Duck and cover! Our guest article series rolls on with @scaler911’s Anatomy of a Photo. Photo, words, enough said.
Yours in Cycling,
Gianni
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Ah, The Queen of Classics. Hell of the North. L’enfer du Nord. Call it what you will, every spring we Velominati cherish this monument. Every April the course is set to put the pain to all who brave this glorious classic. The weather can be sunny, making things dusty – or rainy, making it a slippery, muddy mess. In the words of Orangeman Theo de Rooij, “It’s a bollocks, this race! You’re working like an animal, you don’t have time to piss, you wet your pants. You’re riding in mud like this, you’re slipping…it’s a pile of shit.” When asked if he would do it again, he replied, “Sure, it’s the most beautiful race in the world.”
In 1994, Frenchman Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle was returning to go for a hat-trick. The weather was horrible, raining, cold. The course was shit. 14K in, the rain turned to snow. An attack went off, but that was not to last. The peloton came to life and caught the lone break-away man and an elite selection was made in the revered Arenberg Forest. Duclos-Lassalle suffered a puncture during one of several large crashes in the bunch and lost contact.
From behind, Duclos-Lassalle, Johann Museeuw, and new guy Andrei Tchmil caught the lead group. With 63K to go, Tchmil attacked hard and rode away to victory, becoming the first Eastern block winner of PR.
But what is compelling to me is the photo of Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle and hardman Johann Museeuw chasing. In addition to a fantastic study in the V, notice the steeds: Rockshock-equipped road bikes all around including Johan’s Bianchi. It turns out that that Celeste wonder was a $20,000, one-off, fully suspended road machine that saw exactly one race. The cost, weight and UCI rule change prohibited any further development of those monstrosities. Thank Merckx, those were strange times my fellow VM, strange times indeed.
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View Comments
great one for sure scaler
those were odd times, odd bikes, it was a proverbial 'thinking outside the box', that to a good extent should have stayed there. I remember the rock-shox, the 'do whatever' to make the race easier.
HTFU was what I thought then, it holds today.
Its a killer race, as you mentioned, it takes killer guns and a killers mentality to master it.
few have
none with a cushy hymem I might add
all with skills and guts
@Souleur
Fixed your Haiku at the end.
Crap! Bad week to quit sniffing airplane glue! :)
Missing a ton of articles as our home computer is shit and I have most of the week off from work.
Oh well, it'll be great to catch up on all these articles when I return!
by the way, awesome photo and great write-up. '94 P-R was such a classic!
2 thumbs up @Blah
Good piece Scaler. I love the quote from Theo, cracks me up everytime. To go through such harsh conditions and still call it beautiful....absolutely beautiful stuff.
Right one, scaler! Love that Theo quote too. Its so...Velominatus. We bitch, whine, suffer, cry, scream, die in agony...but it is all so beautiful.
When will be being to speculate about faves for 2012 PR? Those on the Keepers Tour surely will need to supply us video. Lots and lots of video.
Easy for me to look at that Bianchi frame and call it a "girl's bike". But then I look at those chainrings and realize how small my own sack is. Oh, well.
Museeuw is going to fuck us up at the Keepers Tour. I can't wait. And look at the peeps standing just out of the shit, cheering the riders as they pass. Nothing fancy. Just a bunch of cycling fans out for a day of spectating. That's the look I'll be going for, nothing special. I'll be in some shitty jeans, and old toque (if it's cold and rainy), and some muddy shoes. Bring on the madness!
Thanks for the piece Scaler, what AoaP should be.
i wonder if, when the riders were told their bikes would have front shocks, they thought "you gotta be fucking kidding me!"
Looking at the photo again, I particularly like the bearded bloke on the left, doing the commentary into his imaginary microphone. I think he's commenting on the Rockshox.
@silkrider
I'm fairly sure (oxymoronic?) that it was that famous innovator Greg LeMond who told Julien Devriese to fit Rock Shox to his and Duclos-Lasalle's bikes for the '92 PR.