As part of Champion’s “Take one for the team” competition, we’re paying tribute to some ultimate team players. Today, we salute one of the most devoted domestiques in the history of the world’s toughest sporting event.
It takes guts to race the Tour de France, three weeks and 2200 miles up, down and across the toughest terrain of the Alps, the Pyrenees and the windy French planes.
It takes guts to keep plodding away, to keep turning those pedals when the temptation to jack it in, to climb into the Broom Wagon trundling along behind the peleton, just waiting for you to bring your bike to the side of the road, must be almost irresistible.
It takes guts to put your body through the most unspeakable torment, day after day, and get up the following morning and go through the process once more.
But it takes a special kind of guts to keep going when you routinely find yourself towards the back of the field as the pace increases, your energy levels having been spent setting the tempo for your more talented, better paid and usually better-looking team leader.
And not only towards the back of the field. At the back of the field. One man has the distinction, the oddly enviable distinction, of winning the lanterne rouge – the so-called Red Lantern who finishes last in the race in Paris – on three separate occasions.
Step forward – or, more accurately, peddle forward, slowly but surely – Wim Vansevenant.
The Belgian retired from a 14-year race-riding career in 2008, to take up the altogether easier pursuit of managing the family farm.
His achievements, if that is the correct term, are not to be sniffed at. Not just anyone can finish last in the Tour de France, never mind three times in a row. It’s not just a matter of peddling away at your own pace, finishing in your own time. On every stage, you must finish within a set time of the winner or you face disqualification.
Vansevenant made it inside that time limit, again and again and again, to ensure that he was available for his team leader stage after stage after stage.
On the face of it, the results suggest he may have been a passenger. He finished a total of four hours behind the yellow jersey in each of his lanterne rouge tours. On the contrary, though, his was a key role. Wim may not have had much vigour by the end of each stage, but he was a respected and valued team member, one of the most devoted domestiques in Tour de France history.
As his team leader, the Australian Cadel Evans, said on Wim’s retirement, “He is one of the riders who you always want to have in your team, in every race you do. He’s a real team player in every sense of the word and he’s only going to be missed in that way.”
We salute you, Wim Vansevenant. An ultimate team player.
