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For the Love of the Cobbles Only those who are in top condition can say that the Ronde van Vlaanderen is not hard. For all others, it is the Way of the Cross. –Andrea Tafi 2 For the Love of the Cobbles A Journey Inside Cycling’s Cobbled Classic Racing Season, and a Ride Across the Hard Surfaces of Belgium and France By Chris Fontecchio Founding Editor of the Podium Café 3 Prologue On a spring afternoon in 1985, I did what I usually did when nothing was going on. I hopped on my bike and rode to my friend Steve’s house. It was spring break and I was home from college with no particular plans, so falling back on my high school routines was like slipping into an old sweatshirt. Those routines consisted of gathering across town -- biking on the nice days -- at either Steve’s house or another friend’s, and if anything like a quorum could be found, basketball or football or some warped rendition of baseball would happen. But on this day there was no quorum. Steve was home, hanging in his room, watching TV. “Check this out,” he said1 as he flicked on CBS Sports, showing a bike race from France. I’d caught a glimpse of the Tour de France before, enough to know the name and register some basic comprehension of the need for some people to race their bikes. Back then I poured over the sports pages every morning, and knew from the agate page (the one with the scores, standings, etc. in small type) that Frenchman Bernard Hinault had won the Tour de France a few times, making him the top bicycle racer in the world. Honestly, I haven’t the slightest idea how I knew this, but somebody must have said it or written it, and I didn’t care to disagree. But this was April, the Tour was three months off, and the race we were watching, called Paris-Roubaix, was unlike anything else I had ever seen, or even expected to see. 1 If you think I, or anyone else writing a book from memory, recalls mundane conversations verbatim from 25 years ago, then... cool! But hey, this is probably pretty close. 7 Steve got me up to speed: Hinault wasn’t around,2 but a group of international stars was at the head of the race, and an American named Greg LeMond was one of them. No American had ever accomplished anything in European cycling, the hub of the sport, until LeMond came along just a few years earlier, won a surprise world championship, and placed third in his first crack at the Tour de France. This information wouldn’t rock my brain for another season, but it was enough to bait the hook. And the roads of northern France proceeded to set it. The 1985 running of Paris-Roubaix was a classic edition of the Hell of the North, the infamous race over rugged cobblestones through communities known mostly for the devastation they suffered in consecutive world wars. The dark legacy hanging over the region was greatly enhanced that day by intermittent rain showers and thick dark clouds. Mud covered enough of the road so that every spin of a bicycle wheel helped splatter the riders beyond recognition. Videos from that day might confuse a casual viewer as to whether color TV had been invented yet. For the riders, navigating the cobblestones was a brutal, awkward exercise, and the constant threat of crashing kept everyone -- even us first-time viewers -- on the edge of our seats. People like me who hadn’t been to war are prone to thinking that the battlefields looked exactly like this. The American broadcaster CBS did its best to enhance the drama. Anyone who got caught up in the LeMond Era of the 2 Bernard Hinault only appeared sporadically and swore off riding Paris-Roubaix after 1981. Ever the diplomat, Hinault declared the race “bullshit” to the waiting media, seeing no reason to hide his feelings. And he’d just won the race. In 1985, explaining why he was home rather than in Compiègne, Hinault remarked, “I have a wife and two children, so I don’t want my skin ripped off.” 8 mid-1980s will doubtlessly remember their approach: selective editing heavy on crashes, uptempo synthesizers, shameless use of dramatic language (you can say “hell” on TV, apparently... over and over...), and the tag-team of John Tesh and some unfamiliar British guy calling the action.3 I don’t know how CBS tried to sell cycling to an American audience back then, but the race was a gift from the Cycling Gods: unfathomable visuals of riders so caked in mud that only their eyes and mouths could be recognized. Action that featured the sport’s biggest names, including “our guy.” And a fantastic slugfest of a race with all the drama, aggression, tactical nuance and brute athleticism that veteran cycling fans prefer. The race lead changed hands numerous times, not in the mundane way of cyclists in a break taking turns but in a more serious manner. With the race winnowed down to a dozen or so guys in contention, attacks happened in small groups and failure was constantly an option. At one point mega-stars Eric Vanderaerden of Belgium and Francesco Moser of Italy had broken away from the field, the young Belgian clinging to the wheel of the cagey Italian -- known as “the Sheriff” -- who’d won three previous editions. But suddenly Moser lost his rhythm, veered into a deep puddle by the side of the road, and keeled over. Watching on Youtube thirty years later I still can’t believe what I’m seeing: one of Paris-Roubaix’s greatest champions unceremoniously kicked to the curb by the infamous cobbles. Vanderaerden, game for a two-man attack, knifed through the headwinds alone, but with 15 miles to go he eventually succumbed to an eight-man group of riders poised to duke it out for the win. The powerful Renault-Elf 3 Phil Liggett, who’s no longer even slightly unfamiliar. 9 squad in their black and yellow stripes were the home team, and they now had two guys up front. Eventually Renault’s young French star Marc Madiot went clear with a well-timed winning attack, step one of his eventual ascent into the pantheon of Cobbles Riders (two Paris-Roubaix wins, marriage to a former Miss France, and knighthood in the French Legion of Honor). Bruno Wojtinek, Madiot’s less heralded teammate, escaped for second, and Irish master Sean Kelly outsprinted LeMond for third after the two swerved around a pileup that happened as their six-man group swung onto the wet velodrome track. Intrepid to the last drop, this race. Afterward LeMond was among the 35 riders who survived to finish (officially, at least), out of 172 that started. As he talked to Tesh on the velodrome infield, the layer of mud on his face made the young American look like he’d just stepped in from a minstrel show. Through this mask of shit shone his clear, wet eyes and his satisfied smile, a bizarre juxtaposition of human and inhuman that further drove home the beautiful madness being celebrated on this day. It gets better though: Tesh also interviewed Theo de Rooy, a Dutch rider who occasionally led the race in the final 90 minutes before succumbing: de Rooy: "It's a bollocks this race! You're working like an animal, you don't have time to piss, you wet your pants. You're riding in mud like this, you're slipping, it's a piece of shit..." Tesh: "Willl you ever ride it again?" de Rooy, not hesitating for a second: "Sure, it's the most beautiful race in the world!" 10 Punctuated by a borderline-insane laugh by de Rooy. I don’t remember if this exchange aired in real time, but thankfully it’s preserved in legend now. Like the shattered Dutchman, I honestly didn’t know quite how to respond to what I’d just seen, but Steve did. He’d talked to some guys who knew about a weekly circuit race in the Boston suburbs maybe ten miles from home, and by summer we were on our beater bikes trying out the sport of cycling. Within a year I had embarked on a fund drive and picked up an entry-level Bianchi racer, gotten completely hooked on the soap opera of LeMond’s career, and eventually made myself into a hack racer and permanent cycling fan. The Tour de France was as much the centerpiece of my viewing as it is of the cycling calendar, and with other fans like my big brother Pete and my friend Drew I celebrated the glorious battles on the slopes of the Alps and Pyrenees. We heralded Lance Armstrong’s arrival at the front of the Tour, delved deeper and deeper into the sport as the internet grew and dramatically expanded the level of available information. I’m now nearly a decade into hosting the Podium Cafe, a website and community of cycling fans, where we obsess over cycling 365 days a year. But as great as all that has been, I never forgot that first brush with the sport. I never forgot the sights, the result, and most importantly I never got over the sense that, however great the Tour was, racing on cobblestones was something else entirely. This book is a journey to the cobblestoned classics, a series of races in Belgium and France that begin with a late February sneak preview and meaningfully unfold over three weeks in March and April.

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