Stelvio

Words: Richard Moore Photos: Gerard Brown

By common consent, 1994 was one of the hardest Giros in history (sceptics might suggest that this might have had something to do with the alleged prevalence of EPO).

For Britain’s Brian Smith, riding for Motorola, it was a baptism of fire with, thanks to the Stelvio, a dash of snow.

It was to be Smith’s only Grand Tour. But he finished it. And he survived the Stelvio.

“Of course I remember it,” he laughs. “How could I forget it? I was on it for ages. We had about 50km from the start to the Stelvio. It was a nice day, but I remember guys putting on tops, leg warmers, overshoes.

“There was a lot of discussion, but my Italian’s not great and I didn’t know what they were saying. In any case, I fancied myself as a hardy Scotsman, but then I started to wonder. What was I missing here?

“Andy Hampsten, my team leader, told me just after the start, ‘Apparently it’s snowing at the top of the Stelvio.’ We’d sent our soigneur up there with flasks of hot tea with honey and rain capes.

“But I thought I’d better be prepared. So I dropped back to the team car, got my knee warmers, jacket and overshoes.

“We rode piano initially, and when the climb started we were bunching up. It was okay. It was nice and steady. Everything was cool. I had my 39×23 on; I thought it’d be fine.

“The one thing I was concerned about was staying with a group. The Stelvio came early in the stage; we still had the Mortirolo and another climb after that, so you couldn’t afford to be isolated. If you got dropped, you weren’t coming back.

“Then Vona attacked and that set the cat among the pigeons. The group split to pieces, people were in ones or twos. I can’t even remember if I was in a group for much of the climb. You’re concentrating too hard on just getting up it. I can’t remember much about the crowd, either.

“The Mortirolo [the stage's final climb] seemed like a different race. I was back in short sleeves. And the last 500m I didn’t touch the pedals – there was a huge crowd and you just got pushed along.

“Only the hardiest, toughest tifosi had made it up the Stelvio. At the summit the road was clear, but there were 12ft snowdrifts by the side. I’d never seen anything like it. It was surreal: huge banks of snow lining the road.

“But when I think of the Stelvio I think mainly of the descent. I got up it okay; it was going down that was the problem. Although I’d been back to the car, I’d forgotten my gloves. And I didn’t want to stop.

“I was never one to get scared on a descent. But coming down the Stelvio that day, with my hands freezing, having to close one eye for the tunnels, and then hope for the best once you were inside, is something I’ll never forget. I was petrified.”

Extract from Rouleur issue 7. Richard Moore is a writer and the author of ‘In Search of Robert Millar’. You can purchase a copy of Gerard Brown’s Stelvio print here.

The Accidental Death of a Cyclist

Words: Andy McGrath Photos: Offside

The English-language documentary about Marco Pantani is due to be completed in the next few months.

“The Accidental Death of a Cyclist” charts the tumultuous life and times of the late Italian star, using archive and contemporary footage, stylised dramatic reconstructions and interviews with Pantani’s family, close friends, former teammates and peers.

The film is a collaboration between director James Erskine and New Black Films, who previously teamed up for Italia 90-based One Night in Turin and cricket flick From The Ashes.

Erskine’s hope is that the Pantani film can approach the success of Senna, the 2010 smash about the mercurial Brazilian Formula 1 driver.

Last week, we sat down with Erskine to get the details on a film which could surpass anything that has come before in cycling cinema.

Why did you want to make a film about Marco Pantani?
I thought this was an extraordinary story with an extraordinary athlete, unique in that his story combines all the highs of contemporary commercialised sport and all the lows.

It feels to me that this was a story on the scale of Senna or Raging Bull, one about a human being and a human tragedy in the sporting world. And that’s what compelled me. It’s about getting to the heart of the man.

The Pantani story is really about someone who loves the bicycle. It’s ultimately about why someone becomes a professional in the first place. It’s about love and risk and adventure and seeing sport as an art.

I think that’s really important if you’re going to try and make a cinematic film. Senna was an artist behind a racing wheel, Pantani was an artist on a bicycle.

How do you frame whether or not Pantani doped?
I think we allow the audience to make their own conclusions. But I don’t think the aim of it is to force them into making any conclusions.

It’s about stripping away the doping scandals and looking at the real human being behind it. Is it more interesting to examine the question of whether Marco Pantani took performance enhancing drugs or to explore why he had such a tragic end?

If you decided that Marco Pantani took drugs, it doesn’t explain the ending.  If you decided he didn’t take drugs, it certainly doesn’t explain the ending.

