The Climb: The Autobiography
Page 14
Paris–Roubaix
Saturday in Holland. Sunday in France.
It is five minutes before 11.00 a.m. on Sunday now, 13 April 2008. We mill around in the Place Charles de Gaulle in Compiègne. There are 198 of us. All clean for now. The locals smile at us as if we were farm boys waiting in line to go off to the trenches. They’ve seen real war in these villes though. This is their fun, conceived in 1896.
Welcome to the Hell of the North. Paris–Roubaix.
The posters for this year’s race show a rider coming towards the camera with a big apocalyptic sky above him and a long straight of pavé beneath him. ‘La Dure Des Dures’ is the slogan, ‘The Hardest of the Hard’. When they ran this race for the first time it took the German Josef Fischer 9 hours and 17 minutes to ride the 280 kilometres from Paris to Roubaix. For some reason (perhaps the thrill of seeing a German suffer) they decided to hold the race again and again after that.
All this history is new to me.
Cobbles and more cobbles is the forecast. Expect widespread cobbles after Arenberg. The clear sky itself is a small mercy. Nothing more. The roads are a little damp from yesterday’s showers but heavy rain is what gives the Hell of the North its most lasting flavour. Sean Kelly, an old warrior of these rides, once said that a Paris–Roubaix without rain is not a Paris–Roubaix. I can live with that. I’ll take the dry, bland version any day. Yesterday’s drizzle will keep down the dust we might have been swallowing today.
When I woke up this morning I didn’t feel like a professional cyclist. I felt hungover. The race and the travel yesterday subtracted something from me. I’m not sure what is gone or what remains. My insides felt like they had spent time in a blender. My hands were sore from gripping the handlebars on the pavé. I asked some of the guys this morning, ‘What do we do for our hands? We’re riding Paris– Roubaix today, what do you guys do?’ I’m asking because the gloves don’t seem to offer sufficient cushioning against the expected battering.
Every rider had his own theory. I was sorry I had asked. One guy tut-tutted. He didn’t use gloves. The more padding between the glove and the handlebars, the greater the friction generated. The greater the friction, the greater the chafing, and so on until the chafing causes sparks which cause bike and rider to burst into flames.
Other contributors had come up with varieties of home-made padding and strapping which they would put underneath their gloves. Simple.
I thought that sounded good. It made more sense. I taped my hands before getting on the bus. I felt like a boxer. On the bus as we drove here I looked down at my hands again and again. Like a boxer, except I wasn’t just going into the ring. I was going into war.
Off we go. All 198 of us. We know that many of us won’t finish. That’s the point. Attrition and suffering.
I have learned a couple of things about these sorts of races since coming to Europe. One. I don’t like them as much as I like stage races and mountains. Two. The meek shall inherit the broom wagon. So, if there is a breakaway, go with it. If there is a gap, barrel into it. The stretches of cobble aren’t quite the hell they are made out to be, but you need to position well before you hit them. If somebody wants to pass you, make his life hard, very hard. Today I shall not be meek. My flappy-bird wide-elbows style will keep me near the front of the group for when we hit the pavé in the second half of the race. That’s the plan.
The legends of Paris–Roubaix just add to the allure. Two years ago George Hincapie was gripping his handlebars so hard over the cobbles that they came away in his hands – literally detached from the bike. As a metaphor for the race, Hincapie holding his useless handlebars as the bike skittered about the pavé is perfect.
They abandoned the race for obvious reasons during World War One and Two but started back even before it was reasonable to do so.
The ‘Hell of the North’ tag came from a report by two journalists sent out to recce the course in 1919. The war had claimed the lives of two men who had been winners of four previous editions of Paris– Roubaix: three to Octave Lapize and one to François Faber. The journalists, Victor Breyer and Eugène Christophe, drove the course. Breyer described ‘shell pieces one after the other with no gaps, outlines of trenches, barbed wire cut into one thousand pieces … nothing but desolation. The shattered trees looked vaguely like skeletons, the paths had collapsed and been potholed or torn away by shells … here, this really is the hell of the north.’
