Help, they’re stealing the Roubaix! The cry of pain comes from the association that has been working for years to preserve and protect the pavé, the porphyry paths that are the essence of the centuries-old French race. “Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix” – the Friends of Roubaix, the organization that has gathered volunteers from all over the world since 1977, around 300 active members – have reported that on Sunday, after Mathieu Van der Poel’s great ride, there is It was the theft of many stone cubes from their natural location. And they attached an emblematic photo of the theft in one of the iconic sectors of the race, the Carrefour de l’Arbre. An act of vandalism that takes history back to the years, when the race risked disappearing, or at least losing its main feature: the stones.
It was the Sixties, and in the gigantic industrial triangle in the Nord-Pas de Calais department the asphalt had buried kilometers of pavé, the ancient country roads sacrificed to the car boom. So much so that the great organizer Jacques Goddet, after the 1967 race which saw a massive sprint finish – no selection before, in short – at the head of just 22 km of pavé out of 263 in total, blurted out: «Enough, we can’t go on like this ».
This is how Jean Stablinski, Polish name but French heart, 1962 world champion, who was at home in the area and took action to discover the remaining sectors, moved. On Sunday there were 56 kilometers of cobblestone, never so many since the race was born. And among these is the sector that Stablinski one day subjected to Goddet, horrifying him: a disconnected stretch like few others in the heart of a forest, in the Arenberg area: the myth of the Forest was born. Now there remains the vandalism that offends the monument race of cycling, such as the gesture of the fan who threw the hat between the wheels of Van der Poel’s bike, risking it falling. The Friends of Roubaix are already studying how to protect the heritage that they clean and arrange every year, also with the help of selected goats that graze the days before to eat the weeds. Entire stretches are dismantled and reassembled after the winter in which rain, tractors and frost upset the precarious balance of roads created in the centuries before the advent of cars. An agreement with three local agricultural high schools leads students to study cobblestones, some teams in the area train children to pedal on stones: a Frenchman hasn’t won the race since 1997 and that too is a problem in the deep North.
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
1970-01-01 00:00:00
#Roubaix #pavé #stolen
