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Road
July 2005
RIDING THE STONES
My Time on the Cobbles of Paris-Roubaix
By Andrew Vontz
Thanks to the VO2-Max Gone Wild! exploits of Lance Armstrong, the three-week long Tour De France is revered as one of the most brutal athletic challenges in the world. But Paris-Roubaix, a 160-mile, one-day race often contested in freezing rain on mud-slicked cobblestone roads in northern France, punishes racers so severely that it’s known as the Hell of the North. While the Tour favors emaciated all-arounders like Armstrong, Paris-Roubaix favors the peloton’s equivalent of plus-size models, classics experts who have the weight and strength to intimidate, dominate, and destroy on the cobbles. Since I picked up my first copy of Velonews sixteen years ago I’ve known that Paris Roubaix was a hardman’s race. But I had no idea how just how hard these men were until I threw a leg over the top tube of a Specialized Roubaix two days before this year’s edition of the race to ‘ride the stones’ as Euro pros are fond of saying. Some folks dream of riding the Champs Elysee on a Tour winning Livestrong replica bike. But my bike racing daydreams have always focused on the cobbles and fantasies of pedaling into the Roubaix velodrome alongside greats like Planckaert and Merckx and Moser and Musseuw and Van Petegem and Steve Bauer on the custom Eddie Merckx rig with a super laidback seat tube that he rode in the 1990 edition of the race. Now it was my turn to ride the route of legends.
The first 100 clicks of PR are ridden on normal roads before the suffering really beings on the first section of cobbles. This is where we would start our 47-mile tour of the course including five sections of cobbles. Michael Rich from Gerolsteiner, several former pros, and a gaggle of journalists were all along for the ride as part of a Specialized press camp to experience the new edition of their S-Works Roubaix, a bike with relaxed geometry and a carbon frame featuring elastomer dampers called Zertz built into the seatstays and forks to combat the teeth-rattling roads found in the race. Even though I’d stepped off a coach class flight from Los Angeles only ten hours earlier, I rubbed some tiger balm into my quads and hammies, pulled on my full finger gloves and tights as protection against the 40-degree temps, strapped on my Lotto-Davitamon Specialized Decibel helmet, and put on my best Full Metal Jacket war face. As Oakley’s globe-trotting PR deity Steve Blick is fond of saying, game on, brah. It was go time.
I’d been waiting for this day since I first read about the race. Belgium and Northern France looked flat, bleak as hell, and cold, conditions I was well acquainted with in my hometown of Kansas City, Missouri where it’s parka weather six months out of the year and 100 degrees the rest of the time. In my head, Missouri most closely resembled Belgium, the country that has produced more than 50 winners at Paris-Roubaix during the race’s 103-year history. At 6’2” and 175 pounds, I sometimes feel like the Kirstie Alley of bike racing. No, I’m not recovering coke addict and Scientologist with a food addiction, but when I toe the line against sinewy flyweights in the vert-heavy races that dominate the SoCal road racing calendar I always imagine that if God had smooshed the West coast with a glacier instead of tossing the San Andreas fault and oodles of mountains into the mix I’d have a better chance of winning.
As we pedaled off at a brisk tempo, the cold wind chapped my cheeks and the legs were heavy. The suffering, it had begun. After whipping off a few hard clicks and railing some roundabouts in quaint medieval towns, our fierce ride leaders switched settings from stun to kill and ramped up the pace to an oh-shit tempo as we headed into the first section of cobbles. Kevin Franks and the Specialized boys responded and suddenly the pace was so hot it felt like I was standing in front of a blowdryer. When my Ksyrium’s kissed the hard red bricks it felt like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket as a high-frequency vibration buzzed from my hands, feet, and backside up through my entire body. It was a feeling unlike anything I’ve ever experienced on a bike before and it made pedaling, let alone keeping up with the fierce tempo thrown down by Rogers and the boys from Specialized up front, insanely difficult. You don’t ride across cobbles so much as you bounce and as my wheels hop-scotched from stone to stone the jarring impact of each inch of forward movement felt more like running than cycling. I could feel the Nutella-smeared baguettes that I’d pounded in the van on the way to the ride descending through my lower intestine and knocking at the backdoor as I tried to hang onto the wheel in front of me. The driving crosswinds common to the landscape of northern France coupled with the riding surface meant conspired to jack my heart rate up well past my lactate threshold. Holding my position without blowing up was difficult enough but when I attempted to surge to the front of the group I had nothing more to give.