Recce duly done, they resumed with the organization of the race immediately.
Next time around they didn’t even wait for the Second World War to finish. In 1944 a French rider, Jean Robic, fell and cracked his skull on the famous cobbles. The legends and the stories kept coming though. Fausto Coppi won in 1950 after chasing down two escapees from the pack then taking an orange from his pocket and eating it as he encouraged his two rivals to head off again. He would catch them up, he said. And he did. Coppi rode the last 100 kilometres all alone.
Two years later, though, in maybe the most famous race of them all, Coppi’s genius just couldn’t shake Rik Van Steenbergen. The two entered the velodrome in a state of exhaustion and Coppi lost Paris– Roubaix in a sprint to the line. Van Steenbergen was, of course, Belgian.
The history of crashes and wounds is just as long. In 1998 Johan Museeuw crashed in Arenberg and his wounded leg became gangrenous so quickly that he almost lost it. He came back to win the race another couple of times. Museeuw was Belgian too.
Bernard Hinault once described this race as bullshit and a con. He won the thing in 1981 though. That was a day when he fell seven times and ran over a small dog. At one point he ended up having to put his bike on his shoulders so he could run past a commissaire’s vehicle. His dues paid, he competed once more, but never did Paris– Roubaix again after 1982.
If Hinault could ride through the baby heads and the bullshit, so can I. So must I. It’s a rite of passage. An observance. A pilgrimage that every rider should do at least once. I love suffering and this is the place of high suffering. This race, one of the five monuments of the classic season, is also part of the soul of European cycling.
When today ends, in the old velodrome in Roubaix, there is a communal shower block with cubicles that reach shoulder high, and each cubicle bears a plaque with the name of a previous winner. We are told by men with shaking heads that this time, for the first time ever, the water will be hot. They tell us this despising our modern-day softness.
On the road there are breaks from early on. Nothing serious. Nobody panicking. One group goes but by the time they get to the pavé at Vertain they are among us again. Still, even the first pavé sectors do some serious damage to our numbers. It isn’t hell though. You can figure it out. Today, at least, the race doesn’t live down to its name.
I get one puncture early on but recover quickly. I try and try for about 100 kilometres to follow team orders: ‘Get into a break.’ Two or three of us have been told to do this for the first half of the race. There are no really serious breaks, though, until three guys get away from us a short while before we reach Troisvilles. They go but I am not a part of it. I miss the break. Now it’s a different game. I’ve already spent a lot of energy trying to get into the breakaways and I’ve missed the serious one. I’ve just got to survive as long as I can.
For nearly 100 kilometres there are no cobbles at all, then just a few patches, at Quiévy, at Quérénaing and more at Haveluy. From Arenberg to Roubaix, however, it’s lumps and bumps as often as not. Most of the 50 kilometres or so of pavé lie between here and Roubaix.
It takes the race over 160 kilometres to reach Trouée d’Arenberg. Paris–Roubaix didn’t always come along this route, but when they discovered a long-forgotten stretch of pavé in the forest here, they decided this was too good to miss. This is where the cobbles cease to be a novelty. The difficult patches of cobbles on Paris–Roubaix are rated like hotels and three stretches are of five-star difficulty. This is the first of those three and the most eerie. The pavé is three metr
es wide, fringed by grass, and then there is a sheer wall of birches and cypresses, towering so high that it feels like twilight in early afternoon.
The stones here have been in the ground since Napoleonic times. There were mines under this forest too, but they have gone now. Arenberg, according to the wisdom of the elders, is not where you win Paris–Roubaix but certainly where you can lose it.
Not for me though. By the time we get there I have already lost the race.
