by David Millar
There will often be a journalist or two with us. Little interviews will be done, photos taken, then we’ll go and find our bikes among the ten that are lined up against the side of the bus (we always have two reserve riders in case of an accident during recon). We have special bikes for Roubaix that have larger clearance between the wheels and the frame so we can ride larger tyres that can handle the abuse that awaits them (28mm compared to our usual 25mm). It also allows us to be prepared for the eventuality of mud if it rains, because the bigger clearance will prevent mud getting clogged between the frame and the wheel. We’ve given these bikes the highly technical and innovative name of ‘Mud Bikes’.
Some riders will place an extra brake lever on their handlebars next to the stem, because on the cobblestones the comfiest position is to grip the top flat section of the bars, where normally there is no brake lever. In Roubaix you never know what’s going to happen in front of you, so some prefer to at least try to give themselves a chance. There will be extra rolls of bar tape, and some riders will even add some cushioning underneath that, all in an attempt to absorb the relentless shocks created by the cobbles.
As important as all those details are, they mean nothing if you don’t have strong wheels and the right tyre pressure. Our usual lightweight wheels would be pummelled to pieces, so we use special wheels that have more spokes and stronger rims, which means not only will they survive the beating but they’ll also have a higher chance of withstanding damage from a crash. Most of the equipment we use in modern racing is so lightweight that one crash is all that’s required for it to be ruined; Paris–Roubaix puts more stress on equipment than multiple crashes, and that’s assuming you don’t crash.
Tyres
The tyre pressure is Andreas Klier’s domain. Nobody questions his decision – not even the head mechanic, Geoff. The tyres we use are not those of our sponsors, they’re artisan creations – most teams choosing those from the French maker François Marie, or FMB (the B standing for boyaux, French for tubular). They’re wider and tougher yet also more supple, the finishing touch being the traditional natural cream-coloured side walls. If you’re into tyres, these are beauties. I used to buy my time-trial tyres from François Marie, as he also makes lightweight silk tyres which really are something special, although they’re so delicate they wouldn’t even make it to the first section of cobbles in Roubaix.
These handmade tyres are one of the few things left in modern cycling that hark back to an earlier age, a time when artisans holed up in nondescript barns or outhouses were the go-to for the latest and best tech. Nowadays nearly everything we use is generic, almost all churned out by giant factories in China or Taiwan, whereas there is something so special about the feel, smell and look of these beautifully crafted pieces of cotton and rubber. It’s ironic that perhaps the most carefully constructed and cherished piece of equipment we use all year will have the shortest life, because each tyre will race only once in its brief existence.
We run approximately 6-bar pressure – maybe a bit less on the front, and even lower in both when wet. The larger diameter of the tyre means there’s more air volume, allowing us to run these lower pressures. The lower pressure gives us more shock absorption, and the wider diameter also gives us a larger surface area at the point of contact between the tyre and the ground, which means we’re not ricocheting around so much and have more grip. It’s also much more forgiving on the bike and therefore the body.
Cobbles
Nowadays nearly every team will supply their racers with this ‘Mud Bike’ set-up for Roubaix; the difference lies in how it is used. Having the set-up doesn’t mean you’ll go fast – ultimately, riding cobbles is an art form. It’s not something I have ever truly mastered. I’ve had glimpses of it, and was certainly never bad, but I could never compare myself to the specialists. They appear to float over them with an ease that isn’t fair to the rest of us, and tricks many – especially the fan on the sofa – into thinking, ‘It doesn’t look that bad.’
Every cycling fan must go and watch Paris–Roubaix one day, and take their bike to have a go on some of the famous sectors. Only then can you feel what it’s really like. Only the actual reality of riding the pavé can do it justice. Roubaix specialists tend to have been good at it since their first attempt; they just got it immediately. In that sense it’s more of a feel, a natural ability rather than a learnt one.
