A weekend in Hell

On the road at Paris-Roubaix with Lizzy and Tom

Van der Poel and Van Aert, by Friend of the Podcast Kenneth Love.

Listen: What does Paris-Roubaix mean to you, Lionel?

by Lionel Birnie

The first time I went to Paris-Roubaix, in 1999, it was obvious where we had to go. The Arenberg Forest section of pavé, the most terrible and the most feared of all the sectors.

The previous year Johan Museeuw had crashed there and shattered his kneecap. Not only was it an injury that almost ended his career, he nearly lost his leg when gangrene set in.

The sense of danger was acute. People talked of Paris-Roubaix as being almost two separate races. Everything before Arenberg. And then everything after Arenberg.

‘Can you win today?’

‘Let’s get through Arenberg and see where we are.’

In 1999, it was a bright, sunny spring day but the Arenberg trench was gloomy and dank. It smelled musty and felt almost subterranean. I remember being shocked by a group of fairly well-oiled Belgians who were flicking the caps from their beer bottles onto the cobbles – as if the jagged edges and uneven angles of the stones needed to be made any more treacherous.

We were quite near the start of the section when the riders came through but I can remember nothing apart from the noise and the anguished looks on the faces of the riders. The sound you could hear above the cheers was the dull thud of wheel rims on stone. The riders’ eyes had a sort of hundred-yard stare. No one was looking immediately in front of them, everyone was looking just that bit further ahead, perhaps to detach themselves from the uncertainty of what they’d hit next.

The race is called the Hell of the North partly because it cuts across the countryside scarred by the conflict of two World Wars. Comparisons between a sporting event – even one as savage as Paris-Roubaix – and warfare are trite, of course, and yet there is something unique about Arenberg. Approaching it at speed, knowing there is no turning back, unsure what lies in wait, is as close as any sport should get to the sensation of going ‘over the top’.

Over the years, I’ve been back to Arenberg several times. I’ve ridden the cobbles myself – the first time was during the Paris-Roubaix sportive in 2008 – and the jarring bang of each heavy hit was not something I enjoyed. ‘Keep the speed up,’ they say, ‘and sort of glide across the top of the stones.’ Yeah, right.

Each subsequent visit must have desensitised me to the danger; normalised the suffering, but at the weekend I saw Arenberg through fresh eyes.

I was travelling with Lizzy Banks and Tom Whalley, and Lizzy’s husband Gabriel. We met for dinner in Valenciennes on Friday night to discuss our plans. Lizzy and Gabriel had ridden the Arenberg section after arriving in northern France that afternoon. Gabriel punctured almost immediately. I’m not sure Lizzy could quite believe how bad the cobbles were – the width and depth of the gaps between the stones were enough to swallow even today’s trendy fat tyres. Tom had been to Paris-Roubaix several times before but always to the velodrome, never to the pavé. And so it was obvious where we had to go on Sunday. Arenberg.

It meant I got a chance to see it all anew, through the eyes of people who had never witnessed the chaos close up before. And it was energising to witness Tom, Lizzy and Gabriel’s excitement. Tom is making an episode for Friends of the Podcast but rather than release it now, while Roubaix is still in everyone’s minds, I think we’ll put it out towards the end of the year when the memories have faded a little, so we can re-live it all over again.

In the meantime we’ve got the Queen of the Classics well covered. There are two episodes of Arrivée covering the women’s race and the men’s race. Then Mitch Docker joined Daniel and I for a thorough debrief and some Camembert chat. There’s also and an excellent episode of Service Course to listen to before the whole show moves on to Amstel Gold and then the Ardennes.

Listen: The sounds of Arenberg by Tom Whalley

Lionel, Lizzy and Tom on the road at Roubaix. Photos by Gabriel Banks

This week’s episodes

Listen to a Service Course sneak preview: Lizzy and Tom talk to Gertjan van Ginderen, founder of Gravaa’s self-inflating tyre system, KAPS.

(Fake) grass is greener

Mitch Docker wondered why the grass in the centre of the André-Pétrieux velodrome looked so much greener this year. Well, they replaced the grass with a 5G synthetic surface – fake grass, basically. I called it AstroTurf in this week’s episode when everyone knows that AstroTurf is a brand name. Anyway, Jack Lionberger from Chicago wrote to say: ‘My friends and I were in Europe for a wedding in July. We decided to also see stage six of the Tour de France, and visit some of the sights, including the Roubaix velodrome. It was under some construction, and the inner field was ripped up. At the time we wondered why, but while listening this week’s podcast, I made the connection. They must have been in the process then. See the photo below taken on July 5, 2022.’

Thanks Jack. I knew it was still grass when Sonny Colbrelli won in October 2021 but couldn’t remember what was underfoot when Dylan van Baarle won last year, but now I know.

We won, thanks for voting

Thank you to everyone who voted for the Tour d’Écosse series in the Sports Podcast Awards. I’d like to thank Simon Gill for his company and contributions, Sam Slatter and Jon Heard for supporting us from the Broomwagon on the road in Scotland, everyone we met along the way, and our partners at Supersapiens, Science in Sport, MAAP and Hammerhead for enabling us to set off in the first place. And, of course, Tom Whalley, for his brilliant editing, sound design and production.