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A dedicated group of volunteers try to keep the course safe throughout the year leading up to the race, ensuring the unique profile is maintained.
The preparation of the route includes the use of goats to chew the vegetation that paves the way through the rocks – especially in the terrifying sector through the Arenberg forest, a foreboding sprint on roads that are always treacherous, often slippery and forever filled.
The weather never helps either: if it rains, it’s an almost-impossible swamp, with countless abandon; If it’s dry, the dust will get you, kicked by competitors and cavalcades of team cars and motorbike outriders – it’s a challenge to breathe, let alone see.
In his glory days, Deeganan surprised the rest of the peloton and crashed in extreme conditions that saw him, at one point, spin the bike as the rear wheel slipped in a corner.
“Everybody gets a puncture and everybody crashes, the one who has a good leg and really survives,” he says “It’s unlike any other race.”
Paris-Roubaix falls within the same road cycling world tour as the Tour de France or the Giro d’Italia. And so the same peloton will hit the cobbles months before passing through the sunflowers of the French summer.
But success in those other races doesn’t always translate to joy on the trail.
Four-time Tour winner Chris Froome: hated it, rode it once and didn’t finish. Three-time Tour champion Greg LeMond: Finished fourth. Two-time Tour winner Jonas Wingard: most likely to stage a Paris-Dakar rally.
Those who both straddled, including Bernard Hinault and the oft-acclaimed great Eddy Marx, each with five Tours de France under their glittering palmares, but they weren’t the best either way.
Hell belongs to the power house; Burley Classic riders who can’t go over the hills day after day, but who can go long and hard throughout an epic day of racing.
“Every time I tried (to attack), my legs weren’t big enough and (Van Art always) rode my wheel,” Pogakkar, who we’re used to winning races by minutes, said after Sunday’s edition.
For Van Aart – known to many as ‘the best man in cycling’ and who roared onto the velodrome – it was simply “a dream come true” that had been “years in the making”.
Nothing tells you you’re a part of something so hard and deep as when a champion dedicates his win to a teammate who lost his life on the cobblestones eight years ago. Belgian Michael Goularts died of cardiac arrest during the 2018 race.
