On a crisp spring morning, I am on a bike waiting at an intersection in Zeeburg, a neighborhood on Amsterdam’s east side, watching the city’s teeming two-wheeled morning commute. “Tom?” I hear, as Tim Krabbe rolls up on an Eddy Merckx road bike, tanned, thin, with no sunglasses, his bushy, grey-flecked eyebrows and twinkling eyes peeking out from his helmet.
He looks both ways, then rolls through the red light, motioning me forward. “I’m known,” he says, as we settle in, two abreast, “for not waiting for red lights.”
With the 40th anniversary of The Rider approaching, I had come to Amsterdam to catch up with this writer/racer/chess master, who has always been something of an enigma. Could he still be riding? What does he make of the book’s curious four-decade journey? Which of the characters in the book were real, and which were ghosts of Krabbe’s imagination?
We’re heading to the meeting spot of the Tuesday ride with his cycling club, the Windjammers, a wide-ranging group of locals (Dutch nationals and expats). Krabbe tells me that, as of last December, he has “retired” from the Windjammers’ “A” squad, as he terms it, which does a harder, faster ride on Thursdays. In my honour, however, in addition to the fact that he will be turning 74 this Thursday, he has agreed to do both.
The ride is a 45-mile loop around the “waterlands” north of the city. It’s all narrow roads, flat green polders, some archetypal tulips, tidy houses on canals, cows, minor ascents of earthen dikes, and wind – the legendary “Dutch mountains” and “Dutch descents”. The first thing I notice about Krabbe is how strong he is, unafraid to take lengthy pulls up front, even to take on a sprint or two.
As the ride continues, I never seem to find him alongside me so I watch from a distance as he banters and jokes with the peloton, mostly in Dutch, a combination of slightly cantankerous (and essentially deaf in one ear) elder statesman and merry prankster.
Paul Santen, a former Dutch Basketball League player and now a sports marketer who helped found the group a few years back (the name, he says, is a mashup of Holland’s seafaring past, the fact that many of its riders seemed to be tall – like the ships – and the idea that “that’s what we do, we literally jam the wind”), tells me, as we stop at a member’s farmhouse midride for coffee and cake, that he met Krabbe one day six years ago by chance at a red light.
“One of the few that he stopped for,” he jokes. Santen, well aware of who he was, invited him to join the group. “He was still racing,” he says, “and he said he’d be happy to join.” On the first ride, Krabbe crashed and badly bruised his ribs. “I thought, oh no, not him,” says Santen. “He’ll never ride with us again.”
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