Cycling stops in Roubaix

The countryside south-east of Lille is farmland, and for fifty-one weeks of the year the lanes running through it are what they look like: field roads between beet and wheat, laid in granite blocks a century ago because that was the cheapest way to make a surface a cart would not sink into. On the second Sunday in April they are the hardest race in cycling. Paris-Roubaix crosses about thirty of them in the last two hundred kilometres, and the difference between a sector that ends a rider's day and one they barely notice is a matter of a few centimetres of camber and how long it has been since the commune last relaid the crown.

Three of them carry five stars in the race roadbook. The Trouée d'Arenberg runs dead straight through a forest on blocks that were laid over a mining tramway, dropping slightly, which is why riders arrive at it at speed and why it has broken more races than any other. Mons-en-Pévèle and the Carrefour de l'Arbre come later, when nobody has anything left.