Some things make you want to stop being an American for a while, or at least make you want to stop watching American movies. My trip to the Low Countries brought with it a wish that I had never watched the third "Austin Powers" film.

To not ruin the plot of the film, let me just say that Mike Myers seemed to have an overwhelming desire to bash the Dutch, with only slightly subtler jabs at the neighboring Belgians.

From the time the jet touched down at the Amsterdam airport, I began thinking not of the beautiful countryside of dairy farms, windmills, and tulip greenhouses, but instead of incessant, irrational Dutch-hatred.

Don't get me wrong. The Dutch are, from a tourist's point of view, hard to dislike. The airport, trains, streets - hell, the country in general - seemed immaculate. The woman at the airport train station was businesslike, polite, and thankfully, quite tolerant of my near-total ignorance of Dutch.

About all I knew at that point was that my hotel was in Herentals, which is pronounced largely as it's spelled, and that the race was in Geel, which is pronounced (roughly) "hail."

I hated myself for such limited knowledge of my host country, but I actually had a tiny advantage in that department over many of my American teammates. I passed one of them on my way from the rail ticket counter down to the platforms.

The nameless though not quiet American had at the time attached himself to a Canadian. Each wore his respective team jacket and blue jeans (uniform for the how'd-you-guess-I'm-not-a-local? traveler). And each was lugging an unwieldy giant plastic bike box every bit as difficult to wrangle through the airport - then under renovations - and into the tiny trailer-turned-ticket office as my Skyline hard case had been.

"Going to Geel?" I asked amicably, with the best attempt at a Flemish-Dutch, guttural "hail" sound I could muster.

"Naw, we're goin' to Geel," came the reply, complete with hard "G" and total Anglicanizing language abuse.

The Canadian, sensibly a half step behind in stride and a few steps behind in apparent boorishness, gave a silent nod indicating that he'd explain yet one more alien concept to our lost cowboy friend, lest he end up in the wrong station - or the wrong country.

Sadly, for the duration of the trip I was in near-constant antagonism with the American athlete contingent I came to call the "Sheep." The term was no reflection of any penchant for wearing wool sweaters. It was my preferred term for an entire group of people for whom Europe would have been so much more lovely had it been more Disney-fied and less, well, European.

The Sheep were the ones who had selected the group travel package not for lack of time, unavailability of alternative travel agents, or truly careful choice but out of a childlike need for the familiar. Better to be surrounded by other American tourists than by your hosts.

Sheep also seemed to have somehow neglected to pack any clothing not garishly splashed with "USA." In fact, several Sheep spent perhaps as much as two weeks wearing the team parade top, a hideous and cheaply made swindle by Saucony, to the exclusion of any other shirt. (I wore mine once, in the parade of nations, and it has since become a permanent squatter in the dark recesses of my closet.)

The team hotel - the self-selected Sheep pen - abutted a forest, a farmer's hay-pasture, and not much else. For those of us not exiled there, the team hotel was accessible only after getting careful directions. These directions included a turn at a roadside cafe and bar whose name seemed to have several alternative spellings, depending on which scrawled, photocopied directions you read. From there, you could follow the signs to the place, which left you a good four miles from any human settlement of consequence.

On our first attempt to find the place, Greg (who shared my hotel room) and I biked to the town of Kasterlee, midway between Herentals and Geel. The team hotel had a Kasterlee address. We rode up and down the town center of Kasterlee and discovered a beautiful town church, a bicycle shop, the setting for the town's outdoor market, and several medium-sized hotels, none of which was the team hotel. We even asked a young woman - who was working on a street-construction project at the edge of town - where the Hotel Residentie was. Or, rather, we made the question known to the (very patient) woman as best we could through English, mispronounced Flemish and hand gestures. She responded with an expression that told us that she was confused by more than our lack of language skills.

Greg and I then asked an older American couple, who were walking out of their (non-team) hotel wearing jackets from their local triclub, which way the team place was. They had been told that it was somewhere "that way," and they pointed off to the south and west. It took us days of inquiries to finally find the place. Part of me wishes I never had.

For some of the Sheep, the isolation of the team hotel likely raised its place in their estimation. There are far fewer Belgians, excepting small game and birds, in the middle of a forest than in towns like Herentals, Geel, or Kasterlee. One could be sure never to miss team meetings or to have to go anywhere by oneself among the natives. Meals, which I've been told were largely pasta and almost wholly bad, were served at regular times, in a separate dining room from that of the regular guests.

