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Sport, Work and the Professional Cyclist in Belgium, 1907–40

In 1905 the Belgian cyclist Cyrille Van Hauwaert began to compete in the prestigious French road races of the period. Although his performance was at first disappointing, he managed to surprise cycling enthusiasts in both France and Belgium by finishing second in the 1907 Paris–Roubaix race. He went on to win that year’s Bordeaux–Paris race (Fig. 1) and in the following year won the Paris–Roubaix contest. Within two years, Van Hauwaert had established himself as one of Belgium’s biggest sporting heroes, nicknamed the ‘Lion of Flanders’ – a reference to the lion on the medieval Flanders coat of arms. The success of this young working-class cyclist, coupled with his growing affluence, pleased as much as it surprised contemporaries. A report on the 1909 Tour of Belgium featured an interview with Van Hauwaert in which he expressed regret over losing eighty Belgian francs in a fire on the cycle track at Ypres, in the second stage of the race. How can it be, his interviewer mused, that someone making 20,000 francs a year still laments the loss of such a (relatively) small amount of money? Van Hauwaert’s story illustrates the rise of cycle racing as a popular sport in Belgium. His regret over losing a ‘small’ sum of money and the interviewer’s reaction to it, however, also point to the social implications of the new phenomenon of lower-class youngsters achieving wealth and fame through sport. Starting in the later 1900s, cycle racing became the first – and for a long time the only – sport in Belgium practised on a large scale by professionals. Being a racer was soon recognized as a distinct, albeit special, ‘occupation’. The path leading to the profession’s social acceptance was nevertheless not without bumps. Research into other sports has shown how professional athletes did ‘a funny kind of work’: paid to play, they engaged in forms of activity which were ‘fun’ but also offered them a lot of occupational independence and secured them a good income, thus straddling spheres of work and leisure.