Cobbles Are Forever – Podium Cafe

This final* post is appropriately dedicated to, uh, for shorthand let’s call it Belgium and the Classics. Shorthand because if naturally includes France and the Netherlands to a significant degree, not to mention riders from around the globe. To the extent that concerns the thing I wrote about the most, that would be the cobbled classics, though it’s hard not to loop in the Ardennes as a necessary tangent. And cyclocross as another necessary tangent. You get the picture. The purpose of this post is just to play a few of the hits, nothing more.

[* Nothing is ever final!]

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Cycling’s Mooiste

My cycling fan origin story is one I’ve mentioned a few times. It was the 80s and Greg LeMond was everywhere, including this weird looking race over cobblestones where everyone looked like they were performing in a minstrel show by the time they reached the velodrome, in a place I’d never heard of, a town in France’s industrial north. The gloomy skies, the early spring atmosphere, hardly alive with greenery — it seeemed like something else, especially when photographed in European cycling mags I bought in Harvard Square, my only access to the images of the sport in spring.

It is really an aesthetic thing. There is a still, peaceful beauty to rural Flanders in Spring, the mud, the small roads, the dour churches, it all seemed very authentically Belgian to me, even before I knew anything about the country (it was a pretty good guess though). Add in a dash of mystery to this area of Europe, an artifact of my American cluelessness, and I was hooked. You might say they had me at “cobble.” That this peaceful bliss is sporadically shattered each spring by the cycling traditions (and in winter by cyclocross) just made it all the more exciting to me.

And the racing. Pitiful as it was, my own racing experience enabled me to see these places as the setting for fantastic events. I had spent enough time on odd, technical surfaces or going up stabby climbs to understand that you didn’t need majestic mountains to have a thrilling race. Even without that background, I doubt it would take long to get what makes de Ronde special, but anyway for me it all clicked into place. By 2006, I had begun to see the classics season as par with a grand tour for fun, intrigue and glory. From a blogging perspective, it helped that nobody was saying all that much (in English) back then, as compared to the Tour de France. But even if there were no niche to fill, I was going deep on the classics, and hoping there would be an audience here to go with me.

Turned out, it wasn’t just me, not even close. I couldn’t possibly recap all the work that people collectively put in around the classics, particularly the cobbled ones, but suffice to say that it was extensive and involved practically every editor or Cafe member inclined to generate content here. As much as any one subject the cobbles made the Cafe what it was intended to be — a unique community hanging around together and reveling in the best Cycling has to offer. It is no coincidence that the closest we came to creating a literal cafe was a tradition in the early years where everyone in the live thread was encouraged to quaff a nice stiff ale at the precise moment the men’s Tour of Flanders hit the lower slopes of the Koppenberg. It was usually just prior to 5am my time, on a Sunday when I was expected to spend quality time with my kids. I have zero regrets.

Francois Lo Presti, Getty

The Modern Golden Era(s?)

Timing counts for a lot, and the Podium Cafe coincided with some of the most memorable racing the Classics have ever seen. Usual caveat about how past eras are hard to compare, and I’m not calling the 2000s the ultimate iteration… but it’s been pretty great. And by great, I don’t mean just top characters and fun races — that is practically inevitable. I mean eras of great champions defined by compelling head-to-head drama. As they say, the value of a victory comes down to who finished second.

When the Café began in 2006, there were several notable vets around such as Peter Van Petegem, Magnus Backstedt and George Hincapie, but in 2005 Tom Boonen had pushed all of them aside and seized the Flandrien mantle, achieving the Ronde-Roubaix double. Then, clad in the rainbow stripes, he opened his next campaign with a second resounding win in Vlaandriens mooiste. That was quite an individual story. We saw him coming in 2002 and by ’06 he was astride the cycling world.

Photo by Tim De Waele/Getty Images

But the week following that magic ‘06 Ronde, it became a golden era. Boonen wasn’t the only emerging star circling the podium; Fabian Cancellara’s Paris-Roubaix debut in 2004 (4th place) served notice that he was somebody. It would be a moment before he would break through at Flanders, but the ‘06 Hell of the North was his coming of age. Cancellara powerfully attacked and left Boonen in the mire, soloing away with a slight help from a train crossing, and other dramatic twists.

Photo by Tim de Waele/Corbis via Getty Images

From there we got a few years of missed magic, but in 2010 it all came to fruition. Cancellara’s Flanders-Roubaix Double made it clear that we were witnessing two all-time stars. I don’t need to repeat any of this, you guys know. But I’ll just thrown in one last note that this drama played out mostly on the old Flanders course, in all its beautiful madness. It’s the narrative that keeps on giving.