On the way to Arenberg, the three riders out front are still hanging tough like desperados, ahead of the posse of about sixty chasers. From Haveluy, the last cobbles before Arenberg, the pace increases. Two kilometres before Arenberg, there are inevitable casualties. A big crash. Bikes and bodies are scattered everywhere. And this is where my race effectively finishes.
I am not far behind our team leader, Baden Cooke, a tough Aussie with a talent for sprinting. Baden gets a puncture. I am nearest, so I sacrifice my back wheel to him and wait for the support car as he speeds off. A small thing.
I feel okay, I’ve done something pretty useful today. I was right there when the lead man punctured so I gave him my wheel. At this stage there were only two or three of us left on the road anyway. Robbie Hunter had packed it in on the first cobbled section and got into the car. He wasn’t feeling up to it today and he said he wasn’t going to suffer for nothing. Inwardly, I smiled. Suffering for nothing – so many times I’ve thought that’s exactly what I do.
By the time the car comes, Baden has joined up with a group of about thirty riders who will come out of Arenberg in pursuit of the three leaders. My hands are battered from gripping the handlebars but I decide that I might as well go after the group.
As luck would have it, Daryl Impey rides past just as I am getting going again. Daryl got dropped on the last pavé section. I am intent on getting back to the race though. My war isn’t over.
Daryl is surprised. ‘The race is gone, Froomey. Don’t worry about it. There’ll be other days, mate.’
‘No. I want to catch them.’
So off I hare after the group, leaving Daryl behind shaking his head at me. Not for the first time.
The race comes on to another stretch of cobbles and having waited for our team car I now find myself behind a line of support cars. The group is on the far side of the cars. I think to myself that maybe I can use the cars to move up again and I start making my way through the convoy. All of a sudden there is a screeching of brakes and a car shudders to a halt just in front of me.
I am not even holding my handlebars by this point. I am perching on the saddle and resting my arms on top of the bars, trying to guide them as opposed to holding them with my hands, which are extremely tender and sensitive. There is no feeling left in my hands. Pain from gripping the bars through all the vibrations has surrendered to numbness from the cold. With my hands largely redundant, I don’t even attempt to brake. I ride at speed straight into the back of one of the commissaire cars.
Another day; another commissaire.
‘Hello again!’
I tumble over the side of the boot, sliding off the car and rolling on to the grass. I look out on to the cobbles and see that I have damaged the front wheel of the bike pretty badly. I have to wait for the team car once more and change the front wheel. By the time that is done I will be too far back.
Of course, before the team car arrives Daryl Impey comes upon the scene again. He finds the young sapper whom he last saw speeding back to the action now lying on the grass with a madly bent front wheel in his hand. He explodes with laughter and shakes his head again. I realize – again – that I’ve still got a lot to learn.
The car comes but Daryl and I must ride on for another 20 kilometres. There is no choice; the car is full. Of 198 starters only 115 riders will finish the race and all the cars are full.
We ride through the Arenberg Forest and I remember thinking that even a Belgian couldn’t love the cobbles in this tree tunnel. They are large and really uneven – almost designed to do you damage. The Friends of Paris–Roubaix love and preserve this stretch for that very reason. It is treacherous. The top riders hate and avoid this place for the same reason. No summer contender wants to catch a gangrenous leg on Napoleonic cobbles in April.
Daryl and I push on through another couple of pavé sections. The feeling of being two soldiers making our way home after the war is hard to avoid – this landscape is so evocative, so unchanged. Eventually we get to the second feed zone where our soigneurs, surely with space in the car, are waiting.
Our soigneur that weekend was a temp whom the team had hired for the day. He had brought his friends along in his car. What sort of a soigneur would fill his car with friends on a workday among the pavés of northern France? A Belgian sort.
Our Belgian soigneur looks at me and Daryl, tattered and mud-splashed veterans of Paris–Roubaix by now. He shrugs his shoulders, gets back into the car and leaves.
We sit there asking each other the same question: ‘Well, what now, genius?’