Every recon starts the same way: we set off as a team with lead and following cars and photographers or TV on accompanying motorbikes. The first couple of sectors we stick together, stopping a couple of times to adjust tyre pressures, because each one of us has a different style of riding and a different weight. There’s always one rider who is totally neurotic and spends the whole day trying to find the unicorn of tyre pressures that will make them fly – which is normally a sign that they’re not going to fly.
In this year’s edition there are twenty-eight cobbled sectors totalling fifty-one kilometres of a 257-kilometre race. They’re listed in reverse order, so it’s a countdown from the first sector in Troisvilles (ninety-eight kilometres) to the final symbolic one in Roubaix (256 kilometres). Our recon will take us from Sector 19 (153 kilometres) to Sector 4 (240 kilometres), these are the eighty-seven kilometres that matter in the race. Unlike the definitive moments of Milan– San Remo or Flanders, Roubaix is a protracted war.
Each of the five Monuments in cycling has its iconic moments: in Milan–San Remo it’s the Cipressa and Poggio climbs; in Flanders the Kwaremont and Patersberg; Liège–Bastogne–Liège has the Côte de la Redoute and the Côte de Saint-Nicolas; while the Tour of Lombardy features the Madonna del Ghisallo. There’s also the Carrefour de l’Arbre in Paris–Roubaix. But for me the most memorable of all these is the Roubaix’s Trouée d’Arenberg (the English speakers among us refer to it as the Arenberg Forest, making it sound like something out of The Lord of the Rings). It doesn’t look like much – a 2.4-kilometre dead-straight road cut through a forest – but for a pro cyclist it is the most brutal 2.4 kilometres they’ll ever race along. There is no hiding – in fact, if you try to hide you’ll take a hiding. The race to be at the front entering the forest makes the Scheldeprijs positioning battle look like child’s play, because although we’re 100 kilometres from the finish, this is where the race finale begins.
There is almost always a decent-sized peloton entering Arenberg, but by the time it leaves it’s in pieces. The compact group that enters the forest is stretched out and broken up over those 2.4 kilometres. Even those at the front will eventually find themselves beaten into submission, because Arenberg is one of only three five-star sectors in the race. All twenty-eight sectors are categorised, one star being the easiest, five the hardest. There’s actually only one one-star sector, and that is the symbolic and specially made stretch a kilometre before entering the famous Roubaix velodrome. This is probably what people think of when picturing cobblestones, but it’s actually quite smooth. None of the other sectors are like that.
The easiest way to traverse each sector is to go fast; the speed will allow you to skim over the stones. Well, that’s not really true, but in comparison to what it feels like going slow it makes them feel like beach pebbles rather than ski moguls. The other problem, and the reason why positioning is so important, is the fact that there is only ever one good line on cobbles. Normally it’s the central crown, as that’s the strip of cobbles that hasn’t had to endure the transit weight of decades of vehicles. It feels almost counter-intuitive to ride the centre like this, and there are always some riders who will decide it’s a bad idea and instead try to ride in the gutter, or even off-road in the hard-pack dirt. It may seem safer there, but ultimately you run a much higher risk of a puncture due to the stones, dirt and potholes.
Arenberg doesn’t even have a central crown: it’s just shit cobbles the whole way, with one particularly bad section where it feels like you’re being jack-hammered. It’s slightly false: flat uphill means you’re losing speed the whole time and,
if you’re caught up behind a crash or a slow rider, you’ll lose even more speed. Only the very strongest riders can recover from that sort of situation, because once you lose speed you’re not getting it back.
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In the dust with @millarmind
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In recon only the newbies actually ride on the cobbles through Arenberg; those of us with a bit more experience ride on the dirt path adjacent to it knowing it will do us more harm than good to ride on these harshest of cobbles in training. Unfortunately the dirt path won’t be available on race day because, as in Flanders, they will barrier the road off, giving us no choice but to be beat up by the cobblestones.
