I gather the most truthful sites to explain the cycling spring
I know that each one has a well-defined map of places to be able to experience a cycling spring one day in situ, but if we have to choose, we go for eight places that surely give the measure of what lies ahead.
Here we go for a quick and subjective tour of 8 sites that when I see them, I know I’m home, that it’s spring.
The The most iconic climb in Flanders is the chapel, Le Grammont, as I knew it in its early years, today it is the Kapelmuura hill at the exit of Geraardsbergen that was the key to the Tour of Flanders for many years until exactly eleven years ago, it was relegated by the circuit with Oude Kwaremont and Paterberg.
The chapel is, however, the main filter of the Het Nieuwsblad, which recreates those endings of De Ronde, chained to Bosberg.
After the opening, the central street of Siena that leads to Il Campo, where Van der Poel took off on the resistance of Alaphilippe, has been the emerging icon among my places of spring.
I could choose other places, places with sterrato, but that Sienese street, so Tuscan, so verticalis the result of the importance that the Strade has gained in the spring.
then there is a turn, very pronounced, going down the Poggio towards San Remo, which you will remember by the cabinlike that vestige of a past that we don’t have so far away and that every year I try to look for on television as the turning point of my career.
We saw Nibali pass by alone a few years ago, that’s where Alaphilippe has passed in the lead several times, I even remember that time King Kelly launched at that point for Moreno Argentinthirty years of that already.
next stop is the fleeting passage of cyclists through the site of Ypres and the exit through its arch, the start of the Ghent-Wevelgem.
Flemish urbanism, like that of the great square in Bruges, at the service of cycling, a perfectly shot scene of a site that was left in ruins after the First World War.
From De Ronde, the Tour de Flandes, I would come to stay with the Oude Kwaremont, but the Koppenberg is pure magica vaulted stadium, under the branches and leaves of a dense forest in which the most flamenco heart beats.
How hard and heavy it becomes.
Its cobblestone is uncomfortable, stark, the most similar to Roubaix that Flanders offersbut it is that the inclination and the intimacy of the place have just closed the circle to explain what cycling is in Flanders, a singular and unconditional roots of man, the bicycle and the land.
I turn the page, I travel to Roubaix, good to the road that leads to Roubaix, in which many will use the iconic Arenberg straight, but I was left with another section, five stars in the “paveses” rating.
The curves of the Carrefour de l´Arbre are «Tourmalets» for more than onethat place in the middle of nowhere, taken as if from a battlefield, in which Tom Boonen saw how the rivals were falling in a serpentine at each turn, all after him.
Photo: ASO/Gautier Demouveaux
We make the leap to Wallonia, to two enclaves in the final stretch of spring.
The initial is Huy, the epilogue of the Walloon Arrowthe so-called “longest kilometer” between stations that look like a “via crucis”, I don’t know maybe they are.
Y luego la Roche-aux-Faucons, the place where Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the oldest of those known -with the permission of Milan-Turin-, jumps through the air and in which we may realize that spring, already at the end of April, is getting out of hand.
Photo: ASO/Pauline Ballet
