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“The Racer” Extract: The Hell Of The North

The 2020 Paris-Roubaix is at best postponed, it will be conspicuous in its absence this weekend. It is an early-season highlight for any fan of cycling – we’re treating CHPT3 followers to exclusive, full extracts from David Millar’s book, “The Racer”. Winner of the Cycling Book of the Year, David writes from the perspective of a professional, preparing for the race and providing an enthralling look inside the crazy race with no details left out. “It’s one thing to love watching a race, it’s another to love doing it. Paris–Roubaix is an example of this: it’s easy to love as a fan, much harder as a racer. The love hate relationship is real. I’ve started it three times and none of those times ended particularly well – which is another way of saying I didn’t finish. It’s known as ‘the Hell of the North’, something people often mistake as being attributable to its renowned difficulty and the famous images of exhausted racers looking like they’ve been to hell and back. It actually originates from the 1919 edition, when it was held for the first time since the First World War had ended, and travelled through a devastated northern France – ...

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