From the Arenberg on we start getting more animated, testing ourselves. For the first time in my career I’m actually having fun on the cobbles. It feels effortless – even my hands are fine, whereas all the young guys already have blisters after only half the recon. I’m so relaxed that I’m barely gripping my bars, something that I’d never mastered before. It genuinely feels like I’m floating over the pavé.
Sebastian Langeveld and I decide to ride the last two sectors at full speed. Even Seba can’t stay with me on our last sector of the day, the Carrefour de l’Arbre. Our bus is waiting, parked at the exit of this, the last sector. I’m the first rider at the team bus at the end of the recon. This is unprecedental. It appears I’ve finally hit form a few days before the last race of my final Classics campaign. Better late than never.
Don’t Fuck This Up
I can’t retire from pro racing without ever having finished Roubaix. I’d never forgive myself. I genuinely don’t know if I can make it to Roubaix, but I keep telling myself I’ve never felt better on cobbles. It is truly now or never. Don’t fuck this up.
Our plan for Roubaix is similar to what it was in Flanders in that Sebastian is once again leader, although he shares this responsibility with past Roubaix winner Johan Vansummeren. Tyler Farrar is having one of the best Classics seasons of his career, so we are giving him carte blanche and I am to make a call later in the race as to whether we back him or use him up to help Sebastian or Johan.
The race tactics are fairly simple in Roubaix: cover the early attacks and then prepare ourselves for the two red alarms in the first 152 kilometres and then a dark red alarm for the entry to Arenberg, followed by a dark red zone from 202 to 242 kilometres. We are to look after our leaders – unlike in every other race this involves riding behind them in key moments rather than in front. Andreas has given us strict instructions to make sure we are on the wheel of Sebastian or Johan whenever we hit a pavé sector, so we are ready to help them if they puncture or crash and don’t hinder them if anything of the sort happens to us.
Apart from the final, symbolic sector, all other twenty-seven sectors will be covered by team support (in easy-to-spot team jerseys) with spare wheels and bottles. This will be the biggest logistical nightmare of the day. While Andreas plans tactics and speaks to riders, Geert is organising the team of vehicles, staff and volunteers whose sole job it is to be at their allocated sectors when they need to be – we’d had the same in the Tour of Flanders, with support at the top of nearly every hellingen. The reason for this is that the team cars are often too far behind the race to support the riders quickly enough to keep them in the race. Paris–Roubaix is the only race where the neutral race support is serviced by motorbikes that can weave their way through the carnage and stay near the front of the race where they’re needed.
Hitching a ride in one of the team support cars for Roubaix is one of the best spectating opportunities available in pro cycling. I know this from experience, having been picked up on the sidelines in 2009 with a broken collarbone (even then I wanted to go and watch a bike race). For this reason, and the fact she knows how important the race is to me, my wife Nicole has come up to watch – a rare thing considering she knows how much of a dick I can be at races. Having family or friends from my non-racing life visit me at races is strange. I get confused about who I’m supposed to pay more attention to. Unlike many, though, I do care about everybody on the team. I worry if somebody is having a bad time. I want to fix it. Similarly I get angry if somebody is disruptive in a negative or hurtful way. I have no fear of confrontation, which has served me for better and worse in equal measure.
Mechanics
The mechanics are the members of staff I get on best with. I’ll often bring a tray of beers to the truck in the evening when they’re the last members of the team still working, and sit and have a chat with them in the quiet and dark of the car park. Everybody else seems to forget about them. As I’ve got older I’ve always made an effort to tell my mechanic when my bike is working flawlessly – which means almost every day. The length of my career has allowed me to see trends. I’ve begun to notice things that I’d have taken to be anomalous moments if I’d just been passing through. One of these is the way mechanics always get told when things are going wrong, and very rarely when things have gone right. I’ve always thought it weird that they’re treated as the bottom of the food chain when theirs is one of the most important jobs on the team. Then there’s the way we take for granted that, when we wake up in our hotel rooms, the first thing we hear through our window is the truck compressor running and the compression hose hissing. Mechanics are the first up and the last down, nearly every day. Most pro cyclists will never wake up before their mechanics; they’ll spend a career not noticing them already down in the car park at the team truck getting the bikes and cars prepped, often before sunrise; or that once the race is finished and we’ve had our massage and been down for dinner and returned to our hotel room and bed that they’ll finally be putting our bikes back into the truck for the night, ready to repeat the cycle the next morning. It’s easy to forget that they’re at the hotel with our bikes when we arrive from whichever airport the day before the race. Then, the moment the race finishes and we leave in a mad rush to the airport to get home to our families, it’s the mechanics who are left cleaning our bikes and packing the truck, with at least another day of driving ahead of them to get back to the service course where they will then have to unpack the truck. It’s a metier far harder than being a pro bike racer.
