Paris Roubaix Sportive Trip 2014

Ahead lay the most iconic sections of the Hell of the North pave; The Arenberg Tranchee, Pave Marc Madiot, Pave Duclos Lassalle and du’Carrefour l’Arbre. Each a blood diamond in a necklace of Northern French stone.

Riding the pave is very much in the head, having good legs is great, but if your mind set is wrong the pave can overwhelm you leaving you bereft of hope.

The Arenberg Mine

Having opted for the ‘short’ route my start was to be the Arenberg. Now a World Heritage site the Arenberg mine stands testament to a lost way of life in the Nord de Calaise. In 2004 coal mining in France ended setting the area into a downward spiral; no wonder then that the Paris Roubaix race and the pave is so important.

The introduction of the Arenberg Tranchee is relatively recent. It was coal miner and cycling World Champion (1962) Jean Stablinsky who promoted the use of the Forest and saw it move from private ownership to become a National Park. Stablinsky’s Polish parents had been drawn to the Northern French coalfields and his father died working inside a mine; it was hard graft, if well paid. It was a different social environment post World War Two, in stark contrast to the one described by Victor Hugo who wrote of the poverty in the novel ‘Germinal’, where employer’s controlled every aspect of the miners lives, and could even hold the miners and their families to ransome. It was also dangerous with many accidents including one at Courrivres, a sister mine to the Arenberg where over a thousand died in one incident in 1906.

Now the Arenberg, like much of the pave, is protected as a National Monument. The pave here is the worst of the parcours, not so much cobbles but more like riding through a vandalised graveyard, where monuments lay cracked and snapped into hostile and aggressive shapes ‘organised’ into reverberating form.

The violence offered by the pave at the Arenberg draws comparison to the damage done to the area during times of war; it takes little stretch of the imagination to view the pave as a place defiled by war. Historically, with the end of World War One and the resumption of the race in 1919, it became known as the ‘Hell of the North’, an observation of what had been the fault line between opposing forces locked in years of bloody struggle.

In 2010 a huge storm hit the sportive in the kilometres leading to the Arenberg, flooding this and the rest of the pave. Luckily this time no rain fell, allowing a feeling of greater confidence and certainty. You could feel the tension loosening in the tone of voice and body language of fellow riders; as we said, a good Paris Roubaix is very much a matter of a good mind set.

I stood still for a moment, ready to start and pictured the sections I had skipped by opting for the shorter route, inlcuding the 2.2km long Pave Stablinsky at Troisvilles, where your world is tuned upside when you hit the cobbles for the first time and is then followed by ten further sections prior to the Arenberg. I have ridden them a number of times and I felt sad to miss the sections where in the race the domestiques work their legs to the bone to make sure their star riders are in a good position.

We rolled out in company and made our way past the now gentrified ex-miners houses that line the road to the forest. You cross a railway line that marks the boundary and next thing you are into the forest where the pave explodes the grenades in your hands. It’s so rough that I lost a camera, jettisoned from the bike. I had promised myself that I would ride the Arenberg and Carrefour de l’Arbre in their entirety, wanting to pay homage to these most iconic sections; thus once I had retrieved my camera I settled into a good rhythm and just kept plugging away until relief was found at pave end.

Some four days after the sportive I could still feel those cobbles in my hands. The Arenberg and Carrefour notwithstanding – and it’s a theme many riders talked about or battled within themselves – just how much of the cobbles would I avoid, opting instead to take the narrow bands of earth, sand or grass to be found at times on the verge (not an option when wet)? Though I argued that if Tom Boonen was racing the parcours he would take the route of least resistance wherever possible, if I avoided the cobbles why ride the Paris Roubaix Sportive at all?