Photo by Tim de Waele/Getty Images

We are in the second great era of the 2000s right now, although it’s not (yet) Boonen-Cancellara because Mathieu van der Poel hasn’t had anyone challenge his hold on the cobbled monuments… yet. But Wout Van Aert is still around and due for a year without shit luck, and Tadej Pogačar seems determined to assert himself more this coming spring. Tom Pidcock is somewhere in the picture. Maybe a decade from now we won’t see the 2020s as any special era of competition, but it sure seems like we we’ve been denied exactly the kind of rivalry that would make it so by the fickle fate of crashing.

Being There

If you love these races, you really should try to go in person if possible. It is very different to absorb all of the atmosphere — the place, the scene, the steadily building anticipation toward one or more moments of witnessing the spectacle right in front of your eyes. It is not at all like watching on TV. You may or may not know exactly what is happening in the race, except for that time when it passes by you, although information is easy to come now. Traditionally it was a choice to forego the information for the spectacle. Even then, it was well worth it.

I covered this a bit in the meetup post, our 2010 trip, but I actually spent two weeks playing journalist from E3 Prijs to Paris-Roubaix, taking in everything there was of the cobbles season apart from the smaller races (Handzame, Nokere) and Dwars door Vlaanderen, which ran three days after Milano-Sanremo back then. Taking in races as a fan or journo, in person, is naturally very different from our normal consumption, and in Belgium it is its own garden of delights. As an American, attending sports usually means parking at the stadium and finding your seat for however many hours (and yeah, de Ronde is a bit like that now too). But this was a different world. A few random experiences:

• E3 is special in that you can take in the start and the finish with relative ease. They’ve moved the line, but with 4+ hours to make the trek across the river, I’m sure it still works. But in 2010 the finish was smack in the center of town, in front of the pubs, making it a cool place to spend the day.
• Gent-Wevelgem was notable for one thing: if you go to the start in Deinze, you can hop on the train to Wevelgem, along with like 20,000 Belgian cycling fans crammed in with you. It’s kind of a straight shot from Gent to Deinze, Waregem, Harelbeke, Kortrijk and eventually sleepy Wevelgem. Nowadays the race makes a big deal of its tours of the WWI battlefields, and that or the Kemmelberg are watch points, but the rail-rolling party is pretty cool.

Chris Fontecchio

• Hardcore fans have long used cars to hop around and see the race from several places, but by far the best — and maybe the last — place for this is Paris-Roubaix. You could drive around the old Flanders course but you had to know your Flemish roads or you risked getting hung up by the race closures. Paris-Roubaix, on the other hand, has an A-route running parallel and the race traverses it on bridges. Twice we have gunned it from Compiegne to an early cobbles spot to the Arenberg Trench, just pulling off the highway and hoofing it to the course, and running back to it for the next move. Oh and the other like minded drivers… you can tell some of them have done this a lot, and they aren’t gonna get cheated.
• Flanders, I guess you can do this, but the stadium finish makes it an ideal race to sit in one spot, or walk between two places, and not worry about being fit to operate a motor vehicle. This is the land of great beer, right?

I could carry on way too long, but the only other point worth mentioning is that if you’re a cyclist you must bring a bike. For a million different reasons, but mostly because when the Super Bowl isn’t happening, you are not invited to run out and try your hand at kicking field goals. Guessing the same rule applies at Old Trafford, and just about everywhere else in the major ball-sports world. But the great cycling venues belong to the public, except on the one day a year (or so) when they are closed for a race.

Greatest Hits: The Flandrien Faceoff

We found innumerable excuses and formats used to revisit cycling lore, but of this one I am most proud. In 2013, we ran a 64-entry single elimination tournament to determine the all-time Cobbles God, the Flandrien Faceoff! Here is the explainer post, and yes, it was inspired by the NCAA basketball tournament that runs in the US the same month. Our four brackets (we made actual brackets) were current Belgians, past Belgian stars, current foreigners and past ones. I roped Ursula into this rather lengthy commitment — 65 subjective mini-posts where we break down head-to-head matchups and put them to a deciding vote by readers. Ursula couldn’t have refused even if every fiber of his being had not been screaming yes.

One key element is a feature of SBNation’s called the story stream, where you start a stream with a topic and a token opening post, then attach all the follow-up posts so that readers can work through as little or as much as they want. This may be the only time we used the format, and it was perfect. This screenshot will give a flavor of it:

You may not have bought the whole thing, but if you wanted to dive deep into Round 1 of the Oude Flandriens Bracket, clicking on the story stream would bring up all of the matchup posts. The vote function has long since disappeared (it had a timer) but the matchup posts were where you would cast your ballot. SBNation has made its rep with really great tools.

