On a Times podcast recently, my colleague Matt Lawton was asked how he could maintain such affection for cycling when he spent so much time reporting on scandals that blight the sport, from Lance Armstrong to Dr Richard Freeman.
It is a good question and at least part of my answer would be found in A Sunday In Hell which I sat down to watch properly this week. I really cannot explain why it took so long given this acclaimed film, frequently lauded as cycling’s best documentary, has been around since 1976.
Bike frames, haircuts, fashions and body shapes of riders have all changed, so the film drips with nostalgia, but what most strikes you watching this enthralling study of that year’s Paris-Roubaix monument is how timeless it feels once the race is in full swing, and Eddy Merckx is trying to hunt down the breakaway provoked by Roger De Vlaeminck.
We see the dust thrown up in great clouds as this race squeezes along those cobbled sectors deep into its 166 miles; the slow-mo shots vividly capturing how forearms and biceps judder incessantly over the brutal pave in L’enfer du Nord, the Hell of the North; the mayhem as a frenetic convoy of motorbikes and cyclists try to squeeze around the tight bends of these farm tracks.
This is a setting that has been used since 1896, interrupted only by wartime or pandemic, and will be raced for another century, and beyond — which is central to my answer about why cycling survives and holds such appeal whatever the disgrace or indignities.
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As with the mighty mountains like the Alps, Pyrenees and Dolomites, such a setting for cycling, at least in my mind, is matchless as a venue for sport. No stadium, however spectacular, can compete with this backdrop.
The news agenda — whether a serious issue like the racist abuse directed online recently at Nacer Bouhanni, the French sprinter, or the controversial expulsion of Michael Schar from the Tour of Flanders last weekend for discarding a drinks bottle outside designated zones — comes and goes, flashing past our noses like a whirring peloton, but the grandeur and perpetuity of these historic surroundings is a reassurance that cycling will endure beyond any scandal. Men and women will want to race these tracks, just like the mountains, for as long as they exist.
What endures is what you see in that film as the riders battle over the cobbles. A friend once rode an amateur version of Paris-Roubaix and his fingers and hands were so battered by the end that he was useless as a doctor for days afterwards.
Jørgen Leth’s documentary is an unvarnished look at a raw day’s racing which begins in the chaos of an industrial strike in Chantilly, as Merckx fiddles obsessively with his bike, and takes us through breaks and bloody crashes. There are some lovely retro touches — rare steak for De Vlaeminck’s pre-race breakfast and stragglers catching a lift in passing family saloon cars — but it is remarkable how the footage from almost half a century ago feels so vibrant. You can almost breathe in the dust.
Drones and on-bike GoPros give us ever more angles and access in the modern age but this film, with its choral soundtrack, certainly lacks nothing for drama or intimacy as the riders race towards the climax in the Vélodrome André-Pétrieux in Roubaix.
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It would be a good time to dig out A Sunday In Hell given that the 2021 edition of Paris-Roubaix, due to be staged this weekend, has been put back to October because of the surge of Covid cases in France. Last year’s race, which should have featured the inaugural women’s version, was also moved from Spring to October, and then cancelled for the first time since 1942.
That absence was a great shame but it will come to be a footnote in the grand, sweeping history of this classic race. Perhaps they will make another ‘Sunday in Hell’ 100 years from now and, happily, I suspect it will not be much different.
