Updated April 2, 2026 09:30AM
If there are two weekends to skip the cycling group ride and turn on the TV, they’re here with the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.
The Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix are historic, one-day races lasting roughly six punishing hours over cobbles and steep climbs, where the prestige is immense, and one mistake can end everything.
Add the savage weather and millions of delirious fans, and Flanders and Roubaix — called cycling’s Holy Week by ultra-fans — become two-wheeled nirvana.
The stakes are higher in this style of one-day racing.
Unlike stage racing and grand tours like the Tour de France, where pacing, patience, and pointed attacks decide the winner across three weeks and 3,000km, these 250km-plus brawls over steep bergs and jagged cobbles crown a different kind of winner.
Yes, nutrition, aerodynamics, and cutting-edge tech matter — no one wins without them in modern cycling — but in these one-day throw-downs, there’s no tomorrow.
One ill-timed puncture or one missed move, and it’s game over until next year. Get it right, and you’re a cycling immortal.
For anyone new to bike racing, buckle up for the season’s best racing.
For the hard-core fans, you already know. This is as good as it gets.
Rock and a hard place
The winner gets a chunk of granite and their name carved into the history books. (Photo: Gruber Images)
Flanders and Roubaix are among cycling’s oldest and most prestigious races.
Tour of Flanders — set for April 4 — was first run in 1913, and mirrors the grit of the proud region of western Belgium. Today, the race is effectively a national block party, with an estimated one million fans lining the roads on Sunday.
Flanders is contested across mostly flat roads, punctuated by short, savage walls — the “mur” — that have become synonymous with cycling legend.
The Paterberg and the Oude Kwaremont are the famous cobblestone climbs where the race is won or lost in the final hour.
In 1896, a ghoulish race organizer in northern France conjured up Paris-Roubaix. Raced across the jumbled cobblestone farm roads of northern France, it was soon called the “Hell of the North.”
Scheduled for April 12, Paris-Roubaix boasts the infamous cobblestone roads that stretch from a few hundred yards to more than one mile called sectors. This year, there are 30 cobbled sectors totaling 54.8 km of pavé in the 258.3 km route. Carrefour de l’Arbre and Trouée d’Arenberg are the most punishing stretches in modern sport.
These two races are part of cycling’s monuments, five prestigious one-day events — along with Milan-San Remo, Liege-Bastogne-Liege and Il Lombardia — that create a sort of “grand slam of cycling.”
These races matter because they are cycling’s ultimate measuring stick, like baseball’s home run record or the NFL rushing title.
And because these races are so hard, winning one makes legends, and it’s the legends who end up winning more often.
Cobbles and walls
The roads of Paris-Roubaix are unfit for cars. (Photo: Gruber Images)
This year’s Flanders and Roubaix editions should be even more spectacular than usual.
All this spring, races have come down to the wire, and there’s no reason to expect anything different at Flanders and Roubaix in 2026.
Dwars door Vlaanderen and In Flanders Fields — two other one-day classics in the run-up to Flanders over the past week — have shattered speed records.
Sunday promises something special with the late addition of Remco Evenepoel to the Tour of Flanders.
It marks the first time all four of the one-day superstars — Wout van Aert, Tadej Pogačar, Mathieu van der Poel, and Evenepoel — will face off in their trade team colors, a showdown so far only seen in international competition like the world championships.
Van Aert remains the nearly man of the northern classics, cycling’s version of the Chicago Cubs.
New challengers are rising, and Evenepoel could surprise at Flanders, but make no mistake, these next two weeks are all about Pogačar versus Van der Poel.
The pair arrives at the peak of their powers, with Van der Poel — today’s best classics racer — chasing history at Flanders and Roubaix, and Pogačar — a four-time Tour de France winner — hunting the rare monument sweep, a feat set by three icons of cycling’s black-and-white era.
It’s Ali vs. Frazier on cobbles.
Cycling’s March Madness
It’s all or nothing on the cobblestones at Paris-Roubaix.
This style of racing is different, and that’s why hardcore cycling fans love it.
If the Tour de France is cycling’s Super Bowl, the spring classics are the two-wheeled version of March Madness.
The Tour is raced one day at a time for nearly a month across 21 stages up and over the Alps and Pyrenees, while the classics are all-or-nothing races for glory.
That creates a different, more explosive style of racing.
Unlike the Tour, which changes its route every year, Flanders and Roubaix trace the same roads decade after decade.
And they unfold across cycling’s most unforgiving roads, if you can even call them that.
That these races even still exist seems almost criminal in the modern era. By today’s ever-sharpening safety standards, Paris-Roubaix wouldn’t pass inspection.
Yet riders crave it and almost seem addicted to this blood-and-guts racing vibe.
There’s an almost perverse pleasure taken in six hours of pain. Riders race the cobbles without gloves and finish with their palms bloodied and shredded.
Yet they come back for more.
John Degenkolb, a Paris-Roubaix winner in 2015, keeps returning even if his best days are behind him.
Why? Because a race like Roubaix can tilt in favor of the brave and away from the soulless power meter, if even for one magical afternoon.
Holding nothing back
Skills and technique count on the cobbles. (Photo: Gruber Images)
Careers can be defined in a single afternoon. Legends are forged in the mud and cobbles in cycling’s most brutal races.
Unlike cycling’s stage racing, where the strongest and most consistent almost always prevail across 21 stages, here miracles can happen.
The monuments can produce shock winners, like journeyman Mathew Hayman, who defied a broken arm just weeks earlier to win Roubaix, or Alison Jackson, who turned her Roubaix triumph into a never-ending dance.
This is about emptying the tank in the most extreme way.
When the flag drops, riders drive the pedals until they crack, crash, or until they’re caught.
And still, they return, drawn back by an almost irrational pull to test themselves against the legendary stones one more time.
Roubaix lives within that contradiction. It is at once the most feared race on the calendar and the most coveted.
If you’re watching for the first time, be sure to tune in for at least the final 90 minutes of each race. That way, you can take in the battle for position and see how important finesse is required on these horrific roads.
At Flanders, it’s the Koppenberg and the final Oude Kwaremont-Paterberg double that light up the race. For Roubaix, things unravel sooner, so be sure to catch the Arenberg Trench all the way to the famed Carrefour section before the final fun into Roubaix’s historic velodrome.
The heartbeat of racing
In Belgium, cycling is front-page news. (Photo: Gruber Images)
For fans, it is as close as you can get to the heartbeat of the sport.
Roads fill hours before the riders arrive.
Rowdy, beer-fueled crowds pack the sectors shoulder to shoulder, forming tunnels of noise and color. And peel back at the last second as riders blast through (at least in theory).
A trip to the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix should be on every fan’s bucket list. After a hard day of riding, plenty of bars and cafes await.
Cycling remains one of the few sports where you can ride the same roads as the pros. Just imagine teeing off at Amen Corner a day before Tiger Woods shows up for The Masters.
The spring classics remain gloriously unpredictable. The classics wait for no one, and no one saves anything for tomorrow.
Even with the sport’s modern super hero Pogačar at the start line — a rider staking claim to being the greatest of all time — you never quite know what you’re going to get, except long-range attacks and violent accelerations.
These races capture everything good, cruel, and wondrous about bike racing.
Anyone who loves sport at its rawest — or wants to understand why cycling captivates millions — should watch these races for their chaos, drama, and defining moments.
This is cycling at its finest. Don’t miss it.