Trouée d'Arenberg

The Drève des Boules d'Hérin was cobbled in the Napoleonic era and later undermined by the Arenberg coal pit that runs beneath the forest, which is how the road reached Paris-Roubaix: Jean Stablinski, who had worked in that mine before turning professional and liked to say he was the only rider to have passed both over and under it, proposed it with Édouard Delberghe after Jacques Goddet sent Albert Bouvet looking for cobbles to replace the sectors being tarmacked, and it was raced for the first time in 1968, Pierre Chany naming it the Trouée that same day. The Office National des Forêts closed the passage from 1974 to 1983. The crashes that fixed its reputation came later: Johan Museeuw shattered his kneecap here in 1998 while leading the World Cup and came close to losing the leg to gangrene, which prompted the organisers to run the sector in the opposite direction in 1999 to cut entry speed, for one edition; Philippe Gaumont broke his femur at the entry in 2001 and never raced at that level again. Subsidence from the old workings took it out of the race in 2005, after which regional and local authorities spent 250,000 euros resetting the surface and widening it by 50 cm, and it returned in 2006. It carries five stars in the roadbook, the maximum, alongside Mons-en-Pévèle and the Carrefour de l'Arbre, and it survives only because it is worked on: Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix, volunteers since 1977, reset the stones and replace the ones souvenir hunters carry off, students from the Raismes horticultural school have spent two weeks restoring sectors here every spring since 2002, and a herd of goats was brought in to graze the verges in 2023. A stele to Stablinski has stood at the entrance since 2008, and the chicane installed in front of it for 2024 at the riders' union's request was dropped for 2025 in favour of a slower run-in with four right-angle turns through the old mining site.