When Tour de France started in Ypres (Wednesday 9th of July 2014) we had after long thinking, even wavering) designed the POPPYSHIRT, including on the right chest part: Le Tour - Ieper/Ypres - 1914 - 2014. Only 70 shirts were made of these.

It was also part of our beginning company BIKING BOX CYCLETOURS. In the months before, we regurarly had journalists from all over the world, joining us for a guided tour, as they were invited or inspired to visit In Flanders Fields with the starting of the whole remembrance campaign, one hundred years after the Great War broke out.

On that 5th stage that would lead the Tour riders towards Wallers-Arenberg, it was raining cats and dogs. Chris Froome, one of the favourites crashed even before the cobble stones and abandonned the race. Italian rider Nibali was on that day showing his potential to win the Tour de France. Which indead happened two weeks later.

For us, as a kid growing up in the shadow of the pill boxes at Hill 60, with Lucien Van Impe featuring as our Belgian Tour hero on television, this particular design of a cycling jersey inspired that much, that we choose the POPPY as our personal symbol to guide our guests on a bicycle throughout the Battlefields of Flanders. Being former cycling journalist as well, always keeping that young boy's dream in mind dancing on pedals while climbing hills and mountains, this shirt had truely become part of our cycling passion, combined with profound respect for those thousands of young men being slaugthered on the Cross of Sacrifice. So now the poppy shirt was born. And it has become a pure and honest symbol in the whole remembrance between 2014 and 2018. Since the Tour has left Ypres, we changed the text on the  right chest:

In Flanders Fields

2014-18

The Poppy Exposition in Ypres - Cloth Hall & In Flanders Fields Museum, 2015