Exactly a week after Marcel, 33, hit a rusty wire on his mountain bike, he once again found obstacles in his path. This time someone cut down a tree and put it across the road. “It must be the same culprit.”
A week after opening his nose to the iron wire running across the road, Marcel de Kock is back on his mountain bike, in the woods near Ossendrecht. “I actually check in here every day after work,” he says. “If I can still find the iron wire somewhere. Whether there is still something hanging somewhere.”
He couldn’t find any iron wires, but on Monday evening there was a tree stump across the road. Exactly where the wire was found last week. “Someone cut down a tree specifically for this,” he notes. “And a big tree, too. I think this was a good birch, six meters tall.”
He managed to get the logs out of the way again, but the stunned by the event still echoed in his voice. “I don’t understand this,” he says. “I saw while riding a bike that there was a tree on the road. Some branch or tree fell down and someone cut it down on the road. But I’ve never seen a new tree cut down for it.”
Marcel noticed the tree trunk in time on Monday evening. No additional injuries to him. His face is already recovering from some of the iron wire he encountered last week. He laughs: “I feel so bad from the anesthesia injection.” “But you’ll still see that wound on my face. It was a big hole.”
Marcel hopes to meet the perpetrator of wires and tree trunks one day. “I’m just curious who would do something like that.”
