Haveluy à Wallers
Scenic route · Roubaix
Checked
part of: The pavé of Paris–Roubaix
Haveluy à Wallers is a 2.5 km scenic cycling route in Roubaix, essentially level (+6 m over its full length). It is 0.8 km of cobbles, the rest asphalt.
Sector 20, four stars, carrying Bernard Hinault's name for his 1981 win in the rainbow jersey. Since Van Aert opened the 2023 race here at 48.5 km/h it has a new role, named by Visma's own coach as the new gateway to the final of Paris-Roubaix; Van der Poel attacked on it in 2026 with more than 100 km still to ride.
2.5 km · level · +6 m · 0.8 km cobbled
Route and surface read from OpenStreetMap, elevation from satellite data — approximate.
Download GPX ↓Navigate to the start ↗
Elevation is drawn to the same scale on every segment, so a level sector looks level. The bands beneath the line are surface, not gradient.
History
Haveluy à Wallers is sector 20 of the Paris-Roubaix roadbook, 2,500 metres of four-star pavé through the old Anzin mining village of Haveluy, on a road the commune names rue Bernard Hinault and the race lists as the secteur pavé Bernard Hinault, after the 1981 winner. The stones are roughly 150 years old. In 2005 the Trouée d'Arenberg was dropped from the route after old mine galleries subsided, and the race ran on toward Hélesmes instead of Wallers, cutting 100 metres off the sector. Its modern standing was made in 2023, when Wout van Aert opened the race here and only Mathieu van der Poel, Christophe Laporte, Stefan Küng and John Degenkolb could follow, Van Aert and Laporte covering the pavé in 3:07 at an average of 48.5 km/h; Visma-Lease a Bike coach Maarten Wynants afterwards called sector 20 the new gateway to the final of Paris-Roubaix. Mads Pedersen attacked on it in 2025 before Van der Poel and Tadej Pogačar came past him, and in 2026 Van der Poel attacked here with 103.7 km left, holding about 490 watts for close to five minutes; the same year Haveluy entered the women's race for the first time, alongside Haussy and Saulzoir. Keeping it rideable is hand work: since 2002 the horticultural lycées of Raismes and Lomme have rebuilt a sector or two each year with Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix, and in March 2018 fourteen Raismes students spent a fortnight on Haveluy repairing the flashs, the sunken holes that turn into standing water when it rains.
What it’s like to ride
Haveluy à Wallers is 2.5 km of four-star pavé carrying Bernard Hinault's name, for his 1981 win in the rainbow jersey, and it is where the day stops being a warm-up: the stones are disjointed and deformed under a film of dust, and coming off ten kilometres of asphalt out of Denain you get shaken far harder than by anything earlier in the race. It runs out along the chemin d'Hélesmes, then breaks through a right angle onto the chemin d'Escaudain, and the stretch past that corner is the worst of it, a place where no line looks right even after a partial relaying. Its standing problem is holes, what the repair crews call flashs, and edges that keep subsiding: students from the Raismes horticultural lycée have lifted, redressed and reset the stones here in sand and gravel with Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix, in 2017 and again through the summer of 2018. Wet, those holes turn into large puddles, mud greases the crown and muddy water stands in the low edges, and one rider who took it in that state had his tyres sliding and his handling hesitant for the first few hundred metres, until the mud filling the gaps between the stones gave a little comfort back. Carry speed in, because you will not find any once you are on it, stay up on the crown, hands on the tops and elbows bent; the pros ride the race on roughly 4 to 5 bar, and the useful measure of this sector is that a clean one like Maing to Monchaux lets amateurs hold 40 km/h and this one does not. It is an ordinary open road, and the Challenge's 170 km Enfer du Nord covers all thirty sectors including this one, on roads still open to traffic. This is one of the ones that hurts.
Surface and what to expect
0.8 km of cobbles, the rest asphalt.
- Cobbleskm 0.2–1.0
More to ride in Roubaix
Common questions
- How long is Haveluy à Wallers?
- Haveluy à Wallers is a 2.5 km scenic cycling route in Roubaix, essentially level (+6 m over its full length). It is 0.8 km of cobbles, the rest asphalt.
- What is the surface like on Haveluy à Wallers?
- Haveluy à Wallers is 0.8 km of cobbles, the rest asphalt, measured from OpenStreetMap surface tags along the route.
- Is Haveluy à Wallers flat?
- Effectively, yes. It gains 6 m across 2.5 km — an average of 0.0%.