‘Cycle, cunt!’ It was really there on Saturday, on a banner along the route of the Vuelta in Den Bosch. For the unsuspecting reader or viewer an insult to the Tour of Spain riders. But according to the maker, it is precisely an ode to the Bossche spoken language and to a banner that hung along the route in 1996 at the Tour start in Den Bosch.
Photos of the canvas are making a lot of noise online and they have put a wide grin on the face of many. That was exactly the intention of Jordy Schonkeren from Vught.
“Yes, still a bit childish”, the 35-year-old Jordy has to laugh about it the day after the Vuelta. It was absolutely not intended to hurt, he emphasizes. It was a playful action with a sense of historiography, says the avid cycling enthusiast .
But what about that? “A friend was at the start of the Tour de France in Den Bosch in 1996. Then at a student house on Koningsweg hung a canvas with the text: ‘Cycle, pussy!’ It has always stayed with him.”
“It’s taken on a life of its own. Poo-and-pee humor. That’s all.”
His memory has become commonplace within Jordy’s group of friends. They are all avid cyclists. And as advanced lads they came up with their own club name years ago: Oeteldonkse Wieler Club Fietse Kut.
“It has taken on a life of its own. Poop-and-pee humor. That’s all,” Jordy says. “When we heard that the Vuelta was coming to Den Bosch, we wanted to pay tribute to the canvas from then and to the Bossche slang. So we thought: let’s spray that text on a canvas and hang it on the side of the road.”
But that didn’t go quite as expected. Buy a cloth, spray text on it and hang it up, you might say. But according to Jordy, that was against the will of an officer, who passed by on a bicycle.
“5 minutes before the race came, the police wanted the curtain off.”
“We hung the curtain and all kinds of Vuelta cars driving through the tunnel at the station stopped to take pictures. Some Jumbo-Visma cars, for example. People sitting in it laughed and gave their thumbs up. But 5 minutes before the race came, the police wanted the curtain off. The agent himself could see the humor in it. But he had been ordered to remove the canvas. So well, we’ll just fold it ourselves.”
And so the entire Vuelta peloton missed Jordy’s creation in person. But in the short time that the 6 meter long white sheet with black letters was hanging there, it was frequently photographed. They go around the internet.
“The ode to 1996 and Den Bosch is still a success,” says Jordy. “And with a bit of luck, the Dutch cyclists will still see him. On Omroep Brabant or on dumper.”