At the team hotel, there were no packs of teenagers and children biking by on old single-speeds on their way to school. There were no church bells that always sounded just a bit off-key and somehow sinister. There were no shop-lined brick streets, downtown market Fridays with lingerie stands, neighborhood bars, mushroom-shaped telephone booths, or local newspapers. In short, there was none of what made town life in Herentals so new, different, and fun for me. No uncertainty meant no choice, no interaction, and a myopically distorted view of our host country.

And for this twisted, isolationist reality, the Sheep praised their package-tour maestro as a demigod. He was surrounded day and night by petulant Sheep asking for rides to and from this and that. The Sheep wanted to know when their precious team meetings and group inspections of the course would be held. The wanted, for all I know, to have travel agent wipe their runny noses for them, preferably with a "TEAM USA" handkerchief.

The team travel agent is not evil incarnate, nor is he endowed with some god-given gift for leadership. He is just a businessman. As such, he must try - in setting up the package tours - to make a profit for himself. (How else does one pay for a nice glass of wine after the race?) Some of his more intelligent customers come to this conclusion for themselves, and, in the words of a song by The Who, they "won't get fooled again." The Sheep, like so many Americans in so many aspects of their lives, not only get fooled again; they actually fail to recognize that they've even been fooled.

In Switzerland the year before, the team travel agent had at least put the team hotel in town. Granted, that town was Zurich, not Affoltern a.A., where the race was held. But, there were only a couple of very small hotels in Affoltern, which roughly translates as "pig valley," but is beautiful nonetheless. (For this you could not blame the travel agent.) And there was, of course, the team bus, which was chronically overloaded and thus late, from what I've been told by someone unfortunate enough to have purchased the package deal. Add such minor glitches to less-than-fully-competitive pricing, and you should have a system not long for this world. Instead, the Sheep so loved being herded about like, well, sheep that they, by and large, elected to do the same again in Belgium.

Thank God for team managers. Or, that's what I'd be saying if I were religious in any conventional sense, or if I could look forward to the continued aid of perhaps the most gifted team manager USA Triathlon could have asked for, one Mr. Tim Yount. Sadly, Geel was Tim's last World Championship at the helm. For reasons that have never been publicly elucidated, Tim was promoted to executive director of the whole of USAT, only to resign completely from the organization months later.

The Sheep, in a particularly melodramatic episode, presented Tim with small gifts after the team photo. I was less than thrilled even to to be near such a spectacle. At the time, of course, we all thought Tim was simply being promoted. No need to boo-hoo, my little baah-baahs. Besides, the apparently intelligent and capable Tracey Levenson had already taken over some of the management duties - including rambling e-mail updates - for the team. The was a logical succession. Life would go on, but the Sheep seemed unmoved.

What did finally moved some of the Sheep from their grieving were the subtle political overtones of the speeches at the end of the parade of nations - held a few hours after the team photo. Some of the local dignitaries used their time on the platform in the main square to make sidelong allusions to the U.S. conquest of Iraq, phrased carefully but plainly through appeals to the power of international sport for healthy competition and conflict prevention. They spoke with nuance and of peace, both of which agitate the Sheep. How dare these people of "Old Europe" seek to meddle in the affairs of our sovereign nation, under our crusader-in-chief, even if meddling in the affairs of other sovereign nations had become our stock-in-trade.

Damn, there I've gone and made things complicated. This was supposed to be about trip to a race in Belgium, wasn't it? Really, it still is. Trust me. If there is any nation on this earth that should understand international meddling - from either side of the conquered-conquerer divide, that nation is Belgium. In its relatively brief and modern history as a single political entity, Belgium has served as both a brutally exploitive colonizing power to a vast swath of Africa and as little more than a speed bump to German armies on their way to France. Germany and France (funnily enough) are now in at least occasional agreement and guide a lot of European Union policy - which (also funnily enough) emanates from EU headquarters in Brussels, Belgium. The Sheep were pissed off that the hosts had gotten political. Children hate to hear "I told you so," from those who have enough history to know better.

Politics aside, the Belgians were glad to have us. All the race volunteers I met went out of their way to help you if asked. They even tracked down some extra posters for me at the most casual request. Civil servants, including railroad employees, were likewise patient, friendly, and generally quite tolerant of visitors' constant molestation of their native tongue. And any place that puts Jupiler beer in the vending machines, right next to the condoms, a few machines over from the waffles, can't be all bad.

