VIDEO. Ceiling of hotel room thunders on Oliver Naesen and teammate in the middle of the night: “Luckily not on my head, otherwise I would be in a very ugly condition”

It is an unlikely but true story. Oliver Naesen was sleeping soundly in his hotel room in Germany when suddenly thirty kilograms of plaster fell from the ceiling. “If it had been on my head, it would have been something different,” he said to his girlfriend and mother of two, Dorien.

It happened in Frankfurt, the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, where Oliver Naesen had to drive Eschborn-Frankfurt. “I was in the room with Stan Dewulf who was riding his first race of the season. It was after midnight when suddenly the plaster fell from the ceiling. I was frightened to death. It made so much noise that caregivers from our team also jumped out of their beds and came into the hallway to see what it was. A large piece also fell on my ankle, which was scraped, blue and somewhat swollen. It was the only part of my body that wasn’t under the covers. My teammate had pushed his bed back a bit. It was lucky that I hadn’t done that, otherwise the adhesive might have ended up on my head. Fortunately not, because there were quite sharp edges.”

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White powder

“On the other hand, it was on my right leg, my good leg. I called the front desk and said that some adhesive had fallen from the ceiling. They came rushing up and didn’t know what they saw. We were assigned a different room and our stay was free. But I always sleep for free when I stay in a hotel for a race on behalf of the team (laughs). The colleagues had to laugh when they saw us coming to the breakfast table in white powder the morning of the race.”

“In the end I wasn’t that surprised that this happened, because when I was doing some stretching exercises on my bed before going to sleep, I had already said to ‘Wulfke’: ‘Look at the ceiling, how badly it is stuck here!’ Without daring to think that this would happen. Let’s put it this way: the ceiling came down at night and I hit the ceiling during the race (smile). In the future I will keep an eye on the ceiling even more than I already did. As a rider you encounter all kinds of things, but this was not everyday,” Naesen summarized his nocturnal adventure in Frankfurt.