What happens to a human being in that situation, one that has won the Giro d’Italia in spectacular fashion, everything that their life has been about, at the very peak of the mountain. That moment when the haematocrit test comes out [at Madonna di Campiglio in the 1999 Giro], he can never get back, he can never be untainted again, even if he was innocent.

How anyone could cope with that? It’s supposed to be about suffering going up the mountain. What’s extraordinary about Pantani is this suffering on the way down.

When did you come up with the title, which seems a nod to Dario Fo’s work The Accidental Death of an Anarchist?
Pretty early on. The nod to Fo was deliberate in the sense that this is the story of a man whose death no-one will take responsibility for, yet everybody is responsible.

Also it’s about a corrupt system. I think there’s no doubt now – you might have argued when we came up with the idea – that cycling in the Nineties was corrupt.

The relationship between Conconi, the IOC and the UCI indicates a system in which natural justice doesn’t prevail.

Does the film go from the beginning of Pantani’s life?
It starts from the age of sixteen, seventeen years old. Most of the archive footage came from the Italian national broadcaster, RAI.

It’s very much about mountains too: we went with GoPros and cameras to these places, like the Galibier, the Mortirolo, filming on empty roads.

What makes Pantani stand out is that he’s a climber. I don’t think the film would have anywhere near the impact if Pantani wasn’t already attempting to do something which is, by its very nature, visually terrifying.

Cinema is supposed to be about showing extraordinary people in extraordinary places. What could be more visually extraordinary than the Galibier, Alpe d’Huez, the Mortirolo?

Which other places did you visit?
God, we went everywhere: Alpe d’Huez, Deux-Alpes, the bit near Turin where he fell off his bike, Cesenatico, Rome, Aprica, Minneapolis, where Greg LeMond lives.

Who else was interviewed?
We talked to his mother Tonina, Pino Roncucci, Roberto Amaducci, Piotr Ugrumov; Marco Velo was good too.

One Night in Turin drew heavily on Gazza-mania in England. Can you compare Pantani to Gascoigne?
There’s an interesting symmetry. I think they’re artists of sport, that’s what makes them entirely memorable and makes a nation embrace them.

It’s the idea of that single figure who represents the emotions of a country at a certain time. Pantani unquestionably does that in Italy.

Think about his funeral, it was extraordinary, on that scale of Senna and Princess Diana. Tens of thousands turned up – more people than for Margaret Thatcher.

It’s a way of connecting emotional identity through sport. Televised sport is at the heart of it.

Has there been an Italian sportsperson since Pantani? I’d say not, and Italian cycling is searching for a similar hero.
Pantani is unique. As much as Coppi might be a hero, or Jacques Anquetil in France or Merckx, they’re sort of pre-television.

You need mass media to create mass celebrity. You’ve got to be able to see their faces, see the emotion. It’s emotion that gets people.

Pantani’s mother Tonina seems to feel that the media had a part in her son’s downfall. How did the family feel about the making of this film?
We’ve been talking to them for a long time and interviewed them. I’ve shown them some bits of the film, which they found moving.

They see that we’re not making a journalistic exposé, we’re just trying to capture the spirit of the man.

Is there a narrator?
If we needed to clarify any of the key propositions of the film and push the emotional moment, we’d have one. But I don’t think that we do.

Each race is a story of its own, commentators from all over the world tell it well.

A lot of it was stripping down races to the bare ingredients, the key battle and protagonists, be it Tonkov, Ullrich, Armstrong, Indurain, Buenahora… fortunately Pantani offers those pugilistic moments.

When will it be in cinemas?
Some time between now and the 2014 Tour de France. I hope it would premiere at a major film festival and get theatrically released…

To me, it feels like a film that could come out in the autumn. It has lots of beautiful shots of mountains that recreate the magic of cycling so perhaps cyclists might fancy getting on their bikes, going down to the cinema and seeing those things.

Rouleur 38 is out now, featuring Colin O’Brien’s piece on Marco Pantani. Buy it here – or get it free before May 20 with a Rouleur subscription.

Operation Dennis

Words: Andy McGrath

How did you spend New Year’s Eve? Watching Jools Holland’s Hootenanny round a warm fire? Down the pub having a few drinks with friends? Having a few more and dancing badly to brash nightclub music?

No bubbly or bad boogieing for Blanco rider Dennis Van Winden. The Dutchman was lying hazily in hospital after a third operation on his iliac artery, health and cycling career hanging in the balance.

“The nurses woke me up a little bit before midnight and said ‘this will be your last minute in 2012’. I remember I said ‘2013, from now on, it will be a straight line to the top. Because I can’t get any worse now’.”

