This is my third attempt at interviewing Tomas Van Den Spiegel. The first two times he cancelled at the last minute, and this time it required a curt message which barely disguised my impatience to get him to rearrange. But as I sit there waiting for him to appear on my laptop screen, he texts me that he’s running late. Not this again, I curse. 25 minutes pass, and still he hasn’t popped up. But I can’t give up – I really, really want to pin him down.
The media can rightfully be accused of hyperbole and overstating a person’s stock, but you cannot understate the importance and growing power of Tomas Van Den Spiegel within cycling. A professional basketball player for 18 years in six countries, Van Den Spiegel has been the CEO of Flanders Classics since 2018, turning it into the most modern, innovative and progressive race organiser in the sport, while simultaneously being unafraid of deviating from convention. With an instrumental role in the proposed One Cycling project, he is eyeing even more influence in the coming years.
“At Flanders Classics we’re allergic to the sentence: ‘we’ve always done it that way’. You’re not allowed to say that when you work with us or for us,” the 46-year-old tells me when he finally appears. His organisation’s marquee event, the Tour of Flanders, takes place this weekend, and at a crucial moment in the sport, with potentially transformative economic and calendar reforms set to be signed off in the coming months, he has positioned himself and the company he heads up as a central figure in discussions. “We always try to be in the middle of the bed, but we’re also always trying to poke people. We’re not as big as ASO or RCS, but we’re the guys with good ideas that try to get along with everyone but try to change things at the same time.”
The meditator
Working in cycling after almost two decades representing some of the biggest basketball clubs in Europe, including Real Madrid, isn’t a typical career path. But then Van Den Spiegel wasn’t your typical professional sportsperson. Standing tall at 214cm (7ft), he speaks four languages fluently – Flemish, French, English and Italian – and can get by in Spanish, German and Russian. “Like a good Belgian,” he smiles at his linguistic skills.
“As an athlete, I wasn’t the most talented player,” he says, rather modestly; five league titles and two EuroLeague gold medals – the highest honour in European basketball – would suggest differently, but he continues. “I played at the top-level but I was more of a team player. Just below that level, I could be really dominant, but I preferred to be on top teams and be the glue. On and off the court, I liked to bring people together; I’m not a guy who will tackle people with a straight leg – I will always try to find the middle ground.”
As he moved from Italy to Russia, Poland to Ukraine, and Spain back to Belgium in his storied playing career, Van Den Spiegel did so with a perpetual eye on the future. “I really wanted to stay in sports to continue to have the feeling that this isn’t work but me having a good time,” he says. “I tried to build a network during my career, tried to stay in touch with people, and tried to understand more than just what was happening on the basketball court. I had a huge passion for the business side of sport and right after my career stopped [in 2013] I stepped into a couple of projects.” That’s where cycling came onto his horizon – but don’t be mistaken, bike racing wasn’t completely alien to him. “Being from Gent, it’s part of who we are and in Flanders we all think cycling is the number one sport in the world.”
The revolutionist
“I was working in the broader landscape in sponsorship and events,” he says of his first forays away from the court, “and started doing consultancy work for Zdeněk Bakala.” Czech businessman Bakala is a very good boss to have. The owner of the Soudal Quick-Step team, though he keeps a low public profile, he is a powerful individual. “I was running his athletic performance centre in Leuven, and I also had Patrick Lefevere [Quick-Step’s longtime CEO] on my board. Alongside that I already knew Wouter [Vandenhaute, the founder of Flanders Classics] so in a very organic way I got close to cycling quite quickly.” It was his relationship with Vandenhaute that would prove the most significant. “We’d meet on a regular basis and he’d always say that one day we’d work together. In 2018 I started discussing with Flanders Classics and they said: ‘why not just come and run the business and make it grow’, and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”
Image: Zac Williams/SWpix.com
Under Van Den Spiegel’s leadership – he’s also president of the Union of European Leagues of Basketball – Flanders Classics has grown into the third-biggest race organiser in the sport, only operating in the shadows of ASO (promoters of the Tour de France and Vuelta a España, among others) and RCS (organisers of almost all Italian races, plus the UAE Tour). Counting the six Flemish men’s and women’s spring WorldTour races, plus Amstel Gold and the Tour de Suisse which they’ve acquired in recent years, as well as a handful of other UCI races throughout the season, they also practically run the entire international cyclocross calendar.
But it’s what they’ve done with their races which has garnered the most attention: redesigned finishing straight safety barriers – much to the admiration of riders; modified parcours with circuits that stay true to tradition, in spite of initial disgruntlement among fans; the introduction of ticketed areas and VIP zones, increasing revenue; and a commitment to turning single-day races into must-attend weekend events with mass-participation sportives and fan parks. The model is basically what One Cycling is aiming to replicate.
Seven years into his tenure, Flanders Classics has grown from an operation of 10 to 40 employees, and its influence over the wider sport has grown year-on-year. “I don’t like patting ourselves on the back, but I think we really pushed women’s cycling very early and still we're one of the only organisers to have equal prize money. I think the biggest impact we had was putting the women’s races after the men’s, and that’s been quite impactful because suddenly being a fan of men’s cycling you’re confronted with women’s cycling in a very natural way. If there’s a women’s Tour de France and Paris-Roubaix today, I think in some ways we have contributed to that by having women’s races for all of our spring Classics.”
The aspirationalist
Not everyone’s a supporter, of course. Some suspect that Van Den Spiegel is seeking absolute power in the sport – something he denies to me, stating that “I’m not a very good politician” – and a man as aspirational as him cannot not possess an ego. But he’s rational, persuasive, engaging, and it’s easy to fall into his orbit. He’s the spokesperson One Cycling really needs. And on that topic. “We need to make sure that this long-talked about change to the calendar will eventually happen,” he says. “I think cycling is probably the only small-to-medium sport today that still has global potential and I think we have to be keen on changing things. If people ask me what I do on a daily basis, first I say I’m more involved in the mid- to long-term strategy, but it’s basically trying to make our company and our sport future-proof.”
Image: Kristof Ramon
Some of Van Den Spiegel’s allies fear that the UCI is about to take a sledgehammer to the Saudi Arabia-funded project in order to appease all factions, but he’s still confident it will be launched within months. Regardless of what eventuates, he'll continue to impress on a very traditional and conservative sport of the need to think outside the box.
“I consider it a huge advantage that I don’t come from this sport and don’t carry around a backpack full of history, and that I can really look at things with a basketball player’s mentality,” he says. “Wouter taught me a lot about embracing innovation, making sure you’re always a step ahead, and that there’s no such thing as a rule. I am super ambitious and let’s see where it stops. What drives me personally is that I want to make a difference. If we ever change cycling so that in 2040 it’s one of the global sports, I’d love to be in that picture of the people who've done that. That's my personal driver.”
This weekend, as he watches the Flemish cobbled Classics reach their climax with De Ronde van Vlaanderen, he’ll take a moment to pause and reflect on his journey so far. “If you had told me the day I retired from basketball that in five years I’d be the CEO of Flanders Classics, a race I watched as a kid as a type of national holiday, I wouldn’t have believed you. And if you would have told me that Fabian Cancellara would be calling me and we’d become friends, I'd have said you were crazy. I’m just having a good time to be honest and we’ll see where this leads.”
Cover image: Kristof Ramon