Maybe we Americans weren't that bad either. We bought plenty of chocolate, beer, and other gifts. We stood out like sore thumbs, but at least a few of us took some time to see parts of the country and find out something about their culture. Much of said culture seems to involve constant pursuit by the devil, a.k.a. taxes, according to one man we met on the train back from a day in the largely preserved medieval city of Brugge. Taxes must have been a long term concern in Flanders, because earlier that day we'd seen the old treasury of Brugge, which is safely tucked about two-thirds of the way up the more than 300 stairs in the 13th century town-hall clock tower. At least I felt slightly less ignorant for having gone, without any package tour, to see the country where I'd just raced.

The race itself had been well organized, though it might have been nice to know that close finishes would be decided visually, not by timing chips. I lost by a chest. Really. The Swiss guy sprinting beside me leaned across the finish line on the raised platform; I didn't. I did a hell of a lot better on a flat course than I would have expected, so I wasn't too down. Maybe it had something to do with the cobblestones, tight spots, and quasi-legal drafting on the bike segment. Touches like those made the course complicated and nuanced. The Sheep were again pissed. Maybe that's why a few of them half-jokingly suggested that I had lost to the Swiss guy because of some anti-American bias by the judges. Those Euros can be tricky, they seemed to say. They might mislead you, or maybe even con you into buying shoddy textiles or sub-standard package tours. (No wait, that's the Americans. I'm getting all confused again.)

Regardless, the course had not been the anonymous office park to which the Sheep had become accustomed. It was not bland or familiar. The restaurants were not of the usual chains, though each basically served the same tavern food as its neighbors. (Travelers' hint: The macaroni and cheese "met hesp," or with bacon, is usually pretty good.) In short, it came back to the crux of the problem for the Sheep: Belgium wasn't America. Anyone who saw the jumbo screen on the Geel cathedral, beaming in pictures from the helicopter that followed the elite race - as opposed to the error-filled paragraph of "coverage" at the back of the local sports pages back home - could have told you that.

But that's supposed to be the beauty of foreign travel. Other countries are, well, other countries. They have pasts, presents, and futures that are sometimes vastly different from ours, sometimes remarkably similar to ours, but always their own. Americans are not the only ones to forget this.

Elements of the British team had a penchant for post-race, alcohol-fueled rowdiness that occasionally came a bit too close to reinforcing nasty soccer-hooligan stereotypes; they even had and unofficial team "bar crawl" following the race. I also met a South African man, whom I won't describe further, who candidly told me how he was sure that the street-crime problem in his country was caused almost wholly by "the blacks." (I wonder if he thought that way of his black team mates.) Most cultures have something, even if marginal, that reflects badly on them in their international reputations. Those ugly stereotyped images show up like 1,000-watt neon signs in a cornfield when citizens are traveling abroad.

The Sheep represented the "ugly American" stereotype, with extra neon wattage. Some Americans (largely incorrectly) see the French as dirty, lazy, or weak. The French, in turn, see us (largely incorrectly) as arrogant, ignorant cowboys. Neither view bears out against the majority of the nation it purports to represent. But one view - the "ugly American" - has far too many representatives abroad. I saw no "surrender monkeys" on the race course, but I saw a little too much swagger, wrapped in way too many stars and stripes, walking around registration.

You could say that I have no pride in my nation because I choose not to shove my flag under someone else's face. I'd rather put my pride to work on the field of competition. I'd rather show my solidarity by helping others than by wearing a matching outfit.

The Dutch and the Belgians also take pride in their social institutions and their cultural and artistic heritages (forget Mike Myers' jokes). They have national pride and a sense of solidarity. But they recognize that there are other peoples and ways of life. The follow a modern European outlook (forget Donald Rumsfeld's wish-they-were-jokes) of international community and diplomacy that has, almost miraculously, brought together the continent that spawned the two worst wars of human history. Maybe that's why, as hard as I looked, I never saw any border markings between the two countries out the window of the trains I took from and to the airport. And maybe that's why they - and I - pity what's happened to the United States of America, which in a previous life helped them to see the future they're approaching - a future we've locked out of our unilateralist Sheep pen.

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by Sparky Ion, November 2004