Spin Cycle: Panic on the streets of Sint-Pieters-Woluwe

Spin Cycle is Escape Collective ’s news digest, published every Monday and Friday. You can read it on the website(obviously) or click here_to have it delivered straight to your inbox._

Hello!

Welcome back to Spin Cycle.

Remember the charming European seagull screaming contest in De Panne we linked to last week to signify the sort of nonsense Belgium could return to after the Classics? Well, turns out those weird but good vibes were short-lived.

The country has been dropped into chaos after an act of vandalism, while cow manure ingestion at a race in the Ardennes could mess up the Giro d'Italia start list.

At least the Italian Grand Tour is here to distract us all for the next three weeks while Belgium gets it shit together...

Eddy's lost his head-y 😱

The good news (as included in Monday's newsletter) is that Eddy Merckx is out of hospital after getting a bunch of bacteria flushed out of his artificial hip (nice).

The bad news is someone has defaced an Eddy Merckx monument in the Belgian town of Sint-Pieters-Woluwe.

Specifically, the head of the mural (pictured below) has been ripped off.

"The news reached us during the morning via various local residents," Mayor Benoît Cerexhe told VRT. "I immediately sensed a strong emotion in their voices, somewhere between anger and dismay. Personally, I am shocked; what satisfaction does anyone derive from such an act? Who would attack a sportsman, a symbol of our country? Nothing can justify such an act."

Security footage is being analysed to try and track down the perpetrators while work to restore the monument, unveiled in 2019 to mark the Belgian Tour de France Grand Départ, will begin as soon as possible.

Shit out of luck 💩

"Half the peloton is ill," Lotto-Intermarché sports director Maxime Bouet told Sporza after a number of riders fell sick following the Famenne Ardenne Classic last Sunday, with cow manure on the roads suspected to be the cause.

Several Lotto riders were taken to hospital after suffering from abdominal pain, diarrhoea, vomiting and fever.

Arnaud De Lie then fell ill on the flight to Bulgaria for the Giro d'Italia and was forced to miss Wednesday's team presentation (as were two of his teammates) but his team expect him to still make the start of stage one on Friday.

:(

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