Very good article on RG and the Northern Classic races in the Observer :
Sunday April 22, 2007
The Observer
It is unlikely that any British sportsman has experienced a more arduous week than the one Roger Hammond has just endured. On 11 April he cycled for 130 miles flat-out through Belgium, into headwinds whipping in from the North Sea, and finished second in the Gent-Wevelgem Pro-Tour race.
Hammond, 33, had broken away and then been assisted by a 20-man collision on a cobbled road that hobbled the peloton. As the final kilometre approached, five cyclists were in contention, including Hammond and his T-Mobile team leader, Marcus Burghardt, and two Spaniards. Hammond kept the others in check to ensure that Burghardt's sprint for the line could not be challenged.
'Before the final kilometre, Roger pulled at the front of the group, leaving me the chance to pick my moment and launch my attack from the back of the group,' said Burghardt. 'We won because I gave it 100 per cent for Marcus,' said Hammond, who pointed out that the same could not be said for the Spanish riders.
'Roger's strong and gutsy ride paved the way for Marcus to win. Fair play to him for the cool way he worked over Oscar Freire and Francisco Ventoso in the finale,' said T-Mobile's team director, Tristan Hoffman.
Four days later, Hammond took part in the Paris-Roubaix, a barely credible slog across the First World War battlefields that fully merits its description as L'Enfer du Nord - The Hell of the North. The race is the subject of one of the great sports documentaries, A Sunday in Hell (1976).
Paris-Roubaix is also known as the Queen of Classics. Lance Armstrong's refusal ever to take part on the grounds that it was worse than useless in preparing him for his only target, the one bike race known to Americans, the Tour de France, is among the many reasons the French and Belgians never took him to their hearts.
The Tour de France may be the toughest event in all sport but Paris-Roubaix may be the hardest day of the year. The race is notable not just for its distance, a punishing 160-mile ride from beautiful Compiegne to brutal Roubaix, but for the fact that 32.7 of those miles are cobbled. And not sweet enlarged pebbles but *******, jaggy, evil chunks of stone the size of enlarged fists. This is the terrain the jangling cyclists have to traverse, travelling at top speed with no room for manoeuvre on either side. When it is wet the cobbles become as slippery as ice; when it is dry, as it was last Sunday, a wave of dust engulfs the riders ensuring their limited vision is reduced yet further.
It usually takes a rider a week to recover from his exertions. The great Irish cyclist Sean Kelly, who considers his two Paris-Roubaix victories as his career highlight and the race as 'the hardest and the most beautiful to win', would find it impossible to urinate without pain for three days after finishing. Last Thursday, just a day after his team-mate and protege, 21-year-old Mark Cavendish, had scored his maiden professional road-race victory in the Scheldeprijs Vlaanderen, Hammond was back in the saddle for the 124-mile Grand Prix de Denain. He did his fair share of the work in getting T-Mobile's Eric Baumann up to third place at the finish.
We had arranged to meet on the eve of the Hell of the North at the Monopole on the outskirts of Compiegne (think Travelodge with better food and wine) but the Discovery and Rabobank teams had taken all the rooms and T-Mobile had been relocated to a fancy hotel in Chantilly. Such frills are uncommon in cycling. The riders, connoisseurs of pain, would be confused by pampering. They often sleep two to a room in the most spartan surroundings - an economy that allows the owners to run their teams on an annual budget equivalent to the salary of a single Premiership footballer.
Road racing is a sport harking back to less commercial times. The salaries of those competing are not markedly higher than those of the people watching them. For all the contestants the course throws up as much of a challenge as their competitors and there is a bond between those who complete it, regardless of position. It is a socialistic sport - most people can afford a bike and all bikes are equal. It is a sport predicated upon suffering. The rider who can best manage his pain is the rider most likely to win.
The 1992 Olympic pursuit champion, Chris Boardman, has said: 'It's very difficult to describe and maybe it's something you have to experience, but the suffering side of it, when you think, "I've just got to get another hour-and-a-half of this climb, and there's another 10 days," that's what sees people off. You've just had enough of suffering because you can't take any more.'
Hammond, quietly spoken and erudite, cannot wait for the pain to begin. 'Second in Gent-Wevelgem is OK,' he says, 'but there's nothing as impressive as entering the velodrome in a group that is fighting for the victory. Being on the podium in Roubaix [he was third in 2004] will always remain my biggest performance, although that might change tomorrow.
'When you hit the cobbles it's not only physically demanding, you are shaken absolutely to pieces, but mentally exhausting because you have to look at every cobble you have to cover. And as you get more and more fatigued your concentration span drops. And it will be doubly difficult tomorrow because of the dust.