How did it come to this for the Tour de l’Avenir stage winner who had even never spent a night in hospital before last winter?

It started when he felt a slight twinge in his right leg four years ago. Wanting to push on with his newborn professional career, Van Winden ignored it – till he could no longer.

At times last season, it felt like he was pedalling with one leg. “The right one was suffering long before the left started to a little. When you notice it, each time on the bike you’re thinking ‘am I feeling it right now?’ You’re not really enjoying riding.”

He had a problem with his iliac artery, which runs from the heart carrying blood to the leg, and can be put under pressure when cyclists bend forward to exercise.

It’s a common cyclist ailment: Tony Gallopin, Travis Meyer, Stuart O’Grady and teammate Theo Bos are among those to have problems with it. In bad cases, the cyclist undergoes a winter operation and returns to former strength, sans souci. Usually.

Van Winden went under the knife in mid-November. But three weeks later, he developed a fever. The wound had gone bacterial and was bleeding internally. “From that moment, it’s really dangerous. If you don’t do anything, you’d probably bleed to death,” he says.

After surgery at a specialist sports hospital in Veldhoven, he spent a fortnight there on antibiotics, mind addled. “As a topsporter, you know your body… if you overdo it in training or don’t eat enough, you know how it reacts because you do everything to make it stronger.

“After this operation, I couldn’t believe how my body felt. It was horrible: I had pain everywhere, I couldn’t stand up. When I tried, I almost fainted.”

He was discharged from hospital on Christmas Eve but six days later, he awoke in agony.

“I was home alone so I called my brother and said ‘you have to come and drive me to the hospital’,” he says.

“In the car, I couldn’t get a normal position. Thirty minutes from the hospital, I touched my leg with my hand, just the upper leg, and couldn’t feel it.

 The top nerves were shut down. I thought ‘oh fuck, this is really bad’.

“When I arrived, I remember the doctors asked me ‘Dennis, you know the drill, number the pain from one to ten. One is no pain, from six to ten is unbearable’.

“I said ‘well doc, I’m not pushy, but if you give me a saw or a knife right now, I’d cut off the leg myself because I can’t live like this’.”

His doctors hadn’t seen a case like this. Having had the original injury repaired twice, the same surgery wasn’t an option.

After operation number three, they told him there was the possibility he might not be able to be a professional cyclist again.

How did he react to that? “The thing is, my condition was so bad, I think I didn’t realise what was going on. My body was in survival state.”

Van Winden was weak, jaundiced and skinny from weight loss. “I had no energy, my blood values were really bad. My haematocrit was 17, my haemoglobin was 4.1 for a week. That’s really low,” he says.

“I didn’t look in the mirror for the first five days afterwards – friends told me not to. When they walked in, they looked scared. But I always said ‘it would be fine’ and I really believed it. I’ve never been scared.”

Van Winden reckons his optimism was a key part in his recovery process.

“In the hospital, you get to know the doctors and nurses. They were saying ‘it’s incredible how your mind is working. From the moment you got here, you never had a bad day. Not even a bad minute. The day they brought you in, you were always fighting to get better in your mind.’

Once discharged from hospital in February after a six week stay, he had another operation on his hands: return to full fitness on the bike after four months off it.

He didn’t wear his new Blanco kit till early March, even then only going for hour-long coffee rides.

The enforced time off gave Van Winden a renewed appreciation of life. He went hiking in the hills around his Girona home and felt the bond of his Blanco brethren.

“Cycling is a beautiful sport. Like now, when I’m riding the bike with friends and colleagues, it makes me happy.”

“A day hasn’t passed without speaking with a teammate, director, soigneur or mechanic. I think we’re a close team, the Dutch guys and the foreigners… they really want to know how I was doing.”

The weight loss had him thinking he’d return as a climber. No chance. “They put a lot of sugar water in me. When I got back home, I gained ten kilos and I couldn’t even enjoy it, like if they’d given me a couple of chocolate bars every day. I was just lying around, doing nothing. You almost can’t see the lost kilograms anymore.”

Now the wheel has turned fully. On Sunday, a little over two months after getting back on his bike, Van Winden is set to pin on a number and returns to racing at the Rund um Köln.

Maybe this upped pain threshold will give him an edge. “Right now, I can do the training efforts real easy. No pain, no gain they say, but after this, pain is not difficult,” he says.

Blonde-maned Van Winden is your typical workaday professional, winless in his first three years in the ranks. For all the support and sympathy he received over the winter, the harsh reality is that he now has half as long as his peers to secure a contract extension – if Blanco finds a sponsor, that is.

