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 Change of Plans

It's been a while that I wrote my last diary entry, and a lot of things have happened.

Last time I was having a small break, so I would be fully well in September for the Vuelta. Well, things don't always go as we want them to go. After the break I still felt unfit, so further changes were made to my schedule. It was not an easy decision for me to stay home from the Vuelta, but I think it was the only thing to do to recover. Instead of the month in Spain I did a few, or should I say a lot of other races. The only difference was that I had recuperation time in between. So I did the GP Merckx, Nurnberg, Midden Zeeland, Paris-Brussels, GP Fourmies, the Franco-Belge and the LUK-cup in Buhl.

Most of those races were normal except for the Franco-Belge. It was supposed to be an easy race for us and the hotel for the whole week was only 60 km from the team's home base in Ghent. I was going to do that race with Julien Stevens, so the day before the first stage we were going to drive the truck over there. When we wanted to leave the team's home base, we saw our truck was blocked by another team truck. Julien moved it and we drove ours out. On the way over to the hotel he said to me he had hurt is arm when he moved the other truck. By the time we arrived he wasn't able to change gears anymore and couldn't lift his arm up. I parked the truck and called one of the soigneurs, he drove Julien to the hospital and there they discovered two tendons were torn. He was operated on the next day, and even now he still isn't able to work again. After a short meeting with Walter (Godefroot) we decided I would do the race as only mechanic, instead of the usual two or three, assisted by our bus driver Tony. It was a tough job due to the bad weather conditions, but Tony did a great job washing the bikes and we got trough the week pretty comfortably.

After a short trip to Buhl, the next big meeting for me was Paris-Tours, my last race of the season. It was one of the most nervous races I did this year, and by nervous I mean fast with lots of crashes. Luckily for us most of them didn't involve our riders. The race didn't turn out as we hoped as there was no bunch sprint for first place. As last year there were a few survivors of an early breakaway, with Zabel finishing third only half a minute down. Nevertheless we were happy Erik won the bunch sprint. It was a good final rehearsal for him for the upcoming world championships.

The day after Paris-Tours I was watching television in the evening when around 22.00pm Rudy Pevenage called me. "Vino just called me," he said, "he asked if you could work for him in the worlds next Sunday. " I was a little surprised, but I accepted gladly.

So the next day I started preparing things and on Friday I drove to the 'hotel' on the address Vino had given me. The team from Kazakhstan was based in a sort of a youth hostel 30 km from Zolder. When I arrived I went to the reception to ask my room number. The girl working there was surprised somebody was coming because she didn't find anything about a reservation for me. She was even more surprised when I told her nine more persons were going to arrive in the next few hours. After a room check we found the solution: the Kazakhstan junior and U23 team had taken all the rooms. Normally there should be four persons to a room, but now there were only two or three in each room. We quickly worked something out so the pros could share rooms.

The team had one mechanic with them, working for the young guys. I took charge over the bikes of the eight elite riders, six pro's and two elites without contract. The day before the race I worked from 8 am till 8 pm as I wanted to deliver the perfect job. At 9.30 pm I finally managed to get the numbers and photo-finish sensors. It's not always easy to work with a delegation where everyone speaks a language you don't understand. Lucky for me most of the pros also speak French, so I could at least speak to someone.

On Sunday I woke up very early because I wanted to be ahead of the big crowds (and traffic jams) that were expected. Everything went well until I took the exit on the highway. It was only a few kilometres to the circuit and the teams had a special 'backdoor entrance', but unfortunately the VIPs also used the same entrance… I made the quick decision to go on the left lane, normally for the cars coming from the opposite direction. It went well for a while, but then I was stopped by the police. I explained everything but it took a lot of time to persuade the officer. He was clearly very strict, but let me pass anyway. After at least five accreditation checks I made it to the circuit, unloaded everything in the designated 'box' and parked the van.

The riders arrived a little later and they seemed to have had the same problem. I guess it's normal on events like that, but I have to say for the rest the organisation was about perfect. The race itself went by very fast for me, 10 laps in the car with a Kazak guy who didn't speak any French or English and the next 10 in the car with a Kazak guy who did speak some English… There's no need to say anything more about the race itself I think. Everybody knows by now who won it and what happened in the race. I can only say the course was far from selective. After 200 km only five riders were out of the race. I think that says enough…

But anyway, I'm happy that I was there and I hope to be present on next year's edition in Canada. The next weeks were easy for me, only a few days work in the team base, cleaning out the trucks and making some preparations for the next season.

Now I can start preparing my move to my new apartment, this means no holiday this year but that doesn't bother me at all. The excitement about my new home makes up for that…

Till next time,
Ken