'It's my biggest race of the year. If I won Paris-Roubaix tomorrow my career would be made. I could go to the Tour de France and win and it would not mean as much. It was the first race I can remember watching, aged six, and then there is the history and something almost religious about the race.'
It is also the race most suited to Hammond, a former world cyclo-cross champion. 'It is not necessarily the person with the biggest engine who wins. You need a certain amount of luck and a skill at riding on cobbles can give you an edge.'
Hammond is far more famous in his adopted country - he lives for a large part of the year in Belgium - than in his homeland. After he came second in Gent, he says, 'Forty to 50 people congratulated me and the chief of police came round. Back in England, I went into a bike shop in Halesowen dressed in full bike kit and asked to borrow a spanner and the guy said to me, "Be careful with that, you can hurt your knee."'
Hammond grew up in Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire and went to Dr Challoner's Grammar School before reading material science and technology at Brunel University. He started cycling when he was eight but did not take it seriously until he was 16 when a ruptured thigh muscle ended a promising football career. Victory in the world cyclo-cross championships convinced him he might have a career in sport. He took his degree to be on the safe side.
Is he addicted to pain? 'I'm addicted to a sense of achievement and as an athlete you associate achievement with pain. If I'm in serious pain before 150 kilometres tomorrow I'll know I'm in trouble. But it will really hurt in the last 30 or 40 kilometres. Mind you, if it's hurting me, what is it doing to the others?'
Two hours before the start, Hammond sits in his team bus. His fiancee, Tara, a doctor he met after she was co-opted to dole out medical advice on the Tour of Britain - a surprising appointment given that she is an obstetrician - hangs around outside fiddling with her watch strap as if it were a rosary. After the start, she will hurry to Roubaix to watch the race on TV in case Hammond falls and she needs to get to the hospital pronto.
Hammond is not superstitious but he likes to be the last off the team bus. On this occasion he is not - and punctures on the second set of cobbles.
'There was no team car,' he says later, 'and I had to take a neutral service wheel and it was pumped up super-hard so I struggled on the cobbled sectors.'
Despite this handicap, he stays in touch and having ridden 'a whole section of cobbles all on my own' is up near the front.
Keeping tabs on how he is doing proves difficult. When watching cycling you can either pick your spot and watch the riders whizz by or get in a van and trust your driver. While following the heavily signed route this is not a problem. Even cosseted inside a Mercedes we can still feel the judder as we traverse the cobbles. Every village has gone to the effort of wheeling out giant replica farmers. There is one with onions, one with garlic, one in a wheelchair.
Everyone, in a very French manner, is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan 'Just say non'. This, it turns out, is not an expression of basic philosophy, nor a comment on the forthcoming presidential elections, but a protest against a planned railway expansion, which would ruin the bleak countryside.
Thirty-two kilometres from the finish, Hammond and the Australian Stuart O'Grady drop race favourite Tom Boonen and go in search of the leading group a minute ahead. Both Hammond and O'Grady are Plan Bs. They started the race with the aim of riding for their team leaders but a motorbike has crashed into Burghardt and the weather has proved too hot for last year's winner Fabian Cancellara. The Plan Bs have become Plan As. Hammond cannot quite keep up with O'Grady as he reaches the leading group.
The Australian looks around and everyone is suffering. He attacks on pure emotion, he says later, just riding on instinct.
He does so, on his own, for 23 kilometres. He extends his lead to a minute. 'I thought that with a minute I could puncture and still be all right. I thought, ah, I don't remember, it was just all a blur. I was in a world of pain that I had never experienced before.'
He survives to ride alone around the scrubby velodrome, but is so exhausted that half an hour later the first English-speaking winner since Kelly in 1986 can barely lift the giant cobble, which is his prize. Hammond, meanwhile, has struggled valiantly to finish seventh. Covered in dust and looking like an overworked miner he collapses to the ground. A trainer comes over with a can of Fanta. He drains it. He is incapable of speech.
Burghardt who has got back on his bike to finish down the field comes over to ask where he finished. 'Sept,' whispers Hammond.
All around people are suffering. One rider is in tears, not of pain but exhaustion. Another looks up into his young daughter's eyes as she bounces in her mother's arms and tries to speak, but although the lips move no sound comes out.
One senses that something rather extraordinary has taken place, a sense highlighted by the low-key nature of the presentation presided over by two genial chaps in baggy, if somewhat shambolic, suits. There has been no hype, no glitz, no showy celebrity. For once, a sport has spoken for itself.
