ROUBAIX THEN AND NOW
A Sunday in Hell: how does modern ParisRoubaix compare to the 1976 race?
is a living example of how bike races both stay the same, yet change. William Fotheringham is the author of a new book which looks at the greatest ever film about cycling, A Sunday in Hell, which covers the 1976 Paris-Roubaix. Fotheringham teamed up with photographer Léon van Bon, a fourtimes top-10 finisher in the race, to visit the most memorable scenes of the movie and key strategic points in the modern Hell of the North
It often feels as if the monuments are the last bastion of continuity in an everchanging cycling world. That tradition is key to our love for the greatest one-day races, but we must never forget they are a movable feast. That’s underlined when you look at recent developments at the Tour of Flanders, and the constant tweaking of Il (or the Giro di) Lombardia. And although Paris-Roubaix is all about those ancient cobbled tracks in Northern France, the configuration of those tracks changes constantly, as I discovered while researching a book on the film by Danish director Jørgen Leth, ASundayinHell.
As well as looking in detail at how Leth made the film, and examining the back stories of the men who shot it and the riders who star in it, a key mission was to examine just how the race Leth shot for posterity in 1976 relates to the route of today’s race. Although Paris-Roubaix may look pretty similar superficially - the mileage of cobbled tracks is about the same as it was in Leth’s day, and the cobbles themselves are as bucolic, bumpy and as battered as ever - in fact, today’s course bears surprisingly little resemblance to what we see in Leth’s film, once it approaches the cobbles around the village of Troisvilles.
That isn’t a bad thing: we shouldn’t expect the great races to be preserved as if in aspic. The way the Paris-Roubaix route has changed is a tribute to the ingenuity of men such as Albert Bouvet and Thierry Gouvenou of the race organisers, Amaury Sport Organisation, who have sought out new stretches of cobbles every year, partly to counter the ravages of the tarmac machines, but also to improve the event and give it a new edge every year.
Comparing the 1976 and 2017 races wasn’t a purely academic exercise. Looking at the route in detail, studying the cobbled sections and comparing screenshots from the film with what is visible today from the same viewpoints brought two things home. One is that the essential elements that create the spirit of ParisRoubaix remain exactly the same: the flat run-out, the climactic run through the cobbles, the velodrome finish.
It is a tribute to Leth that he captured these so successfully, and it is partly why his film retains its place in many cycling fans’ affections. But he depicted something else, which is key to Paris-Roubaix and to every Classic: the race’s place in its own particular landscape. The Hell of the North isn’t always a beautiful or glamorous backdrop - windy hilltops, farmyards, dungheaps, piles of sugar beet and straw bales and now wind farms - but it has a certain brutal simplicity which keeps cyclists and spectators coming back for more, year after year.