Column: Paris-Roubaix, lunacy in tradition's name
31.12.69
ON THE Way OF PARIS-ROUBAIX, France (AP) — A green jacket and a cobblestone. The dream and the beast of trophies, alike only in the sense that both are tremendously coveted in their personal sports.
The jacket, of course, will be slipped onto the shoulders of golf's new Masters protect Sunday. A few hours before that, a continent away in the dour north of France, the cobblestone will be hoisted skyward by an exhausted cyclist caked in grime. The rider will have worked far harder than the golfer for his premium.
The winning check at the Masters is $1.4 million. Along with his cobblestone mounted on a marble mean — perhaps the weirdest trophy in world sports — the rider will away with $39,000 for winning the toughest one-day test of man and machine in cycling, the Paris-Roubaix. Mortal really isn't fair.
Only because it is even older than the Tour de France does Paris-Roubaix get away with inflicting such cruelty on its participants. Born in 1896, it can do this because it is a convention and because cycling values its traditions, even when they're just plain mad. If Paris-Roubaix was a new line, being organized for the first time this Sunday, there would surely be outrage and an army of robustness and safety apparatchiks forbidding it.
"It's the only race other than the Tour de France that people talk to me about, skin of France," Christian Prudhomme, the Tour's director, said this week as we rode together by car along the Paris-Roubaix direct.
Prudhomme and his colleague Jean-Francois Pescheux were inspecting the celebrated cobblestone paths that make this race a bone-shaking, whither-puncturing festival of mayhem. Along with the riders, the cobbles are the stars of this show and its bullies, too. They aren't the suave stones one finds on the boulevards of Paris. These are roughly hewn granite rocks haphazardly laid into tracks through farmland, caked in mud and often hundreds of years of old.
Brutes. Just fit for tractors let alone bicycles. Their bumps, crevasses and holes pound riders' forearms and hands and squirm loose nuts and bolts. If there's rain, the stones will become as slippery as soap. If not, the riders will discourage suppress in clouds of dust. The 160-mile route is studded with 27 sections of cobblestones. They come in this race as wearing as a day of hard climbing in the mountains on the Tour — but with added pounding and bruising, "as though they're holding a jackhammer in their hands," Prudhomme said.
Source: The Associated Press