A couple of graduates from two of the posher schools in Johannesburg, sitting by the side of the road in France. We respect this race but by now we don’t really want to ride another 60 kilometres of it. There are still a lot more cobbles and the stuff underneath my gloves, the taping which made me feel like a boxer this morning, has wadded and grown dirty and chafed my hands raw. By the end, when it was just the two of us chugging along, even though I had been trying to steer the bike with my elbows on the cobbles, the jostling which the bike was taking was causing my forearms to get all bruised too. Paris– Roubaix, I’ve had enough, thanks.
Finally the sweep vehicle comes into sight, the broom wagon, with a trailer on the back to throw the bikes into. We throw ourselves into a couple of seats on the bus amidst the brotherhood of the wasted. Two mzungus, a long way from home.
Strangely, I didn’t dislike the day. I was sorry it ended. I liked the way that it was a fight for position before the pavé. On the cobbles themselves there was pain but it was almost like a time trial. You got in your line and you just rode it.
And the pain and suffering? A pleasure.
I remember sending Robbie Nilsen an excited email afterwards saying that Paris–Roubaix was just like the intervals we used to do at home. An interval every time you hit the pavé, a 20-minute threshold effort over the cobbles.
It was a taste of European cycling like nothing else.
Oh, and Paris–Roubaix 2008 was won by Tom Boonen. A Belgian. What did you expect!
April 2008. Another week in the life.
20 April: Amstel Gold Classic. Finish 139th.
23 April: La Flèche Wallonne. Finish 115th.
27 April: Liège–Bastogne–Liège, La Doyenne (‘The Oldest’).
Today. Finish 84th. Shattered.
I’m 160 kilometres into the Liège, wondering what all the fuss is about.
Then we ride down a hill and turn right. Suddenly there is a race on. I’m not in it.
Three times this week, in the Amstel, in the Flèche and now in Liège, my objective has been to get in the first key breakaway. In all three of them that just seems impossible. I ride the narrow roads. I get battered by the crosswinds. I get to the front when nobody cares about who is at the front.
I know next to nothing about these races or how they unravel. I hardly know who is who. As an amateur, I dipped into the Tour de France on television. Otherwise I have lived in my own little world of training and nutrition. Paris–Roubaix was a revelation. This is a week of three revelations.
When the race starts, through those early miles, I cover the waterfront and go with all those little moves. In the phoney war I am a phoney hero. I cling like a limpet to breaks that go nowhere.
A rule of thumb: you wouldn’t want to be a part of any break that I am a part of.
When a real break opens up, I can’t get back to the front.
Again and again I have been spat all the way to the back of the bunch. I try to move up but riders
seem to close in around me wordlessly and I just get spat out again.
The roads are skinny and crowded. I find it really difficult to be anywhere at the front of the bunch when I have to be. This war for position, it’s something you don’t really see when you are watching a race on TV. It’s like being in a washing machine. You go up the middle. Guys come up on either side. You get thrown backwards until you are so far behind that you try to go up the outside yourself.
That works and you get to the front. Then they come round you and spit you out the back again.
No respect. Not yet.
This afternoon after 160 kilometres I never see the front of the race again.
Afterwards, I ask Robbie Hunter about this: ‘How do I stay in the race until the race starts?’
He looks at me like a disappointed father. ‘There’s no secret. You have to fight.’ He says it in quite an aggressive way. ‘You’re not in fucking Kansas now, Dorothy. You have got to fight.’
‘Fine.’
For the next few weeks I am always looking for Robbie Hunter. Tracking him and following him. Sticking to him. Shoving people off his wheel if I have to. No backing off. Earning position. Seizing respect.
Try to move me off that wheel if you want. I’ll be asking you, what’s your fucking problem? I’ll be taking elbows, giving elbows, come what may. It’s not me, but it has to be me. I’ll be there. You’ll be testing me. I’ll be testing you.
Learning the rules of Fight Club.