Goats snap between the cobblestones of Arenberg.
Below is not the beach of 68, but a coal mine and Polish miners friends and cousins of Stablinski buried, and many dreams.
Obsessions.
Above them, irregular and worn prisms of granite, diorite and porphyry from Belgian and Swedish quarries, those who dream will float, they will bounce and fall broken, defeated kamikazes, on Sunday (Eurosport, 10.30; Teledeporte, 13.45).
It is the
drève
(forest path) of the Arenberg forest, 2,300 meters long, three meters wide, as straight as a square and bevel, the geometric space in which all horrors, and the best cycling, are allowed.
The duel of the fantastic of the century, Van der Poel and Van Aert, Mathieu and Wout.
The misery of one fattens the glory of the other.
They pursue each other and pursue her first victory in the queen of the classics, which they, born for her, have always rejected.
Everyone's adrenaline.
Of the almost children Oier Lazkano, who grew up in the ditches of Itzulia, and Iván Romeo, who in Asturias found the curves that in Castilla, his Valladolid, there are not.
Of Filippo Ganna, the human locomotive who seeks to be Francesco Moser.
Welcome to Hell.
The illusion of illusion.
The queen of the classics.
The Paradise.
Goats graze on the weeds that grow between the cobblestones of Arenberg.ANNE-CHRISTINE POUJOULAT (AFP)
It is Paris-Roubaix, born in the 19th century, when the euphoria of the textile industry, and older than ever, and modern.
Goat herbicide, and not chemical.
Carbon bikes with electronic shifting and hidden suspension.
32-millimeter tubeless tires and very low pressure to dampen the rattling on the cobblestones, boats, 2.5 or 3 atmospheres, and three of the Jumbo -Van Baarle, Affini and Laporte- with wheels equipped with a device to inflate them and deflate them at will via
bluetooth
: hyper pressure to roll on asphalt with little resistance;
hypopressure, for stones.
Almost 260 kilometers from Compiègne, from where it has started since 1977;
54 kilometers along cobbled agricultural roads, divided into 29 sectors that are numbered inversely, from 29, in Troisvilles, 150 kilometers from the finish line, to 1, in the last kilometer to the velodrome.
The Arenberg straight, 95 kilometers from the finish line, on the 19th;
11, at 48, from Roubaix, is the ascent of Mons en Pévèle, three kilometers, the hardest segment, always the wind, the only hill;
and after starting in Camphin en Pévèle from the section named Eddy Merckx, number four, the Carrefour de l'Arbre, where the destinies of the champions intersect, 2,100 meters between fields of recently harvested beets.
From there to the velodrome, 16 kilometers.
It is the Hell of the North.
It will not rain.
Mists and sun.
15 degrees.
Van Aert's leg and ribs hurt, who hit his side when a Pole driving like crazy knocked down half a peloton in the Tour of Flanders a week ago.
Van der Poel is full of energy and counts on his fingers.
He beat Van Aert in the Cyclocross World Championship, at his father's house in the Netherlands;
He also beat him in San Remo, and although both succumbed to the absent Tadej Pogacar from Roubaix who still has half the world rubbing his eyes in disbelief (and the Strava algorithm, which did not want to believe him) for his deeds on the walls of Flanders In his Old Quaremont, Van der Poel remembers that Van Aert suffered more there, whom he suffocated on the Paterberg.
The Belgian from Herenthals can only show a victory against the grandson of Poulidor and son of Adri, two winners of monuments as well, that of the GP E3,
the classic in which he relied on the superior collective strength of his Jumbo, the team that dominates in the North as Quick Step did before.
On Sunday, two other tenors run next to him, the Dutchman Van Baarle, who won the queen in 2022 with the Ineos jersey, and the Frenchman Laporte, to whom Van Aert gave a Ghent-Wevelgem.
Van der Poel runs alone.
They are both 28 years old.
The latest Italian winner, Sonny Colbrelli, retired from cycling with a disturbed heart and a defibrillator implanted in his chest, tells Ganna that to win in Roubaix he has to dare to file
,
to play with his elbows, to brush his bike through impossible gaps in the middle of the peloton.
Imanol Erviti and the directors of Movistar say the same to Oier Lazkano, a 23-year-old from Vitoria, who expresses himself best when he is on the run the most (and with a double break he came second a couple of weeks ago in the Through Flanders) and thinks also elope on Sunday.
"I think so and 160 other cyclists think so," says Lazkano, who is not a mythomaniac and does not adore Mathieu or Wout, nor does he have a favorite between the two, but he does admire his teammate Erviti, 39, to whom a boil has deprived him of the entire northern campaign and the pleasure of riding his 18th Roubaix and becoming the cyclist who has ever ridden the most Hells of the North.
“I do miss Erviti, yes, his advice on where to position yourself, how to enter Arenberg,
the most dangerous and decisive moment, and things like that.
I don't know if I will be a myth for anyone, but a better inspiration than an athlete would be a scientist, right?
Lazkano inspires Iván Romeo, 19, who also, like the man from Vitoria, measures over 1.90 and weighs 80 kilos, and makes his debut in Roubaix, as he also made his debut in Flanders and in all the classics, in which he is being the youngest participant this spring.
In the Strade Bianche he had the luxury of escaping through the first white roads, and in Roubaix he will work so that Lazkano or another teammate can catch the escape.
At Movistar they take care of him and ask him to retire after four hours of the race, but he, although he obeys, always asks for a little more.
On Wednesday and Thursday he rode the most important stages and came away impressed.
“The pavés here have nothing to do with that of Flanders.
It is much more irregular, more complicated.
A horror, a horror… And to think that you have to enter the stages at 60 per hour…”, says Romeo.
To the one who wins a flamant cobblestone and a plaque in a cubicle of the old, miner's showers, black water like the black powder of coal that sticks to your sweat, where only the romantics soap up.
The others, on the bus.
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