As nice as it is to have the race start in another country the Tour de France only really feels like it has commenced properly when it reaches French soil. With maybe the exception of Brittany, there’s no better place for me to return to than the northern border of France with Belgium.
GC riders either hate the wind and cobbles that you get in the North or they love it, there’s no in-between. When you cope just fine it’s quite joyous to put the hurt on people and if you are in the suffering camp then you wake up stressed.
You race stressed and you go to bed thinking about how stressed you’ve been and how long it’s going to be until you reach somewhere with trees, where bouncing along farm tracks won’t be your fate.
The stages within spitting distance of the Flanders classics are actually an unofficial championship for Dutch speakers. Having been on one of those teams, the orders for racing in the region are ‘if we can’t win then don’t let our direct rivals do that either’.
The bickering that exists between the various ex-riders and characters now in team management is as complicated as the fighting that has taken place during times of major conflicts. The racing is brutal, no prisoners are taken and no quarter is given. It would be unthinkable to even consider asking for a favour such is the rivalry.
The first time I did the Tour, I fell off twice on the pave, captured by the misfortune of others, and as a result, I hated my luck, the race for its cruelty and the North but then to ensure I adapted I decided to embrace my inner Flandrian and move there.
Practice makes perfect seemed like a good idea and it was for a few months, until I realised that the improvement was never going to be spectacular. Sometimes you just have to accept that your level of a certain skill is average at best and that means coping with the setbacks that you’ll suffer.
Because suffer you will, one day you survive and it all seems good and the next you get handed a beating by nature, the route and lady luck. Dunkirk, Lille or Arenberg aren’t holiday destinations for many folk and you need a special mentality to even consider the notion that racing in the vicinity might be fun but race you have to and it’s part of the Tour experience that has an influence on you for a long long time.
The fear of being in the gutter in a sidewind is probably worse than actually having it forced upon you but what is always known as the Roubaix stage is awful for the GC riders, who tend to be of a lighter build. Of course, you can be fortunate, my second trip to TdF cobbles went much better but then I fell apart later so there’s no given on what you get on the day or two weeks later when it all seems like a bad memory.
What you can be sure of is someone like Wout van Aert and his Jumbo team will regret leaving the North, opportunity missed. For the other survivors, they’ll never be so glad to see proper roads, hills and a decent night’s sleep. Only if you escaped with most of your faculties though… which when you read through some of the individual tales you learn that not many do.
