An exhausted Wout van Aert collapses after finishing third in the 2018 Strade Bianche, an Italian cycling race.
An inside look at the grueling world of professional cycling
Photographs by Kristof Ramon
Story by Issy Ronald, CNN
Published June 29, 2024
An exhausted Wout van Aert collapses after finishing third in the 2018 Strade Bianche, an Italian cycling race.
Lying on the sodden paving stones oblivious to the onlookers around him — mouth contorted open, eyes closed, arms splayed out and legs bowed — it was as if cycling superstar Wout van Aert was resting on some invisible crucifix.
It is an extraordinary image, one of “somebody lying on the floor just trying to get back to this world,” photographer Kristof Ramon told CNN of the moment he captured after the 2018 edition of Strade Bianche.
As one of the world’s best professional cyclists, Van Aert has mastered suffering better than most. But, on that occasion, he had cramped up on the final climb up to the finish and simply fallen off his bike when he could no longer continue pedaling. A moment later, he jumped back on, continued up the climb and finished in third place before collapsing on the floor.
Ramon has spent almost 15 years documenting these moments in professional cycling, attempting to capture the essence of the sport with all its suffering, beauty and drama as it forces riders to push the limits of human endurance.
The images in his new book — “The Art of Suffering” — thrum with emotion, whether they are depicting the joy of winning a stage at the Tour de France, the exhaustion of fending off a fan trying to take a selfie after a race, or the pain of having hands rubbed so much by handlebars that they have become bloody. This year’s Tour de France starts on June 29.
With his photographs, Ramon hopes to convey “just how deep these guys need to go to try and reach their dreams, and not all of them can.”
“To me,” Ramon adds, “the theme of the book is suffering on so many levels. It’s not just the physical suffering. It’s also the mental suffering and being away from home.”
He became fascinated by the monk-like life riders lead outside the races, and determined to photograph “the moments in between,” the moments when someone is more likely to let the mask slip and accidentally reveal their inner thoughts and emotions to the outside world.
The world of cycling can be weird and wonderful. One of Ramon’s photos depicts a fan dressed in a cloudy sky morph suit standing against a cloudy sky; another shows cyclists swerving to avoid some sheep that have ventured onto the road; in another, a team stands in some kind of urinal contraption with one cyclist barely containing his giggles.
Unlike in most other sports, photographers in cycling are directly involved in the action, taking photos from the back of motorbikes or wheel-to-wheel with the riders, descending with them at lightning-fast speeds, and sometimes chatting with them at more relaxed points in the races.
“Could you imagine as a photographer being at a football match and running onto the pitch? It’s crazy,” Ramon says.
“And to actually sort of doing it. Sometimes … I need to go through the peloton to get ahead again and you go like: ‘Hey Michael, how are you doing? How are the kids?’ It’s crazy … You’re in it as a photographer. What other sport is so close?”
Spending so much time traveling with the peloton has helped “create a sort of relaxed atmosphere,” Ramon says, one in which some riders allowed him to “be close to them at times,” such as taking photos at the hotels or on team buses before or after a race.
He often bumps into riders’ families at races, further strengthening a sense of a tight-knit community traveling the world together.
But cycling is a dangerous sport. “There are 200 guys going at 60 or 70 kph down a hill,” Ramon says. “There’s nothing that needs to go wrong before it goes really wrong.”
Crashes are commonplace and can result in serious injuries. Last year, Swiss rider Gino Mäder tragically died after crashing at high speed on a descent in the Tour of Switzerland, an event that ripped through the peloton.
“If these races are covered live and somebody crashes, someone on the other end of the TV says, ‘That’s my boyfriend, that’s my son,’” Ramon says, adding that in such moments he has sometimes put his camera aside and asked if the rider wants him to ring someone to let them know.
By working independently, without the news demands of a photo agency, he has been able to develop a “sort of etiquette” when shooting crashes, refraining when it is particularly bad or finding ways to “eliminate the gore.”
He remembers one such horrific crash in 2017 at the Giro di Lombardia when cyclist Jan Bakelants plunged into a ravine with such force that he suffered multiple fractures to his vertebrae and seven ribs while his bike flew into the air and became entangled in a tree almost four meters above the road.
“It was a really chilling moment,” Ramon says. “For me, the way to show how serious this crash was, was to simply frame the bike in a tree because … that image tells enough about the seriousness in the story without me having to show actually the gore.”
“The Art of Suffering,” published by Laurence King, is now available for pre-order.