Hell Is No Handlebars

Helmut suggested that I post the following. It's a bad revolution-by-revolution description of parts of the Paris-Roubaix bicycle race this last Sunday. If nothing else, it proves that many sports writers really do have talents and skills. So enjoy, Paris-Roubaix with no Brangelina adoptees (but improved with links!):

It was miserable. There was a 17 man breakaway after the Arenberg Forest. Boonen attacked and shed everyone but 16 riders off the back. Problem was that he shed all of his teammates in the process. So Hincapie is sitting pretty with THREE other Discovery riders in the breakaway and Boonen's got nobody. That was the general consensus about the best way to beat Boonen, isolate him. So after he isolated himself things were looking pretty good. Hincapie was up front most of the time, shadowing Boonen and vice versa. Chasing down some breakaways, staying out of trouble, etc. The lead group, down to 14 riders or so, had put a little bit over two minutes on the field, pretty much an insurmountable lead in that race with a bunch of sections of pave to go.

The Discovery boys had momentarily drifted back to the rear of the breakaway, I guess they were strategizin' or something, and everything seemed fine, when all of a sudden you see a rider sit up in the back, go flying over to the left hand shoulder and then eat shit, landing on his head in the process. And the weird thing is it looked like whoever it was had just decided that it was a good time to ride no handed on the cobbles. I saw his hands come up in the air and then splat. It looked like Hincapie but it was hard to tell because the shot was from in front of the breakaway, but the guy was tall and it just sort of looked like him. It knocked the wind out of me just seeing it, and I was pretty sure it was him, but the thing that made absolutely no sense was it looked like he (or whomever it was) really did just sit up straight and take his hands off the handlebars. This made me think, momentarily, that Hincapie or whomever it was had just cracked, gone insane, batshit.

Paul Sherwen, being his normally astute announcer self, said something like "I don't know what happened. One of the Discovery boys has gone down. I guess he just touched wheels or something, but it looked like he was riding no handed." By now everybody in the group new that somebody had eaten shit and were all looking around behind them to see what happened, and this was around the time that Boonen, wisely, decided to attack. So they've got cameras at the wreck now, it was just a moment's time really, and it's now obvious that it was Hincapie. He's sitting there on the ground and he just looks shattered, like he wanted to cry, and he no doubt did want to. He also looks completely stunned. Still it doesn't make any sense, why was he riding no handed? Now they started playing the footage back in slower motion and you couldn't tell until he swung over almost into the shoulder embankment that it wasn't that he was riding no handed. The problem was he had handlebars in his hand but they were no longer attached to the bike. Sherwin, still being astute, noticed this right away.

They had sheared off, his stem and handlebars just broke right off the top of his bike. This means that the top of his fork broke off too, above the headset. Hooray Trek and carbon fiber! Probably not fair really as he'd crashed once already and that probably weakened it. But that explains why he looked stunned--leaving aside the larger existential aspects of it--his handlebars ripped off in his hands! That had to be pretty terrifying to realize that the thing he was holding onto was no longer holding on to the bike. It really sucked, it was his race to win. But that's Paris-Roubaix, luck, good or bad, always has a lot to do with it. The Swiss rider who won, Fabian Cancellara, rode a great race and deserved it. It was a manly and stylish win too. The remaining 2 Discovery riders in the breakaway had initially taken 2nd & 4th with Peter Petegem (some crazy-assed Flemish name/spelling) taking 3rd, but then all of them were disqualified because they crossed some train tracks after the barriers had gone down. That's against the rules. So Boonen, who'd crossed the line a very distant 5th, ended up in second. He'd gotten stuck at the railroad crossing and had to wait for the train to pass.

A typically crazy Hell of the North, but a really dry one--very dusty.