. Late in the evening Julien arrived with a rental truck with our spare bikes, TT bikes and spare wheels. He had to go back the next morning to take our truck to the garage.

That evening we went out for a drink with the CSC staff. The least we could do was buy them a beer for their assistance.

Monday was the first race day. Except that there was no truck standing in front of the hotel, nobody could tell there was something wrong. Everything worked out very well, and Erik took the victory.

Julien called to say that the truck was going to be ready around Tuesday noon. So again I washed our bikes with the cleaning stuff from our Danish friends and parked them inside their truck. The race clothes were washed in their washing-machine as well.

We even started joking about it, saying that the next race we were gonna come without a truck and that we just would continue using their truck since working with them was so great.

On Tuesday there were two stages, a short one of about 110 km and a TT. Erik won his second stage in the morning after a nice piece of work from the whole team. After the finish bad luck struck again: our camper broke down. There were only two and a half hours between the two stages, so I decided to stay with the CSC team to prepare our TT bikes and clean the other bikes. The rest of the team went to our hotel a few kilometres away and came back for the start of the TT. After a very busy afternoon I got a phone call from Julien: he had finally arrived in our hotel with the truck. We moved all the bikes back to our own truck and hoped this would be the end of the misery. Our camper was also fixed later that evening, so stage three we would be back in full force.

Wednesday, finally back to the normal system. It was a mountain-stage in very cold and bad weather: -2°C and snow on top of the mountain. Giuseppe Guerini won -- our third victory in three days!

Thursday and Friday were normal days, no more victories, no more car trouble, just some bad weather that we didn't expect to get here in Spain at this time of the year.

What started as a very bad tour for us turned out to a very successful one with three stage wins, a second place in the GC, a win in the points classification and the combined classification.

Thanks to our friends from CSC (Craig, Johnny, Alex, Sandra and Jozef). I don't know what we would have done without your help.