Still, he’s ready for the fight. Van Winden had a last word to about his career-threatening ordeal too.

“Every surgery has its danger, even getting your ears pierced. This was an option to enjoy riding the bike as a professional cyclist again. I’d be lying if I said I was happy with the outcome, it’s been a very hard time, but I don’t regret having this surgery.”

Podcast: Issue 38

At 260 pages long, issue 38 is being cursed by sore-backed posties up and down the nation. The accompanying podcast is a big ‘un too, nudging the hour mark. Joining host Jack Thurston for a feast of Italian cycle sport, the Bath Road 100, and much else besides are assistant editor Andy McGrath and writer Michael Breckon.

Issue 38

The Rouleur podcast is brought to you by Mosquito Bikes, London’s custom made bicycle specialists. New into Mosquito bikes are frames from Daniel Merenyi, Dario Pegoretti’s only apprentice. His frames ooze the knowledge Dario collated making Marco Pantani’s race bikes. Available in custom geometry made from the latest Columbus lightweight steel – Hungarian bikes with a dash of Italian flair. Mosquito is at 123 Essex Road, London N1 2SN or on the web at mosquito-bikes.co.uk.

Poetry In Motion

Words: Ian Cleverly

There is something about a team time trial that I find endlessly fascinating, a match for any mountain stage in my book. Raw power; pure speed; precision; teamwork at its finest – lest we forget, cycling is a team sport, after all.

It’s the same deal on the track. The team pursuit is a beautiful thing, four kilometres of screaming pain for the participants, a few minutes of poetry in motion for the spectator.

Of course sprinting is the purest form of one-against-one in a velodrome (now the individual pursuit is sadly deemed surplus to requirements) but nothing grips like the four-man version.

A Tour de France without a team time trial has something missing, akin to the Grand National minus Becher’s Brook. The weaker teams are found out, struggling to maintain any semblance of order, popping riders out the back until they are lucky to hold the minimum five together to the finish line.

Some (Garmin for instance) make a point of training for the discipline with some success, while others (Team Sky) despite their obvious firepower, have still been known to blow apart badly.

Getting it right is glorious. Screwing it up is utterly humiliating, but I guess that’s what I like about it…

Bill Watkins was a TTT specialist, which is kind of an odd thing to specialise in, if you think about.

He is now CEO of Serotta in Saratoga, but back in the days when the four-man 100km time trial was very much a part of the Olympic line-up, Watkins and a group of big burly bruisers on bikes were whipped into shape by Polish defector Eddie Borysewicz for an event that rarely took place.

“In my time, it was the Russians, Poles, Czechs – they were the masters. Eddie defected after the Montreal Olympics and when I met him in Squaw Valley at the Olympic Training Centre in ’77 he hardly spoke English.

“We had a two-week training camp there with Davis [Phinney] and [Ron] Kiefel; Greg Lemond was there too, but he was only 16. He could still rip the legs off of us…

“When Eddie came over from the Polish team, who had already won two World Championships and a bunch of Olympic medals, we didn’t have the first idea how to train for it. We were just a bunch of guys doing our own thing.

“But then we started specific intervals, even weight training, to improve our stamina, so that we could all pull at 31 – 32mph and be ready to go again by the time we reached the front.”

The squad improved rapidly. These unlikely-looking cyclists, with physiques that would not look out of place powering a coxless four, got their act together with the aid of their new coach.

“What Eddie B did was introduce a very scientific approach to selection: power, body fat, weight,” says Watkins. “So we were fed into this system and eventually came out with eight TTT riders.

“We needed real big engines and we were mostly real big guys, but it didn’t matter. Put us on a flat road and we went full throttle. You can’t have a guy who weighs 150lb in front of me – I get no rest. It had to be a complimentary selection: no surging, just steady but fast.

“There’s no rest. When you’re dropping back down the line, you are almost at your limit. You pull for maybe a minute, minute and a half, two minutes max, then swing over and you’re at your threshold. And you need to get back on the train immediately.

“Miss that wheel by a couple of inches and you’re gone, and you’re never coming back. No rest, for two hours…”

The ’84 Olympics saw the US team rise from nineteenth position in Montreal in ’76 (USA boycotted the ’80 games in Moscow) to bronze medal position.

It should be pointed out that, as the Eastern Bloc countries boycotted the LA Games, the chances of those four Americans mounting the podium had the Russians, Poles and East Germans attended, are somewhere between slim and nil, but it was a great achievement nonetheless.