The French countryside may have been beautiful, but I wouldn’t have known it because I was busy trying to avoid the potholes, mud, and piles of calcified cow scat that dotted the cobbles like presents from Charlie along the Ho Chi Min trail. When the peloton rips onto this first section of cobbles in the race, they’re riding full-tilt packed shoulder-to-shoulder from one edge of the road to the other. To complicate matters, they follow in the wake of a train of dozens of exhaust-spewing vehicles that churn the dried mud and dung on the ground into a thick cloud of dust that reduces visibility to near zero. The cobbles are laid in a somewhat uniform fashion but they’re as uneven as the rotted-out teeth of a pelt-hunting explorer along the Oregon trail circa 1836 and more hole-y than the rags of a Calcutta beggar. Making it over just one section of cobbles without puncturing or French kissing brick is an accomplishment. Simply completing the 26 sectors of cobbles ranging from 300 to 3,700 meters in length that are included in the full race route without an equipment or rider malfunction is a remarkable accomplishment. As we exited the cobbles and rolled back onto a paved road, it quickly became apparent to me that winning this race requires not just peak form but luck. I’d always understood why Armstrong and Ullrich and the rest of the legends of the modern Tour avoided Paris-Roubaix. They ride very specific race programs in order to bring their fitness to its peak in June and riding a super hard one-day race like Paris-Roubaix in early April won’t aid in that effort. But I’d also been inclined to nod my head when I read a quote from Merckx or Hinault about how a true Great must win Paris-Roubaix if they want to call themselves champions. That sounds great in theory, but there’s more to it than that. One false move at Paris-Roubaix and you’re the winner of a one-way ticket to a hospital bed in rural northern France.
I ducked in behind the wheel of Gerolsteiner rider Michael Rich, a hardman if ever there was one, and tried to catch my breath. With thighs thicker than redwood trunks, shoulders broader than Ronnie Coleman’s, and hands bigger than meat hooks with sausage-width fingers, Rich looked the part of the classics hardman and he rode like one too. Paris-Roubaix favors men like Rich with thick builds because their bodies keep their bikes weighted on the cobbles and moving in a straight line. Flyweights bounce on the stones which is why you never saw Marco Pantani or Claudio Chiapucci contesting the race. Riding at the front of the paceline into a severe headwind along an unprotected stretch of road, Rich breathed through his nose as he pulled along the train with another ride leader, an ex-pro millimeters from his left shoulder telling him jokes. This was an easy spin for Rich, a six-time Paris-Roubaix finisher, and a reconnaissance mission for the true test on Sunday.
I’d barely had time to recover when we went plowing into the cobbles again and Rich and the boys turned up the heat. The legs they were not going so well. Franks countered from the rear and Specialized engineer Luc Callahan, the man who designed the Roubaix lit it up at the front while Neal Rogers from Velonews marked his move. I hung on but as we hit section four I stopped to change the tape in my video helmet cam and as I tried to chase back on to the rapidly disappearing peloton something went horribly amiss. My legs felt like wet concrete and it took everything I had to hit 14 miles per hour on the cobbles. I thought I’d feel better when I got to a paved road again but when I did, I looked down at my GPS and I still couldn’t push it past 14 miles per hour. Paris-Roubaix is about suffering and that’s what I did for the next twelve miles as I slogged along alone with the follow car idling along behind me. I couldn’t begin to comprehend the level of focus it must take to complete all 26 sections of cobbles during the six hours it typically takes to cover the 160-mile course. The cobbles don’t just jar your body—they rattle your brain and destroy your ability to think clearly as complete and utter mental fatigue consumes you on terrain that can’t be negotiated on autopilot. One overlapped wheel, one bad line selection, one accidental bump into the rider next to you, one nanosecond lapse in attention and your race is over. I’d ridden barely a quarter of the race’s distance and I was having trouble convincing myself to keep going. I’d run out of water miles earlier but kept pushing on along the crown of another sector of cobbles when I heard the sound of riders coming up on my right. I looked over my shoulder to see Viatcheslav Ekimov, George Hincapie, Tony Cruz, and two other riders in Discovery kit hammering along at an inhuman pace. But I didn’t stare for too long because there was a car behind me laying on the horn. I dove down to the strip of mud along the right side of the cobbles and tried to catch a draft off the Discovery train as their team director flew by me on the left.
The free ride didn’t help and my thirst finally got the best of me so I pulled over to grab another water bottle from the follow car. As I wheeled my bike along beside me, I noticed that the back wheel wasn’t moving. At all. I held the back of the bike off the ground and gave the wheel a push with my hand. It didn’t move. The brake had been clamped solid on the rim for the duration of my Jacky Durand-esque solo off-the-back breakaway. I fixed the problem, remounted, and eventually caught the group again. Riding a sliver of the course is hard enough but doing it with your brakes on increases the suffering and the feeling in the legs, it is not optimal. The next day two of the hammerheads from Specialized planned to ride the entire race route. Before my first taste of the cobbles I’d planned on joining them. But on second thought, I decided to leave that task to Rich, Eki, Hincapie and the rest of the hard men.
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