This is the sort of thing I could read again, years later, and enjoy. [This post could have come out three days ago if I hadn’t fallen down the Faceoff rabbit hole.] If interested, you could go into each story stream, in this order:

Round 1— Oude Vlaandriens; Nieuwe Vlaandriens; Oude Buitenlanders; and Nieuwe Buitenlanders. That’s “foreigners” for you buitenlanders. Each bracket stream has all the individual matchups.

Round 2— All four brackets in one story stream

Round 3— 16 Left

Round 4— the Regional Finals

The Final Four was just one last round where you picked among the regional finalists, rather than two phases. It was time to be done. The surviving entrants were too elite to insult with anything else. Only one problem… the end result is lost, without the vote totals! But I know the answer and will put it in comments.

Random Oddities

Cuddles the Cobble came into being like any stone, in that he was there all along, going back many thousands of years, but only recently took his final shape. The name “Cuddles” emerged as a slander of Cadel, as in Evans, a great rider but seemingly an oddball personality who, unfairly or not, inspired his fair share of snark. But Cuddles the Cobble emerged independently, almost mysteriously, and all I know is that by the time he became one of the prominent voices of the Café, he was already… kind of a jerk.

Speaking of cobbles, did you know that we connected up with Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix, long before they became the household name they are now? I don’t recall how it started (recurring theme; also it predates my current gmail account) but I had heard of the guys who formed cobbles cleanup brigades across northern France, even going so far as organizing actual, professional repair of some stretches of pavé to preserve them and their inclusion in the race going forward. I did an email interview (language barriers be damned!) and that led to a brief fundraiser for Les Amis, where we raised enough money to qualify for our own cobble trophy!

Jimbo directed the effort and eventually it was awarded to someone on some race-result-guessing pretext. Nothing lasts forever… except probably that rock.

And last but not least, I wrote a book.

It was a self-published effort which had limited commercial appeal to begin with, and next to none now, being a decade out of date. But I loved writing it and even sometimes take a peek back at it, for nostalgic kicks. Really, if the purpose of this post is to try and sum up my love of these races, I already did this in 2016. Just for fun, that March I declared “Boonen Week,” doing one last lap on the great Tom-Fab rivalry, as Cancellara was cruising to retirement and Boonen just gamely searching for his form for one last effort. I declared Boonen the main story — which not everyone would agree with — given his roots and the fact that he owns or shares the record for most wins in E3 Prijs/Harelbeke/Saxo Bank, Gent-Wevelgem, de Ronde van Vlaanderen and Paris-Roubaix.

I actually downloaded all of the articles from Boonen Week into the book’s appendix, and I’m glad I did, to spare me the trouble of trying to remember them all. They were:

1. How Terrific Was Tom? Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Who got next?
4. What made him great— his teams
5. And finally, how Fabian and Tom made each other great

Looking back, what this all means is that Tom Boonen is my spirit animal. I only met him once, in a scrum before a 2009 Tour of California stage, and he was a nice, cheerful guy, probably a joy to talk to if he wasn’t a mega-star whose life was under constant media glare. If I go back to Belgium, maybe I will find a way to say hello, if he is around and has an unbothered moment, or if some other pretext arises, but I won’t count on that.

No matter. He’s a person and a stranger, and the spirit animal comment is more about the effect his career had on me and my work here. Among our first posts were talking about his Tour of Qatar rampage — I was following him before the Café started — and I watched his final race in person, the 2017 Tour of Flanders, where he seemed to loom over the peloton enough to allow his teammate, Philippe Gilbert, to solo away for the win. Another recurring theme. We knew Boonen wasn’t his old superstar self, and probably some people really did write off his chances completely, but for me I would have never said never.

In the seven full seasons following his stoppage, I kept on with the classics and didn’t really dwell on his absence, but in retrospect it really was never the same. The rise of van der Poel and Van Aert re-enlivened the scene and it has continued to be fun. But the linkages to the old course have faded away (is anyone from the 2011 edition still racing?) and that time feels like a completely separate experience.

I had nothing to do with this photo, and I will cherish it always.

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I sign off next week with no regrets. In addition to the classics, I will miss geeking out on the Giro d’Italia, another specialty, and I could do a deep dive on my love of Italy, or the Tour, or cyclocross as an extension of the classics… but no, it’s time to let go. I will follow up with a post on where you can find us. There will be a VDS, there will be a conversation space (see the Reddit post), and lastly I will create a writing space when I can’t stand not to say something. The only finish line for me and my love of Flanders and the Classics is… uh, the ultimate finish line. Stay in touch!