And had the US not boycotted four years earlier, Watkins fancies the group of “world-calibre riders” under the tutelage of Eddie B would have been strong contenders for medals.

Watkins never got to travel to LA that summer, making the longlist but not the final selection. “I was sad. I was more than sad. But it was rocking good fun, to ride at 31mph for two hours.

“It was intensely competitive and we all had big egos. We probably should have been cheering each other on, but we were always at each other’s throats. Now we laugh about it and apologise to each other for what assholes we were back then!

“I loved it. It suited my personality.”

Bill Watkins is 6’2”, weighs 180lbs and rides a Serotta.

Many thanks to all at Serotta for showing us around and loaning me a rather swish Legend SG for the Tour of the Battenkill. 

Bernard Hinault

Words: Graeme Fife Photos: Gerard Brown

“The snow was driving so hard into our faces, on a crosswind, that we had to protect our eyes with one hand. We needed ski goggles. I couldn’t see a thing.”

Bernard Hinault talking after Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Sunday 20 April, 1980. The race was 245 kilometres; after 70km, 110 of the 174 riders had already quit.

Approaching the feed station at Vietsalm, at 149km, Hinault told his directeur Cyrille Guimard that if it hadn’t stopped snowing by the time they got there, he was climbing off.

As if Nemesis, the goddess of vengeance herself, was eavesdropping, the sun came out. Hinault, being the sort of man he is, was obliged to ride on.

“I went to the front and started to go [roule] because that way I could get some heat into my body and legs.” (The French word rouler can mean to lick someone, as in a fight, or, in the slang, to stand on the pedals.)

He caught and dropped a small group of breakaways, and, 80km from the finish, he was on his own.

“My mind was blank – I couldn’t see anything. I was locked up in myself. I looked at the pine trees – everything was white. I was riding in the furrows left by the car tracks.”

He finished 9min 24sec ahead of Hennie Kuiper, his second victory in the doyen of Classics (Hinault had already won in 1977 and was second in ’79).

By the time Kuiper arrived everyone had gone – television and radio reporters included. It’s as cogent an example as there is of Hinault’s sheer class, his willpower – the rage à vaincre of which he’s spoken – and his style, the panache, the exploit, the dominating spirit, what he called “une morale terrible”.

“Since that day,” he said 30 years on, “I have no feeling in two of my fingers. As soon as the glass drops below eight degrees, I get a pain there.”

This is an extract from issue 19

Farewell to Perren Street

Words: Guy Andrews Photos: Taz Darling, Offside and Ben Ingham

Seven years ago this very week I sat on a pink Ikea sofa in an old piano factory in Kentish Town with a handful of pieces of paper and an idea.

It had been knocking around my head for many years. There wasn’t much to show for it, but I’d been in a rush and I could explain the rest.

I was here to meet up with Rapha’s founder and managing director Simon Mottram. I was feeling a bit strange about it because two rather awkward encounters with Simon had gotten me to this place.

On our first, as a then magazine product tester and journalist discussing the idea for Rapha with him, I said I thought he was mad (I don’t think I was alone with that).

The second time was when he’d sold out his first jersey range and started the company that now sponsors a fairly well-known professional team and is, well, doing a roaring trade.

Seeing as I’d told him I thought that his concept for Rapha was rubbish, I was quite expecting him to return the advice.

My premise was to produce a magazine with high production values, paper and print. It would be a magazine for the discerning reader and the fan of bike racing.

In a climate with very few alternative magazines and a worldwide web cluttered with blogs and simple news-based sites, the idea was pretty ambitious.

But I’d always thought that there was a space in the market for a reportage style cycling magazine, something with the spirit of Jock Wadley’s Coureur and the striking visual sense of Foto 8.

I was wrong. Simon liked it. I think we had a shared aesthetic and passion and I’d realised that Rapha was the ideal starting point for this new idea. We decided to have a go and I went off to develop the idea.

Four or so like minded advertisers liked our pitch and we realised that we were onto something. It was small beer on the page yield front – I’m no salesman, after all – but it would pay for the printing. We were in business.

The cover of Rouleur 1

These were the hand-to-mouth beginnings of Rouleur magazine. Before long we moved into the then-spacious headquarters of Rapha Racing Limited, which numbered four employees and that pink sofa.

In the early days contributors were bribed with Rapha socks, jerseys and even soft shell jackets for those longer features.

Many gave their time for free. Photographers like Gerard Brown and Ben Ingham and writers like Matt Seaton and Graeme Fife were there at the start and still work for us today, albeit for a little more than threads and goodwill.

