The Spring Classics: Cycling's Greatest One-day Races - Tapa dura

The authors are top sportswriters for L'Equipe, a leading European cycling and sports publication.

Cycling’s spring races are always the most anticipated of the year, not only because they herald the start of the season but also because they are brutally difficult and spectacularly unpredictable. Known as the spring classics, these one-day races test cycling’s toughest riders with the worst conditions imaginable—sucking mud, choking dust, leg-numbing sleet, and Europe’s narrowest, most bone-grinding roads. Clattering through agrarian hamlets on roughly paved routes carved from the hills more than a century ago, the spring classics encompass cycling’s most glorious and meaningful history.

With insightful text from L’Équipe’s top writers and hundreds of rare and newly restored photographs,The Spring Classics delves deeply into the rich stories of these great events—races such as Italy’s season-opening Milan–San Remo, which winds south toward the lumpy Ligurian coast on its way to a furious finish; Ghent-Wevelgem, Belgium’s test for sprinters, always won with a burst of lightning; the tooth-rattling Tour of Flanders, with its interminable stretches of treacherous cobblestones; and, of course, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, a monster created in 1892 whose tempestuous weather and sawtooth profile made it the dark prototype for every tough race that has followed.

Whether ancient or modern, each of cycling’s monuments contains within its route a maddening assortment of quirks, impossibilities, and delights, all of which must be conquered anew as the races unfold every year. In the Flèche Wallonne is the leg-breaking Mur de Huy, a wall of a hill with gradients as steep as 19 percent. Murderously, the race finishes atop the Mur, and only after the racers have climbed it three times. There are the successive climbs of Milan–San Remo—Le Manie, the Cipressa, the Poggio—designed to test the endurance of the riders in this longest of one-day races before they pour onto its finishing straight in a desperate sprint for glory. And there are the successive hills of the Amstel Gold Race, a string of no fewer than 31 wickedly steep ascents that include the Keutenberg, featuring ramps of 20 percent, and the 1,450-meter-long Cauberg, whose 12 percent gradient is diabolically placed at the very end.

In its encyclopedic embrace of Europe’s greatest one-day events, The Spring Classics also celebrates the essential races that round out the cycling year: Paris-Tours, which moved from spring to fall in 1951; the Clásica San Sebastián, which burst onto the cycling-mad Basque calendar in 1981 and is now enshrined as August’s most important contest; and the Tour of Lombardy, “the race of the falling leaves” along the shores of Lake Como that closes the calendar in October with elegance and style.

Taken together, these are the races that truly define a year in cycling. It is from these ultimate challenges that heroes are born, legends are made, history is written, and the eternal struggle to triumph over all odds is fought, won, lost, celebrated, and enshrined.

Liège-Bastogne-Liège: The Doyenne
La Flèche Wallone: The Arrow
Paris-Roubaix: The Hell of the North
Paris-Tours
Tour of Flanders: The Diabolical Ronde
Milan-San Remo: The Classicissima
Tour of Lombardy: The Race of the Falling Leaves
Amstel Gold Race
Grand Prix of Frankfurt
Clásica San Sebastián
Championship of Zurich
Bordeaux-Paris: The Derby of the Road
Paris-Brussels
Het Volk
Ghent-Wevelgem

“When you race a classic, there is no next day’s stage. You can get every last bit of energy out of yourself because you don’t have to worry about being eliminated from the race tomorrow. You can give it your all with no looking back.

Legendary races like the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix take the emotions of intense cycling competition to an even greater height. Seeing names such as Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara charging up the Mur de Grammont in the shadow of the Flemish fans