Sunday April 22, 2007
The Observer
It is unlikely that any British sportsman has experienced a more arduous week than the one Roger Hammond has just endured. On 11 April he cycled for 130 miles flat-out through Belgium, into headwinds whipping in from the North Sea, and finished second in the Gent-Wevelgem Pro-Tour race.
Hammond, 33, had broken away and then been assisted by a 20-man collision on a cobbled road that hobbled the peloton. As the final kilometre approached, five cyclists were in contention, including Hammond and his T-Mobile team leader, Marcus Burghardt, and two Spaniards. Hammond kept the others in check to ensure that Burghardt's sprint for the line could not be challenged.
'Before the final kilometre, Roger pulled at the front of the group, leaving me the chance to pick my moment and launch my attack from the back of the group,' said Burghardt. 'We won because I gave it 100 per cent for Marcus,' said Hammond, who pointed out that the same could not be said for the Spanish riders.
'Roger's strong and gutsy ride paved the way for Marcus to win. Fair play to him for the cool way he worked over Oscar Freire and Francisco Ventoso in the finale,' said T-Mobile's team director, Tristan Hoffman.
Four days later, Hammond took part in the Paris-Roubaix, a barely credible slog across the First World War battlefields that fully merits its description as L'Enfer du Nord - The Hell of the North. The race is the subject of one of the great sports documentaries, A Sunday in Hell (1976).
Paris-Roubaix is also known as the Queen of Classics. Lance Armstrong's refusal ever to take part on the grounds that it was worse than useless in preparing him for his only target, the one bike race known to Americans, the Tour de France, is among the many reasons the French and Belgians never took him to their hearts.
The Tour de France may be the toughest event in all sport but Paris-Roubaix may be the hardest day of the year. The race is notable not just for its distance, a punishing 160-mile ride from beautiful Compiegne to brutal Roubaix, but for the fact that 32.7 of those miles are cobbled. And not sweet enlarged pebbles but *******, jaggy, evil chunks of stone the size of enlarged fists. This is the terrain the jangling cyclists have to traverse, travelling at top speed with no room for manoeuvre on either side. When it is wet the cobbles become as slippery as ice; when it is dry, as it was last Sunday, a wave of dust engulfs the riders ensuring their limited vision is reduced yet further.
It usually takes a rider a week to recover from his exertions. The great Irish cyclist Sean Kelly, who considers his two Paris-Roubaix victories as his career highlight and the race as 'the hardest and the most beautiful to win', would find it impossible to urinate without pain for three days after finishing. Last Thursday, just a day after his team-mate and protege, 21-year-old Mark Cavendish, had scored his maiden professional road-race victory in the Scheldeprijs Vlaanderen, Hammond was back in the saddle for the 124-mile Grand Prix de Denain. He did his fair share of the work in getting T-Mobile's Eric Baumann up to third place at the finish.
We had arranged to meet on the eve of the Hell of the North at the Monopole on the outskirts of Compiegne (think Travelodge with better food and wine) but the Discovery and Rabobank teams had taken all the rooms and T-Mobile had been relocated to a fancy hotel in Chantilly. Such frills are uncommon in cycling. The riders, connoisseurs of pain, would be confused by pampering. They often sleep two to a room in the most spartan surroundings - an economy that allows the owners to run their teams on an annual budget equivalent to the salary of a single Premiership footballer.
Road racing is a sport harking back to less commercial times. The salaries of those competing are not markedly higher than those of the people watching them. For all the contestants the course throws up as much of a challenge as their competitors and there is a bond between those who complete it, regardless of position. It is a socialistic sport - most people can afford a bike and all bikes are equal. It is a sport predicated upon suffering. The rider who can best manage his pain is the rider most likely to win.
The 1992 Olympic pursuit champion, Chris Boardman, has said: 'It's very difficult to describe and maybe it's something you have to experience, but the suffering side of it, when you think, "I've just got to get another hour-and-a-half of this climb, and there's another 10 days," that's what sees people off. You've just had enough of suffering because you can't take any more.'
Hammond, quietly spoken and erudite, cannot wait for the pain to begin. 'Second in Gent-Wevelgem is OK,' he says, 'but there's nothing as impressive as entering the velodrome in a group that is fighting for the victory. Being on the podium in Roubaix [he was third in 2004] will always remain my biggest performance, although that might change tomorrow.
'When you hit the cobbles it's not only physically demanding, you are shaken absolutely to pieces, but mentally exhausting because you have to look at every cobble you have to cover. And as you get more and more fatigued your concentration span drops. And it will be doubly difficult tomorrow because of the dust.
