Lotte Kopecky in the streets of disoriented days
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The Belgian cyclist a la Danilith Nokere Koerse was not to be there. He decided to ride it anyway, perhaps to escape the pain of his brother’s death, perhaps because the bike is the best cure for the pain of the soul. She won
There Danilith Nokere Koerse it is a cycling race that is a gymkhana, a right-left-left-right rural jolt without interruption, along country lanes, between asphalt and cobblestones. It’s like getting lost in a few square kilometers above Oudenaarde, Flanders, where it’s not the climbs, the meters in altitude, that make the gaps, but disorientation and bewilderment, which can turn into vertigo. Were they on a ship it would be called seasickness, but runners pedal a bicycle and bike sickness does not exist.
Danilith Nokere Koerse resembles certain days that life throws at us, disoriented and lost days, in which it is difficult just to think of being able to follow a straight path and one begins to chase the right-left-left-right mental jolt in an attempt to get to the bottom of thoughts that are impossible to get to the bottom of, because they are enveloping and totalitarian. Thoughts of pain, pain that multiplies thoughts, the impossibility of escaping from all this because, somehow, all this ominous decay has its own softness, its own comfortable, devouring and infamous warmth, but at times welcoming. One would feel like doing nothing, to watch the events helplessly. Something will happen anyway. And instead you need to snap, flee, leave, maybe face partial failures, try again.
Lotte Kopecky at the start of the Danilith Nokere Koerse shouldn’t have been there, could not have been there, she wanted to stay. Because she needed to escape, to find a thread to follow out of the black maze she had fallen into the previous weekend. She needed a thread to follow and Danilith Nokere Koerse’s tangled and tossed one was fine too, in fact she was even better. Because a race like the Danilith Nokere Koerse is usually won by the fastest. Or who wants to win it more than the others: like Amy Pieters in 2021.
And Lotte Kopecky knew that she had to win this race alone, with no one around, because pain is a private matter, it needs solitude, no one around. Her brother had died a few days earlier. She had suspended everything, commitments, workouts, future plans, days off, suspended in a sense of emptiness that would have been impossible to imagine. Then she won the bike, the force that attracts her, the awareness that pedaling, who knows how, what seems meaningless finds a sense, or at least a solution, a patch.
Lotte Kopecky on a bike started to break away from the peloton with seventy kilometers to go. She ran away from the others to escape from emptiness, from sadness. Lotte Kopecky escaped definitively with seven kilometers to go, she was left alone, she pulled straight towards the finish line. Lotte Kopecky won the Danilith Nokere Koerse without a smile, without pointing to the sky, sniffling, holding back tears. “It was an emotionally difficult day,” she said. “I think we raced in two today”.
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