What Roubaix feels like when you’re in it, and when you’re watching it happen to someone else.
Ashley Gruber
What follows is a piece of creative writing, loosely inspired by Tim Krabbé’s The Rider, imagining Sunday’s Paris-Roubaix Femmes from two vantage points: a rider in the breakaway, and a fan at the end of Sector 11. The riders and the crash are fictional. The route, the sectors, and the Hell that awaits them are not.
12.45 pm, Sunday 12th April 2026
You can hear the cowbells in the traffic. Fifteen minutes away from the paddock and already the crowd is clanging, clamouring, begging for the start. Paris-Roubaix Femmes. The Hell of the North.
She sits in the bus with her headphones in. She doesn’t register the cowbells. Can’t afford to. The bus inches forward. Ten minutes to the paddock. Hazard lights blink in a procession. Team by team. Each bus flanked by its squadron of station wagons. She has a thousand-yard stare. The mind must be empty before the flag drops. A deep inhale. A slow exhale. 148.5 kilometres of road. 33.7 of them cobbled. Twenty sectors. Two five-star. She knows this. Everyone knows this. Knowing isn’t an advantage. Five minutes to the paddock.
Her friend prepared face paint this year. Black, red, and yellow. Franzi Koch of FDJ-Suez is the chosen horse for the day. Her ride at De Ronde van Vlaanderen the week before was the spark, the ultimate teammate for Demi Vollering, and rumour has it she is the team’s leader today. The end of Sector 11, Mons-en-Pévèle, is already heaving. Thankfully, another friend claimed the spot yesterday. Those butterflies of excitement are starting. In five hours, the battle will come storming up these cobbles. She has a long day ahead. Coolers, a barbecue, camping chairs. They’re here for the long haul alongside hundreds of others. No one wants to miss a moment.
2.10 pm
The butterflies in her stomach are not butterflies. Butterflies is what you tell people. What is actually happening in her stomach is closer to something with teeth, gnawing to the rhythm of Rage Against the Machine as it blares from a teammate’s speakers. Bulls on Parade before cobblestones. Someone’s idea of a hype song. Everyone is scrambling about, deciding what the hell to wear. She already knows. She decided three days ago. It is the only thing she can control about today.
Her mind runs the route into Sector 20. Big road. Left turn. Cobbles. That is where Roubaix begins. She has studied Veloviewer. The road narrows and your options halve. You must be in the first thirty wheels or you are already fighting from behind.
But the fight starts before even that. It starts in the neutral. Odd word, neutral. Nothing neutral about 130 women accelerating through a town to claim position for a race that hasn’t technically started. You are not sane if you are not scared of this race. You are also not sane if you are not salivating at the prospect of arriving in that velodrome first. Bloody hands. Aloft. Victor of the Hell of the North.
A slight smile. Her role today is not the velodrome. Her role is the breakaway. Get up the road. Stay up the road. Make the other teams chase. And if the break sticks, well. Anything can happen on the cobbles. That is the whole point.
“Who has a Eurosport account?!” a friend yells, panicked. They are leaning back in deckchairs. Someone has rigged an elaborate cinema: a laptop perched precariously on an ancient copy of The Fellowship of the Ring (well read), nestled on a camping chair, balancing on a trestle table. Beyond the trestle table, the slope down Sector 11. The 90-degree turn halfway through. The long drag up to the end. This sector is where the race is made. That’s why they are here.
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