Ahead of Paris-Roubaix, Cycling Fans Strive to Keep Bumps in the Road – Wall Street Journal

MONS-EN-PÉVÈLE, France—When Daniel Accou closes his eyes, he sees cobblestones. Half a century of working on them will do that to you. On winding roads all over the Nord-Pas de Calais region, here by the Belgian border, he laid and re-laid them until he was doing it in his dreams.

“The cobbles are my religion,” he said.

Bicycle racing is a close second. This is France’s cycling heartland and the home of some of the most famous cobblestones in the world, along the course of the Paris-Roubaix bike race. Which is why, ahead of its 113th running on Sunday, the silver-haired 73-year-old is still out here. Mr. Accou is a member of Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix, a small army of volunteers who work with local high-schoolers and apprentices to preserve these roads.

For several weeks before the race they toil on the narrow paths, taking them apart to put them back together. Rain, wind or shine they work by hand on a puzzle whose pieces want nothing to do with each other.

They call themselves “les forçats du pavé”: the convicts of the cobbles.

“We know we’ll never finish our work,” said François Doulcier, president of Les Amis. “That’s the beauty of it.”

On Sunday, the 27 cobbled sectors will cover 32.7 of the race’s 157.5 miles. But the pavé, over a century old in places, has been in danger for more than 70 years, mainly because asphalt just makes more sense. The first time that Paris-Roubaix lost a cobbled sector was 1939 as part of a larger road modernization plan in the region, according to Mr. Doulcier. Only the arrival of World War II put the brakes on it.

As France recovered, there was no stopping the asphalt. It crept slowly over the cobblestones until, in 1977, a group of local bike racing fans realized it might cost them Paris-Roubaix forever.

They formed Les Amis, determined to preserve their stone heritage. From promoting awareness, they moved to getting their hands dirty by the 1990s. When Mr. Doulcier joined in 2001, there were about 40 members. Today there are 209 dues-paying Amis. Including the projects carried out by local authorities and the race organizers, the Amaury Sport Organisation, there is a total annual budget of about €120,000, or about $129,000, to renovate some 200 to 300 yards of road every spring, plus spot repairs. Until Les Amis came along, work on the roads was often left to the local farmers.

The techniques haven’t changed much. Replacing each stone is like an exercise in macro-dentistry, a root canal for the road. Clean the damaged area, fill with a custom mixture, jam the new element in place, and make sure it lines up with the rest. Use a hammer if necessary.

“It’s not about turning it into a pool table. That makes no sense,” Mr. Doulcier said. “So we have to keep the challenge of the cobbles, but we want to remove the ruts, the potholes that have no place on the course.”

Volunteers try to salvage as many existing cobbles as they can, though fans have a nasty habit of stealing them. Buying new ones is expensive—about a euro a pop. And anyway, garden store cobbles are too pretty and too smooth. Paris-Roubaix demands craggy, weather-beaten stones that fight back. The granite, limestone and sandstone represent the race’s tradition in 20-pound blocks.

Local authorities make sure that every stone is saved when they are dug up by major roadworks in the area. Les Amis’ stockpile, they said, contains around 95,000 cobbles these days.

“These blocks of stone were carved one by one by our ancestors, by those who preceded us,” Mr. Doulcier said. “And I have a deep respect. They were laid here one by one.”

At Mons-en-Pévèle last week, the volunteers labored in the rain, trying to prevent the edges of the road from collapsing. “C’est le carnage!” shouted one, ankle-deep in mud.

Mr. Accou paced the cobbles with Didier Doolaeghe, an instructor and Paris-Roubaix veteran of 12 years. Mr. Accou pointed at a patch of five cobbles, all going in slightly different directions. He shook his head. “This is ugly,” he said. “Did they even line them up with string here?”

Then Mr. Accou launched into some in-my-day reminiscence of working the roads in the 1950s. “It was worse than prison. I’m convinced that when it rains in prison, they stay dry. But when it rained all day for us, we worked all day in the rain. Without gloves. Without rain clothes. That’s seared into my brain.”

“Sometimes you have to be kind of a masochist,” Mr. Doolaeghe added.

The cyclists do too. There is a reason the race is known as the Hell of the North. Riding the cobbled classics in Northern France and Belgium is a specialty. Unlike the skinny racers who fly up mountains to win the Tour de France, these masochists tend to be bigger, more muscular.

And like it or not, the cobbles are back in fashion. Even if they skip Paris-Roubaix, the peloton will have to deal with them in this summer’s Tour de France for the second year in a row.

“I try not to grip my handlebars too tight,” said Lars Boom, who won the rain-soaked Tour stage in nearby Arenberg last year. “I don’t like the vibrations that go along your whole body.” He knows the sectors by heart, how his saddle will rattle, where the wind will try to blow him off the road. “If you see Mons-en-Pévèle, it gets more and more difficult with the wind. It gets to you and all the other riders.”

That is why most teams did reconnaissance on the cobbles in preparation for the race. For the volunteers, it was a chance to wave at the riders and nothing more. Samuel Lefebvre, a lifelong cycling fan, checked them off as he worked on repairs. He will be back on these roads Sunday, dusted off, just as he was when the Paris-Roubaix sped past his childhood home.

“I just hope none of the riders crash on a section I did,” he said. “It hasn’t happened yet.”