The first time I saw Sarah, I’ll be honest—I didn’t think too much of it. She wasn’t what I expected, not at all. The setting was all wrong: a stuffy sponsor’s reception in Antwerp, a room buzzing with the clinking glasses and the low hum of business talk. I was there as an asset, a rider from the team to shake hands and smile. At that point in my life, everything revolved around Belgium, but more specifically, it revolved around the bike. My world was a closed loop of the Game, the Club, the relentless road ahead. It was a life of precision: wattage, cadence, heart rate, recovery. Romance? It wasn’t on my radar. It was an unnecessary variable, a distraction from the singular focus required to be the best.
But then, she walked into my life like a different force, unannounced and unanticipated.
She wasn’t with the cycling crowd. She was a friend of the event organiser, a graphic designer dragged along for a free drink. I noticed her because she was the only person in the room who wasn’t trying to network. She stood by the massive window overlooking the Scheldt, watching the barges drift past with a quiet intensity that seemed to shut out the entire room. She wasn’t beautiful in the way I was accustomed to; it wasn’t a loud, obvious beauty. It was something quieter, more compelling. She looked… interested. In the world outside, not the one in here.
A teammate nudged me. “That’s Sarah. The one who did the branding for the new junior series. Quite talented, they say.” I nodded,my cyclist’s brain filing the information away. Talented. Designer. It meant nothing to me.
Our introduction was a formality. A handshake, a polite “Pleased to meet you,” a comment about the unseasonably warm spring. Her hand was cool in mine, her grip firm but brief. Her eyes, a shade of grey-green like the North Sea on an overcast day, met mine for a second too long, and in them I saw not a flicker of recognition of who I was supposed to be. No ‘Wout Van Aert, cyclocross champion,’ no ‘classics specialist.’ Just a tall, slightly awkward man in a suit that was too tight across the shoulders.
It should have ended there. But it didn’t.
We found ourselves next to each other at the buffet table later, both reaching for the same last mini-quiche. We laughed, an awkward, brittle sound. And then she said something that completely disarmed me.
“You look like you’d rather be out there,” she said, nodding towards the window, “on a bike, in all this sunshine.”
It was so simple, so obvious, and yet no one ever said it. They always asked about the racing, the training, the glory. They never acknowledged the simple, primal desire to just ride.
“I would,” I admitted, and it felt like a confession.
We talked for twenty minutes. She asked me not about my victories, but about the feeling of riding on cobbles. Was it true what they said, that it vibrates right through your skull? Did I prefer the solitude of a long training ride or the chaos of the peloton? Her questions were not those of a fan, but of an artist, someone trying to understand the texture of a life so different from her own. She told me about her work, about the challenge of conveying motion and struggle in a static image. She spoke of gradients and negative space with the same passion I reserved for discussing tyre pressure and breakaway strategies.
I was captivated. This was a different kind of endurance, a different kind of creativity. I gave her my number, scribbled on a napkin, a move that felt both incredibly bold and utterly juvenile. She took it with a small, enigmatic smile and slipped it into her pocket without a word.
I didn’t hear from her for a week. I thought of her often, in the quiet moments during a recovery spin or lying in bed before sleep. I’d become so used to a world that moved at my pace, that responded to my schedule. The silence was unnerving. It was the first crack in my perfectly controlled universe.
Her text, when it finally came, was about the rain. She’d been watching it trace patterns on her studio window and wondered if I hated training in it or loved it.
That was it. That was the start.
She became my counterbalance. My life was about extremes: all-out effort followed by absolute rest. Black and white. She painted my world in shades of grey, green, and soft, unexpected colours. She didn’t care about the podium. She cared if I’d eaten properly, if I’d seen the way the mist hung over the fields that morning, if the book she’d lent me had made me think.
She taught me to see Belgium not just as a circuit of roads to be conquered, but as a place of beauty. We’d go for slow walks—walks!—and she’d point out the way the light hit the brick of a centuries-old farmhouse, or the particular green of a new leaf on a tree I had raced past a thousand times. She listened to my frustrations after a bad race not with platitudes, but with a quiet empathy that allowed me to simply feel the disappointment before letting it go.
The road ahead was still there. The Game was still everything. But now, when I finished a race, utterly spent and hollowed out, there was a new thought that would cut through the fatigue. The thought of her. Not of a fan celebrating my victory, but of a partner who understood the cost of it. She was my sanctuary, my quiet harbour after the storm of competition.
She wasn’t what I expected. I expected a fan, or someone who would orbit my sun. Instead, she built her own gravity, and I found myself happily, wonderfully, in her orbit. She didn’t fit into my world; she built a new, better one around me, one with depth and texture beyond the finish line. And I realised that the most important victory wasn’t on the road at all, but the quiet, unexpected one of letting someone else see the man behind the cyclist, and having them choose to stay.
