On the verge of attacking Paris-Roubaix, it is time for fear in the peloton. After spectacular falls having seriously injured two stars of world cycling in recent weeks, the question of safety arises on the eve of the departure from Hell of the North this Sunday, April 7.
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The peloton is already traumatized » by the serious falls which sent several cycling stars to the hospital. And here comes Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, one of the most dangerous races of the year, with Mathieu van der Poel as the overwhelming favorite.
If there’s one race that’s scary, it’s the Hell of the North. Since its first edition in 1896, the Queen of Classics has broken men and their machines on its six million often dislocated paving stones. To the point of today being the only event of the year where the teams give their riders the choice of participating or not.
Read alsoCycling: multiple fractures for Vingegaard and Evenepoel after a violent fall in the Basque Country
This is even more true for this 2024 edition, with paved sectors saturated with water and stained with mud after a particularly wet winter. Even though hot, dry and windy weather is forecast, the course still looked like a real ice rink on Friday, conducive to a new festival of slips and punctures.
Falls are the theme of the moment in cycling and the fear rose a notch on Thursday, during the terrible crash at the Tour of the Basque Country which notably sent Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel to the ground. Both victims of fractures and a pneumothorax for the first, who, three months before the Tour de France, are forced to put their season on hold for many weeks. The accident, preceded by that equally serious of Wout Van Aert, ten days ago, during Across Flanders, puts the dangerousness and crazy speeds of this sport at the heart of the debate.
For a sixth Monument
The platoon is “ damn traumatized », in the words of the director of Paris-Roubaix, Thierry Gouvenou, to whom the riders’ unions asked for a way to slow down the riders at the entrance to the formidable Arenberg gap, to avoid a new game of bowling.
After numerous discussions with the authorities, it was decided that the riders would go around an island just before, a sort of improvised chicane which is not without posing other safety problems, it is so tight. “ It’s a joke ? », Reacted Van der Poel that an entry at more than 60 km/h into the Arenberg gap does not seem to frighten, like not much else.
Outgoing winner, the Dutchman is the big favorite to achieve the double in Roubaix, a week after his demonstration in the Tour of Flanders. Certainly, the Queen of the classics is not easily available. No rider has won the two cobbled Monuments in the same year since Fabian Cancellara in 2013. And we have to go back to 2009 and Tom Boonen to find trace of an outgoing winner who keeps his property in Roubaix. But Van der Poel has excellent reasons to believe in it because his power, his agility and his superiority are precisely reminiscent of those expressed at the time by Cancellara and Boonen with whom he began to play in the same league.
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If the world champion, who spent the week training in the sun in Spain, is such a favorite, it is also because the competition arrives, like at the Tour of Flanders, in his little shoes. In addition to Wout Van Aert, absent for many weeks, uncertainty surrounds the state of form of Mads Pedersen who is also still healing his wounds after the Tour of Flanders.
Same thing for the Visma-Lease a bike team which records the return of Christophe Laporte, but will be without Van Aert and Matteo Jorgenson. Van der Poel’s most serious competitor could ultimately be his teammate at Alpecin, Jasper Philipsen, second last year and winner of Milan-Sanremo a month ago.
Afterwards, there remains the randomness of a race like no other, 260 km full of traps where it is not always the strongest who wins and where you also need a good dose of luck to avoid punctures and obviously falls.