As time went on readers started to subscribe. So Rene Groot, Claire Wilson and I stuffed envelopes and amended spreadsheets as the orders came in.

The boxes of magazines filled the storeroom and we worked amongst them wondering if we could ever sell them all. We did.

Since that first issue, we’ve gone from 64 pages to 260, from four issues a year to eight. We’ve launched mountain biking magazine Privateer and a book publishing imprint with Bloomsbury.

Bruce Sandell came in to manage the business and we moved from Perren Street to Shoreditch three years ago.

The ideas kept coming at a furious rate and we all realised that Rapha couldn’t help us grow them anymore, mainly because of their own exponential growth and success.

Almost seven years to the day we started out with issue 1, a management buyout created a new company and added some much needed investment.

So amicably we agreed to part and allow us to take Rouleur to the next step.

Publishing an independent magazine in these times of economic vagueness and printing decline hasn’t always been easy, but cycling has been in rude recent health and niche independent magazines are on the up. Rouleur has survived, prospered even.

I would like to thank everyone who has been involved in the journey so far, especially those who helped us in those early days. The list is long, forgive me if I don’t mention you all.

But some special thanks go to Neil Wass and all the kind folk at Manson Group our printers, to Jonathan ‘Biff’ Bacon who worked tirelessly on the design of the early issues, to Edwin Ingram at Tapestry, to Peter Guest at Image Lab, to Brian Dowling, all the guys at BDI and to all of the talented contributors who have stuck with us.

And thanks to Simon Mottram who believed in it. We’ve had our differences and still do, but he saw the good in it and that was more than enough.

But above all, thanks to the readers who subscribed and the advertisers who have supported us. It’s thanks to all of you that Rouleur is here to stay.

It hasn’t always been ideal but if it was easy then everyone would be at it.

*The leading photograph was one of our more ambitious covers. It was for issue 20 and is a story in itself.

It was shot on the roof of Perren Street in Kentish Town, Rapha’s HQ. The dog is Gino and the mechanic is John Sutcliffe, who at one point was Rapha’s (and Rouleur’s) accountant.

It took weeks of planning and some tireless work over a very wet August weekend by a small group of talented professionals under the guidance of regular Rouleur photographer Taz Darling. And thank you for everything Taz.

Not quite everyone’s a Big Mig fan on the cover of Rouleur 38, which hits the shops in a fortnight.

Last But Not Least

Words: Andy McGrath

As fans begin to filter away from Roubaix Velodrome, a shrill whistle peep from a gendarme turns heads again. A race motorcycle buzzes past and one final group begins its laps.

I return to the arena to see these dusty stragglers circle the bowl – the concrete must feel like velvet after the vicious cobbles – in the warm afternoon sunshine.

Back of the pack, last man of the 2013 Paris-Roubaix, is Danish rider Chris Juul Jensen (Saxo Tinkoff), in 118th position, some 26 minutes behind Fabian Cancellara, the results later tell us.

But results hardly mean a thing in Roubaix. After first place, finishing is enough to be feted.

The collective suffering of the many far exceeds one man’s winning relief. The foot soldier’s tale is far more relatable than that of Cancellara the conqueror.

Not many other riders have suffered like Jensen this spring either. In a bizarre coincidence, this result completes a spring set: he was also lanterne rouge at the Scheldeprijs and the GP E3-Harelbeke.

You might expect the man bringing up the rear to call the race shit, be disheartened, swear off it for life.

After he emerges from the velodrome’s faded shower rooms and we ask for his battle stories, he replies: “It certainly was battle, it was incredible.”

Jensen was dropped after the Arenberg Forest. “That section is a complete slap in the face… two hundred riders going towards one stretch straight for two kilometres. It’s like that scene from Braveheart where they just run towards each other.

“Then when you look at your clock and you still have 70 kilometres to go and you’re up shit creek without a paddle, it’s pretty demoralising.”

Keep going, just keep going. That’s what Jensen told himself. So he found a group and counted off the cobbled sections, one by one.

“I don’t think there’s any rider here who would voluntarily like to step off the bike, especially with the finish in this prestigious velodrome. It was the same for me. No matter how fucked I was and how far there was to the finish.”

He emphasises the profanity in his strong Irish accent: bear in mind, Jensen lived in County Wicklow till the age of 16.

Rouleur, climber, middle mountain man? A second-year professional, Jensen doesn’t know what suits him best yet.

So when he was named in Saxo-Tinkoff’s cobbled Classics line-ups, the young professional didn’t just turn up, race and go home. Consciously or otherwise, he began to educate himself.

