The Danish team of Madison World Champs Alex Rasmussen and Michael Morkov were the winners, in a very close finish, over Iljo Keisse and Roger Kluge. Bruno Risi (retiring after this season) and Franco Marvulli took third. You can see lots of great photos and read reports about the racing at any of your favourite cycling sites, so I'll not bother with any of that.
Instead, here are some random impressions from this year's trip.
1. Alexander Aeschbach is hot. (That's him near the railings in black.)
Here's a much better picture where he's all shiny and looking fine.
He didn't make a great impression paired with Bruno Risi last year (although they finished 4th overall), but this year his confidence and personality are really shining through in his riding and demeanour. He seems to have added a bit of mass to his legs this year, too, and when they're oiled-up and wrapped in that flattering black and yellow kit, well, bestill my beating heart, he immediately struck me as the most attractive rider on the track this year.
My fan page for Alex will be coming soon:
www.alexanderaeschbachistleckereralsschokolade.com
(read that in German to make sense of it.)
But I don't think many others in Gent this year would agree with me; there is one rider here who has the crowd's support and admiration unlike any other:
2. Il-jooooo! Il-joooooo! Il-jooooooo!
After winning last year's edition with his long-time partner Robert Bartko, local hero Iljo Keisse tested positive for 2 banned substances: cathine and HTC. 344 days later he was acquitted of any wrong doing and on the programme for this year's Gent Six riding with Roger Kluge.
I was following it in the Belgian press and my Dutch isn't good enough to know exactly what happened. I think that they didn't find any cathine in the B sample and then decided that the concentration of HTC that they found (which Keisse claimed he must have ingested in a contaminated, otherwise completely legal, supplement) was too low to have had a performance-enhancing effect after all. So the whole thing was dropped due to insufficient evidence. Or something like that.
At any rate, it was a very trying year for Keisse and his fans and I wasn't sure what kind of reception would be waiting for him. He is known as "de Kaiser van t' Kuipke", having won the Sixes of 2008, 2007, and 2005 there (and he probably would have also won in 2006 if the event hadn't been stopped after Isaac Galvez's fatal accident).
He is gorgeous and charming and talented to boot. He wasn't at his sparkling best this year (understandable with the doping case and last month's suicide of his friend and Belgian squad- mate Dimitri De Fauw) and noticeably toned-down the showmanship, but Iljo was still always in contention for the win and I think he was genuinely touched and moved by the crowd's support.
When Alex Rasmussen beat Keisse in the final sprint of the final race and settled the result of six days of racing by half a bike length, he made Keisse seem more human and vulnerable and thus more worthy of his fans' support than ever. In a post-race interview, Iljo claimed that he considered he'd "already won the Six Days on Thursday when my name reverberated around the Kuipke for many minutes," and that he left the track every night with goosepimples. He was worried that the previous year's trials would have lost him the crowd's sympathy, but the opposite seems to be true.
After the racing concluded on Sunday, it was a long time before Iljo's fans let him leave the building.And here's the reaction he got later when he finally turned up at de Karper, the bar that his father owns near the track:
I managed to get close enough to shake his hand, congratulate him on his great performance, and thank him for making the racing so exciting this year.
3. Nil-jo!
Although the local crowd took him closer to its collective bosom than ever, it seems that the Six Days peloton's arms were less wide open. In this interview with Het Nieuwsblad, after the author posits that Keisse was due to be Bruno Risi's successor as patron, Keisse says that not everyone has reacted well to his racing again, and he thinks that some of the other top riders were happy to have one less competitor to worry about. He was especially disappointed that his own long-time partner Robert Bartko was less than trusting and supportive of him immediately following the announcement of the positive test. And Franco Marvulli, he claims, has been especially hostile, even going so far as to say to him during the Fiorenzola Six last July, "What are you doing here? You shouldn't be allowed here."
Tough luck, Franco. Iljo's back.