Geoff Brown knows no other way. Geoff is an old-school pro mechanic and it goes without saying that he’s as hard as nails, because for the majority of the time it’s a thankless job. His hardness comes from his upbringing – he’s not only a gentleman, he’s also a gentle man, hence the fact he’s lasted so long in such a hard job. He thinks it’s fine, though. But that probably has something to do with him coming from Ottawa, where winters can kill you if you wear the wrong clothes. He spends the majority of his life on the road and has seen almost everything there is to see. In and among the twenty-one Tours he’s done, he even saw a man win the Tour de France seven times.
This evening, the night before my last Classic, and Geoff’s nineteenth Roubaix, I go down to the truck with a bunch of beers to have a final look at my bike and say thank you in advance. There’s an incongruous calm about the scene; the bikes are all ready to go, an air of serenity permeates the air. Geoff is standing there with his apron on, packing the last little things back into the many drawers that riddle the rear of the truck; Alex Banyay is sitting in a fold-out fishing chair smoking a Marlboro Red, knowing there’s no point in helping Geoff as he’ll just tell him to sit back down, like every other time. Alex never leaves Geoff, though, even if Geoff tells him he’s finished. They are near inseparable, which makes little sense as I don’t think they have anything in common except their love of the job. Then again, that’s probably the best reason, considering how all-encompassing their job is.
The easiest way to describe Alex is as a badass California skater/surfer. But there’s nothing zen about him – he’s like a coiled spring, tattooed up, permanently smoking, headphones rarely off his head; his fashion is the way California is supposed to be, not the diffused rip-off we’re all used to. He wears clothes the way skaters and surfers who actua
lly skate and surf wear them. It looks cool, he means it, there’s not one iota of wannabe about him. He doesn’t look loose, he looks a little fucking dangerous.
Alex is the mechanic assigned to my bikes. Geoff made sure of that the moment he realised he could trust him (I never asked). Alex doesn’t do every race with me, but whenever he does nobody questions the fact my bikes are his property. We’ve grown to become friends over the last years of my career. That doesn’t happen so often between riders and mechanics, which is strange, as it’s such an important relationship, but I have good relations with both Geoff and Alex. This is made even odder by the fact that the two of them tend to avoid making friends. I take it as a privilege to have been let in.
The mechanics all take a beer and they pull out another fishing chair from one of the many compartments in the truck for me to sit with them. Alex is opening the beers and passing them around. Without even asking he passes one in my direction. ‘Oh, man, I better not tonight,’ I say, unconvincingly. Alex just looks at me not pulling back the beer: ‘Fuck you, Dave, one beer isn’t going to make a difference. We both know that.’ I can’t help but smile and shake my head. He’s right, of course. ‘Fuck, I know that, Alex, just let me pretend I’m being a pro.’ He smiles right back at me, ‘OK, you better be at the front tomorrow.’
Farewell, Roubaix
The nerves I’ve had in the build-up to the race dissipate the moment we roll out of Compiègne after the start. Immediately I’m feeling good. I surf the front of the bunch to make sure we don’t miss a serious move, and then settle into the peloton and switch to energy conservation mode, spinning small gears, staying out of the wind, eating and drinking and trying my best to relax.