Seán Kelly is roaming through his vast attic space, shelved with crystal trophies and magnificent gold and silver cups, lines of classic retro jerseys and racing bicycles in between. Not your ordinary Aladdin’s cave.
He pauses and points down to two pieces of old cobblestone screwed into some wood.
“If you look at the collection, look at some of the other trophies, they don’t look like anything,” Kelly tells presenter Dan Lloyd.
“It’s just what they represent. For me still, with all the collection I’ve got, the cobblestones are the ones which I think I look at the most. If you’re a cycling follower, yeah, the cobblestone from Roubaix means a lot . . .”
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This being Paris-Roubaix, still the most famous one-day bike race in the world, 256km across the fabled granite pavé also known as the Hell of the North, a Sunday in Hell, the Queen of the Classics, or simply la Pascale, the Easter race – and by all accounts still the hardest to win.
Sunday’s 120th edition, between Compiègne, just north of Paris, to the Roubaix Velodrome, close to the Belgium border, will be no exception.
Kelly is still the first and only Irish rider to win, not once but twice, in 1984 and 1986, joining such legends as Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx and Bernard Hinault.
On cue with that, Kelly is the subject of this week’s Legends documentary series now streaming online on the Global Cycling Network (GCN). It’s certainly worth the look. (Like bicycles and guitars, when people say you’ve enough streaming online already don’t listen to them, you don’t need that kind of negativity in your life.)
It’s also Holy Week – nothing to do with Easter; the week that divides the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, two of cycling’s five great monuments.
Sadly, there’s no Irish interest this year, only for Lloyd, the British ex-pro, there’s lasting disbelief in Kelly’s second Paris-Roubaix win, in 1986: that spring, he reminds him, Kelly won Paris-Nice for a then fifth time in succession, then he won Milan-San Remo, was second in the Tour of Flanders (to Adrie van der Poel), before flying down to Spain that evening for the Tour of the Basque Country, where he won three stages plus the outright GC.
Less than 48 hours later, he’s back on the start line of Paris-Roubaix, winning that again too.
“It’s a horrible race, but the most beautiful one to win,” Kelly says. “You can be the greatest going into the race, can be in your best shape, but there are so many fences to be jumped, the crashes, and the mechanical problems, all of that.”
Indeed most of us have no idea of what it would mean to win on Sunday. That sense of history and hype in perfect rhyme, of keeping your head when all about you are losing theirs, the spiritual bravery of the effort involved.
Not too unlike Sunday’s other classic sporting event: the final round of the US Masters in Augusta.
Though a world away, that they fall on the same day again draws a neat connection – two events which come so steeped in history that the winning of them goes lifetimes beyond the actual winning prize, financial or otherwise.
For the 175 riders in Sunday’s Paris-Roubaix there’s a total prize pool of €91,000 – with €30,000 for the winner, €22,000 for the runner-up, on down to €500 for 20th place (and that’s no misprint). That €30,000 might just about buy the winner a replacement bike, if the need be, as well it might.
The winner also gets that old cobblestone screwed into some wood, a small replica of the perpetual trophy prize. Second is nowhere, everywhere else is nowhere at all, because Paris-Roubaix remains one of the most coveted and boldly contested titles in professional cycling. At least outside the three grand Tours.
On the faraway and infinitely greener confines of Augusta National, the 88 golfers will share a total prize pool of $15 million (still well short of the Players Championship, worth a tidy €25m), with $2.7m for the for the US Masters champion, €1.62m for the runner-up, on down to 50th: $37,800 for 50th place (plus some bonus cash for those who miss the cut).
Obviously it doesn’t end there. Everyone on the course is being paid handsomely for whatever little strip of logo they’re allowed to reveal. It’s why Nike went from making running spikes to selling golf clubs, and there’s no wealthier audience than the US Masters.
The winner also gets that polyester jacket in hedge-coloured green (plus a small replica of the Masters champion’s trophy). That jacket, like the old cobblestone, is worth more to most than the winning cheque.
Some might well surrender that cheque completely, just to walk away with just the jacket – Rory McIlroy likely chief among them. What’s another $2.7m to him anyway?
Sunday’s Paris-Roubaix is billed as another showdown between Wout van Aert from Belgium and his Dutch rival Mathieu van der Poel, who along with Tadej Pogacar have been ruling the spring classics (Pogacar is sitting this one out, the Slovenian winning Flanders last Sunday.)
Stuck in a sort of unending rivalry since starting out in the sport, Van Aert and Van der Poel are 1-1 on spring classics so far, Van der Poel (son of Kelly’s old rival Adrie) arguably the more spectacular so far in winning Milan-San Remo, 62 years after his grandfather Raymond Poulidor won alone on the same finish off the Poggio.
Whoever wins will happily go through hell – although the hell of Paris-Roubaix doesn’t actually come from what the riders go through, or even finish. Henri Pélissier first described the route as “hell” after his 1919 victory, the first since the war and when all roads towards Roubaix were left lined with rubble and empty shells.
Back down in Augusta, even if there was nothing else on the line except victory, the Masters would remain one of the most coveted and boldly contested titles in golf. For those in close contention going into the final round, it will certainly feel like hell to lose.