After Ghent-Wevelgem, Jensen accompanied friend and team captain Matti Breschel to “some tiny village in Flanders” to visit the Dane’s fan club.

“I saw how they ate, slept and breathed the Classics – Matti was a god to them. And when they realised that I was doing Paris-Roubaix too…”

The significance of the Classics began to sink in, along with his own place in history.

The night before Paris-Roubaix, Jensen watched A Sunday in Hell, Jørgen Leth’s seminal film based on the 1976 edition of the race, again. “I’d seen it a million times, but I saw it three times last week, to get it knocked into me what it is I’m a part of,” he says.

When the going got gruelling, he felt his responsibility to a colossal one-day race and the stubborn need to make his rendezvous with history in Roubaix.

“This isn’t just small races in France or Belgium: this is the bee’s knees of one-day races. There’s nothing that compares. All this combined is what eventually gets you to the finish line,” Jensen says.

“You’ve just seen me coming out of the showers, that’s part of the whole experience. I was sat on the team bus, completely cross-eyed, I hardly knew my own name. But I’d leave here with a sense of regret if I didn’t take a wash in these historic showers.

“That was the same with the bike. You can pull out of many races where you just don’t really give a fuck. But here you’d have such an enormous sense of regret.

“These races have been so demanding, physically and psychologically. As a second-year pro, you just get knocked back down to reality really quickly and hard. I nearly pulled out of more of these Classics than I finished.”

Was it the hardest race of his life? “Yes. It was beyond… I couldn’t predict how tough and frightening it would be, physically demanding and whatnot. There’s no forgiveness really. Although it may have been the hardest race, it was also the most fascinating.”

L’Enfer du Nord

Words: Jack Thurston Photos: Ben Ingham

Riding in the Panasonic team car after abandoning the mudbath of the 1985 edition of the race, dazed and confused, drunk with pain, Theo de Rooy put it with typical Dutch directness:

“It’s bollocks, this race, it’s a whole pile of shit. You’re working like an animal, you don’t have the time to piss and you wet your pants. You’re riding in mud like this and you’re slipping. It’s a pile of shit – you must clean yourself otherwise you will go mad.”

Asked if he would ever ride it again, de Rooy instantly replied, “Sure, it’s the most beautiful race in the world!”

Conceived in 1896 by a pair of canny Roubaix textile mill owners, the inaugural edition was held on Easter Sunday and intended as a loosener for Bordeaux-Paris – at the time the most prestigious race of the early season.

At around 300 kilometres, it was half the length of Bordeaux-Paris, but soon gained a diabolical reputation on account of the rough unpaved roads and cobblestone tracks that criss-crossed the fields and forests of the France’s northern borderlands. These borderlands become badlands when drenched and churned by the rain and the wind that sweep down from the North Sea.

The race has always courted controversy. Local clergy denounced La Pascale, the Easter race, as a distraction from religious observance. In those days road racing was a far less popular spectacle than races on the track, but the final laps were raced on the brand new velodrome, which brought in the crowds.

There were so many spectators that one section of stands collapsed under their weight. Soon, Northerners had adopted the race as their own.

The race draws on the raw character of the Northern expanses: a dour landscape of tough lives and hard times. These are great swathes of land, featureless but for lonely water towers, gloomy gothic steeples, collieries, blast furnaces and their mountains of slag.

The dark density of man-made volcanoes can drain the very light from the sky. If it is wet, brightly-coloured team jerseys surrender to the mud and the filth until each rider wears the same grim uniform. Cement grey – how fitting for the convicts of the road!

Within a few years, a special bond had formed between the brave riders and the locals who line the route. For the farm labourers, factory workers and miners at the turn of the century, the echoes of their own daily toil were all too obvious, but so too was the dignity and the pride.

It immediately became a favourite race for local heroes to try their luck. Roubaix-born Charles Crupelandt delighted the home crowd with wins in 1912 and 1914, achieving the second while turning a colossal gear of 24×7.

This land was their land but it was soon to bear witness to a terrible conflagration of mechanised death and destruction.

From that moment onwards the land would bear the memory of a generation of young men sent to kill and be killed, to rot in the trenches of the war they said would end all wars.

In 1919, six months after the Armistice, the race’s twentieth edition followed the line of the Western Front north of Arras and passed through the towns devastated by war.

Bomb craters and grim wreckage scarred fields that entombed the fallen millions. Shell-shattered buildings and trees formed ghostly silhouettes of destruction along the course of the route.

This apocalyptic scene was described by a journalist as L’Enfer du Nord – the Hell of the North – and the name stuck.

