Journey to the Velodrome
Richard Abraham's weekend in Roubaix
The Whimsical Guide to the Classics takes a break this week and will return with a look at Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège in an edition that could be called A Pair of Walloons. In the meantime, we hand The 11.01 Cappuccino over to Richard Abraham, who has returned from a weekend in Roubaix.
by Richard Abraham
I can’t remember exactly how many times I’ve been to Roubaix. There’s a timeless quality to the famous old ground, the Stade André Pétrieux, with its sturdy, weather-beaten concrete structures, that makes the years and the episodes blend together.
I may be Young Richard Abraham (Credit: Daniel Friebe) but I have at least been coming here long enough to realise that this place never changes. The jumble of half-forgotten velodrome buildings decays with a long half-life. Probably because that decay set in a long time ago.
This Sunday’s episode of Arrivée was recorded after the race on the windowsill of one of them, a miscellaneous store room filled entirely with roller-skates. It was the only place where the forklift trucks packing away the circus couldn’t get me. My view could have been of 2024, 1994, 2014, 1974 or any of the years in between.
Every time I come back to the velodrome, I’m struck by the irony of it all. The irony that a point-to-point race through some of the worst roads of Western Europe – which in some years is a muddy slogging match, in others a dusty hurricane – concludes with a loop and a half around a smooth concrete track.
It’s not the Via Roma in Sanremo, or the Champs-Élysées, but to me it’s the most beautiful finish in the sport. I could go on about this but I know I’m not alone in my opinion. ‘L’Enfer du Nord mène au paradis,’ reads the mural (though it has since been painted over). Hell leads to paradise. It could not – and should not – be any other way.
Uniquely, this year, I took to public transport and my own two feet to make my way there. It meant I could bypass the usual purgatory of roadblocks and police checkpoints and I didn’t have to delicately thread the Lille péripherique, an asphalt game of snakes and ladders that has the infinite capacity to ingest a car and spit it out somewhere that looks like (but crucially is not, is almost never) Roubaix.
Roubaix is a handsome enough town in places – the race is very doable on public transport if you like early starts – but it isn’t really appealing enough to traipse back across at 9pm on a dark Sunday night in order make use of your return ticket for the Lille metro. Industrial decline and chart-topping poverty will do that to a place, sadly.
(I have arrived in the velodrome two wheels before, but like Lionel, I don’t need to ramble on about my experiences of the Paris-Roubaix sportive, other than to say they involved, on various occasions, 23mm tyres, security alarms, thunderstorms, Première Classe hotels (*shudders*), one shredded tyre held together by a 20€ note and some of the most memorable bike rides of my life.)
My point is this; however you travel, it’s no easy thing to make it here. Unless, that is, you are Mathieu van der Poel.
L’Equipe wrote on Monday morning that Van der Poel achieved a ‘state of grace’, which I think were my very words to Daniel as we recorded on Sunday evening. They must have had reporters hiding amongst the roller-skates. They can have that one on me because it is so obvious to anyone watching that Van der Poel rode this year’s Roubaix cobbles like he was on some kind of heavenly cloud.
He’s the quickest rider to ever make it from Compiègne to Roubaix and thanks to the purplest patch of his career, a team purring with confidence, and the beneficent tailwinds of Storm Kathleen, he may well remain so for a while.
Whether it’s pure luck or some combination of skill, he went untouched by crashes, punctures or mechanicals. He threw his bike into the cobbled corners like he was riding a junior cyclo-cross race. As Alex Roos writes in L’Equipe, “the theatre has changed but it’s still all a game to him.” I caught up with a race photographer in the press room, saw a few of his images hot off the SD card. Some of the frames of physics-bending physicality were astonishing to behold.
When they finish Roubaix, most riders collapse on the turf, down a mini-can of fizzy drink and stare 1000 yards back into the abyss that they have just traversed. Mathieu van der Poel leant on his bike, seemingly fresh as a daisy, and watched the sprint for second place.
For the rest, though, Roubaix is a race where the road is long and arduous. While Van der Poel was hoisting his second cobble aloft, I got a text from a friend watching on the Carrefour de l’Arbre sector of cobbles that rider number 56 was the last on the road.
Blake Quick, Roubaix debutant, was typical of the riders off the back: he punctured out of his group, got going again, found companions, then his companions climbed off, and he was left without water or support with an hour to ride. At the finish line he dropped a storm of F-bombs.
As soon as Quick rode off my phone buzzed again; apparently another rider was on his way, even further behind the broom wagon, battling through the fans carrying their camping chairs, looking “like a broken man”.
It was Cyrus Monk, last of the 18 riders over the time limit who persevered to the velodrome.
“I think Roubaix is the Hunger Games, everyone at home just wants to watch us suffer, every sector is like the cannon going off and someone gets killed,” Monk said, much to the delight of the handful of reporters hungry for a little bite of sound. “For me that was the first sector and then it was 29 sectors of hell after that.”
As Monk composed himself, Van der Poel walked past on his way to the press conference. He’d been there 48 minutes. Two narrative threads, wildly divergent for four hours, intersecting again in a moment of beautiful coincidence. A reminder of the most dependable and unchanging aspect of this velodrome: no two journeys here are ever the same.
Tune in to The Cycling Podcast this week
Make sure you never miss an episode by adding The Cycling Podcast to your favourite app. Arrivée returns with Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège next week.
Wonderful stuff. Very much enjoying Richard’s contributions to TCP, both on the pod and here in print (er, pixels).
Great to have a new voice as part of the Cycling Podcast in Richard Abraham. You're our eyes at the race. I, for one, appreciate seeing the finish line through a reflective lens.