"The runners pass, the race remains," says Thierry Gouvenou, the director of "the Queen of the classics", one of those rare sporting events where the star is the event, before its actors.

Paris-Roubaix, whose 120th edition is being celebrated, is a myth, a tribute to sacrifice and suffering. He is an ogre who swallows and digests riders clean as a new penny at the start in Compiègne, to spit them out all rubbed, covered with mud and with a black mouth like that of a miner from the North at the Roubaix velodrome.

Taming the cobblestones - 54.5km this year on a course of 256.6km - remains an immeasurable feat. Because in Paris-Roubaix, as Thierry Gouvenou reminds us, the pavement is "not a bourgeois cobblestone, smooth, well polished" like that of the Tour of Flanders which offers other instruments of torture with its very steep mountains.

No, in Paris-Roubaix, the pavement is irregular, disjointed, smashed. Which, one day, inspired the American runner Chris Horner to comment: "It's like ploughing a dirt road and swinging pallets of cobblestones over it from a helicopter".

The Paris-Roubaix 2023 race route on Sunday 9 April, the 120th edition of the Vincent LEFAI / AFP cycling © race

Raising your arms at the old velodrome in Roubaix offers glory for life. This means that, already, we have managed to finish, but also to play the traps that make this the most open race of the year.

"It could get better"

Thus, the last eleven editions have had so many different winners.

Falls, punctures, cravings, equipment breakage... the hazards are innumerable and often focus on the twenty-nine paved sectors, including the legendary Arenberg gap, "never so clean" after the passage of the weed killers, or the dreadful crossroads of the Tree.

Who to tame them? On paper, in the absence of Tadej Pogacar who still considers himself a little too freluquet to come and dance on the roads of Hell, the luxury ice cabinets, Wout Van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel, logically hold the top of the pavement.

The duo Wout van Aert (L) - Mathieu van der Poel (R) wrestle at the E3 Classic race on March 24, 2023 in the Harelbeke © region Nico VEREECKEN / BELGA / AFP / Archives

The two rivals are still waiting, at 28 years old, to add the Queen of Classics to their list. Van der Poel is the man in form, winner of Milan-Sanremo and second in the Tour of Flanders.

The Dutchman, third in Roubaix in 2021, says he is "100% ready" and advances with more serenity than Van Aert.

Because the Belgian, who has so far won only one Monument, is under pressure after his new failure at the Tour of Flanders (4th).

In recent days, he was rather grumpy. "It could get better. My crash on Sunday affected me more than I thought: I have a bit of pain in my knee and ribs," he said, pushing the label of favourite over Van der Poel.

In memory of Goolaerts

Distrust all the same: last year, barely recovered from Covid, he had said he came in a simple role of teammate before finishing second.

And he can count on a Jumbo-Visma team further strengthened by the arrival of the outgoing winner, Dylan van Baarle, alongside Frenchman Christophe Laporte.

Van Aert, who, unlike some teammates, will not use a new adjustable tyre pressure system, also hopes to find an extra soul in the memory of his friend Michaël Goolaerts, who suffered a cardiac arrest five years ago at Paris-Roubaix.

"Wout wants to win on the velodrome as a tribute to Goolie," Michiel Elijzen, the team's sporting director Vérandas Willems, told La Dernière Heure when Van Aert and Goolaerts raced there together.

Among the outsiders, Italian time ace Filippo Ganna, Swiss Stefan Küng and Denmark's Mads Pedersen have the makings of heroes.

The famous Arenberg gap, mythical cobbled sector of the Paris-Roubaix cycling monument, delivered to the "weeding" goats, in the run-up to the 2023 edition, April 4, 2023 © Anne-Christine POUJOULAT / AFP

All expect to suffer again, but have returned, magnetized by a race like no other, whose power of attraction is summed up by this verdict of Franco Ballerini, a day of great distress in Roubaix: "I will never come back"... before coming back anyway and winning the myth twice.

© 2023 AFP