Extract from issue 9. Jack Thurston hosts The Bike Show on 104.4 Resonance FM.

Sean Kelly: King of the Kasseien

Words: Matt Seaton Photos: Graham Watson

What makes a great rider of the pavé?
First of all, it’s a rider who is strong and powerful. You have to be pretty heavy, or the cobbles will just hop you all over the place.

And, usually, if you have the weight, you have the power – if you’re any good. You need the power because you have to ride a gear that is higher than normal. You push a bigger gear to get the power down smoothly and keep traction.

Then you have to learn to overcome the cobbles. If you’re Belgian, you grow up born and bred to ride the cobbles, certainly from when you start racing as a teenager. But if you’re a non-Belgian national, you don’t race a lot on those roads. It takes time to know how to do it.

I had ridden the Paris-Roubaix five or six or seven times before the first time I won – and not only the Paris-Roubaix and big races like the Tour of Flanders, but a lot of smaller races in Belgium. There was the Grand Prix de l’Escaut that finished with three laps of a 15km circuit that had a several bad sections of cobbles every lap.

Riding a lot of these smaller races is how you learn to ride and control the bike on the cobbles. Of course, when they’re wet, it’s a different matter…

In the Paris-Roubaix, you sometimes see riders hunting for a flat section in the gutter, while some seem to prefer to ride on the crown in the middle. What’s the best way to ride the pavé?
There’s a trade-off. When it’s dry, it’s much easier to ride on the side, not even on the cobbled surface. But the risk of punctures is much greater – you have all the grit and small stones from the fields there.

So you’re conserving energy but you’re risking having to chase back on after having to get a wheel change. That’s OK early in the race maybe, when you still have all your team around you, but later in the race fractions of seconds become critical.

And in the Paris-Roubaix the service cars are always further behind, so you can lose a lot of time.

So the safest place from punctures is to ride in the middle of the cobbles. On either side the road is cambered quite steeply, so especially in the wet you have to stay in the middle.

What changes did you make to the set-up of your bike when you were riding the Paris-Roubaix?
The main thing was you ran fatter tyres – and higher, to avoid the risk of pinch flats, which was greater because you rode them softer than you would for a normal race on asphalt. I didn’t change my position on the bike; very few riders did.

But some used to put foam padding under the bar tape to absorb the shock. I didn’t; I didn’tlike the extra thickness – it’d give me cramp in my hands trying to grasp the thicker bar.

What was your technique for climbing the muurs? You see a lot of riders who sit back in the saddle to get the power down, but sometimes you see a power rider like Boonen who seems to be able to climb the cobbles out of the saddle.
Sitting down, definitely, and keeping the weight to the rear. Most riders can’t do that like Boonen – you have to keep the momentum very smooth, which is difficult on cobbles, and it’s very hard to keep traction.

But there are always some who can do it – Eddy Planckaert was one of the few who could climb like that.

Who else did you rate?
[Eric] Vanderaerden, obviously. He had the power. Greg LeMond could have won more of the classics, but he chose to take it easy and concentrate on the Tour later in the season. Steve Bauer was good, too. He could ride the cobbles.

You were always flying in the Paris-Nice, and kept that form through the spring classics. How did you prepare so well?
The good winters in Ireland helped me a lot – all that sun. No, but I seemed to work quite well in the winter. I wasn’t afraid to go out in the weather. It didn’t bother me. I could do 4-5 hour rides in January; I didn’t get cold as easily as some riders.

Also I didn’t need a lot of training kilometres to get into shape. Some riders had to do half as much again. That’s just the luck of my physiology. I didn’t have to do as much to get good condition.

And then I always looked forward to the classics. So motivation helped. Those northern classics are a monument in Belgium: you have to have lived there to understand it. And if you can win one, you’re a hero for a long time there.

What does the Paris-Roubaix in particular mean?
I always say it was the most horrible race to ride, but the most beautiful to win.

Was it harder than any other? And which hurt most afterwards– your legs or your arms?
Well, the wrists could hurt a lot. But if you’re riding well, you don’t hurt that much.

But it does take longer to recover from the Paris-Roubaix than any other race. The body just takes more punishment than a long but straightforward race like the Milan-San Remo, or even the Liège-Bastogne-Liège which has a lot of climbing in it. Two or three days after the Paris-Roubaix and the body is still pretty weary.

And it can hurt to pee afterwards. Your prostate takes a pounding. A lot of riders complain that you get a burning sensation for a couple of days when you go to the loo.

 

Extract from issue 2