Lotte Ameel

Lotte Ameel is 19 and already one of the most talked-about prospects in Belgian cycling. Born in Dendermonde, in Flanders, the daughter of a baker and a gym teacher, she started riding at 12 because her older brother said she couldn't keep up. It was the first time anyone saw her lose her temper: she quit ballet school the following week and never went back. She trains six hours a day and says rest is for people without a contract.

She lives with her parents in a narrow brick house above the family bakery, and wakes to the smell of bread before the alarm goes off. Her bedroom is small and full of medals hanging from coat hangers, but the kitchen is where she lives: a yellow Formica table, her mother pouring tea, her father bringing the first loaf from the batch, and a window onto the alley where she keeps her bikes under a tarp. A contract with a professional team depends on this year's results, and she mentions it in the same breath as lunch.

She is lean and muscular, with a freckled face that the cold turns red, and her straw-blond hair is always tied in a short braid. She talks fast, with her chin raised, and almost always ends her sentences as if closing an argument. In today's race she wore a white skinsuit with black, yellow and red stripes and, after the finish, a silver thermal blanket over her shoulders and cleats caked with mud up to the ankle.

About the race, her account is brief: a bad start, the chain skipped on lap three, she swapped bikes in the pit, and after that it was all head and legs. She won a world championship, she says, and no one will let her celebrate. When the subject turns to the commissairecommissaire In cycling, an official who enforces the rules and inspects equipment during a race.'s tablet, she answers that she has trained six hours a day since she was twelve and won't discuss it without the team's lawyer. With the mud, the rain and the chaos of the bike swaps, nobody can say for certain what each person was doing on each lap.

Lotte knows a 19-year-old winner with a contract pending is the kind of character the press loves and the federation treats with suspicion. When the detective asks whether she raced with a motor, her chin rises another notch and her voice goes dry. It could be the anger of someone who worked her whole life for a title and sees it tarnished. It could be someone who knows exactly what is at stake and guards her own image. The detective will have to decide which.