Koppenberg
Peak · 77 m · Flanders
Checked
This 600-metre cobbled climb averages 11.6 percent and hits 22 percent near the top, rising 64 metres through a narrow, grass-banked corridor. Introduced to the Tour of Flanders in 1976, it has been ranked a national monument climb ever since. A 1987 crash involving Jesper Skibby, run over by a race official's car, kept it out of the race until new cobbles were laid in 2001.
Locals know it as the Bump of Melden, for the village at its foot where a sharp corner slows riders from a sprint to a crawl before the climb narrows ahead. The name Koppenberg itself comes from kinderkoppen, Flemish slang for the fist-sized cobblestones that pave it. The stones are big, uneven, and worn slick in patches, with dirt washed down from the grass banks making an already narrow line more treacherous. Even with the smoother cobbles laid in 2001, riders losing momentum near the steepest pitch and having to run the last stretch on foot remains a familiar scene at the Ronde each spring. The women's Ronde van Vlaanderen only added the Koppenberg to its route for the first time in 2022, forty-six years after the men first raced it.
What you see
A narrow farm track climbs through a green corridor of grass banks and trees, a small chapel and two farm buildings coming into view only in the final stretch to mark the top.
part of: The cobbled bergs of Flandersmonument climbtour of flanders