'It's my biggest race of the year. If I won Paris-Roubaix tomorrow my career would be made. I could go to the Tour de France and win and it would not mean as much. It was the first race I can remember watching, aged six, and then there is the history and something almost religious about the race.'
It is also the race most suited to Hammond, a former world cyclo-cross champion. 'It is not necessarily the person with the biggest engine who wins. You need a certain amount of luck and a skill at riding on cobbles can give you an edge.'
Hammond is far more famous in his adopted country - he lives for a large part of the year in Belgium - than in his homeland. After he came second in Gent, he says, 'Forty to 50 people congratulated me and the chief of police came round. Back in England, I went into a bike shop in Halesowen dressed in full bike kit and asked to borrow a spanner and the guy said to me, "Be careful with that, you can hurt your knee."'
Hammond grew up in Chalfont St Peter in Buckinghamshire and went to Dr Challoner's Grammar School before reading material science and technology at Brunel University. He started cycling when he was eight but did not take it seriously until he was 16 when a ruptured thigh muscle ended a promising football career. Victory in the world cyclo-cross championships convinced him he might have a career in sport. He took his degree to be on the safe side.
Is he addicted to pain? 'I'm addicted to a sense of achievement and as an athlete you associate achievement with pain. If I'm in serious pain before 150 kilometres tomorrow I'll know I'm in trouble. But it will really hurt in the last 30 or 40 kilometres. Mind you, if it's hurting me, what is it doing to the others?'
Two hours before the start, Hammond sits in his team bus. His fiancee, Tara, a doctor he met after she was co-opted to dole out medical advice on the Tour of Britain - a surprising appointment given that she is an obstetrician - hangs around outside fiddling with her watch strap as if it were a rosary. After the start, she will hurry to Roubaix to watch the race on TV in case Hammond falls and she needs to get to the hospital pronto.
Hammond is not superstitious but he likes to be the last off the team bus. On this occasion he is not - and punctures on the second set of cobbles.
'There was no team car,' he says later, 'and I had to take a neutral service wheel and it was pumped up super-hard so I struggled on the cobbled sectors.'
Despite this handicap, he stays in touch and having ridden 'a whole section of cobbles all on my own' is up near the front.
Keeping tabs on how he is doing proves difficult. When watching cycling you can either pick your spot and watch the riders whizz by or get in a van and trust your driver. While following the heavily signed route this is not a problem. Even cosseted inside a Mercedes we can still feel the judder as we traverse the cobbles. Every village has gone to the effort of wheeling out giant replica farmers. There is one with onions, one with garlic, one in a wheelchair.
Everyone, in a very French manner, is wearing a T-shirt with the slogan 'Just say non'. This, it turns out, is not an expression of basic philosophy, nor a comment on the forthcoming presidential elections, but a protest against a planned railway expansion, which would ruin the bleak countryside.
Thirty-two kilometres from the finish, Hammond and the Australian Stuart O'Grady drop race favourite Tom Boonen and go in search of the leading group a minute ahead. Both Hammond and O'Grady are Plan Bs. They started the race with the aim of riding for their team leaders but a motorbike has crashed into Burghardt and the weather has proved too hot for last year's winner Fabian Cancellara. The Plan Bs have become Plan As. Hammond cannot quite keep up with O'Grady as he reaches the leading group.
The Australian looks around and everyone is suffering. He attacks on pure emotion, he says later, just riding on instinct.
He does so, on his own, for 23 kilometres. He extends his lead to a minute. 'I thought that with a minute I could puncture and still be all right. I thought, ah, I don't remember, it was just all a blur. I was in a world of pain that I had never experienced before.'
He survives to ride alone around the scrubby velodrome, but is so exhausted that half an hour later the first English-speaking winner since Kelly in 1986 can barely lift the giant cobble, which is his prize. Hammond, meanwhile, has struggled valiantly to finish seventh. Covered in dust and looking like an overworked miner he collapses to the ground. A trainer comes over with a can of Fanta. He drains it. He is incapable of speech.
Burghardt who has got back on his bike to finish down the field comes over to ask where he finished. 'Sept,' whispers Hammond.
All around people are suffering. One rider is in tears, not of pain but exhaustion. Another looks up into his young daughter's eyes as she bounces in her mother's arms and tries to speak, but although the lips move no sound comes out.
One senses that something rather extraordinary has taken place, a sense highlighted by the low-key nature of the presentation presided over by two genial chaps in baggy, if somewhat shambolic, suits. There has been no hype, no glitz, no showy celebrity. For once, a sport has spoken for itself.
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