Triple winner in Roubaix (1968,1970, 1973), Eddy Merckx is since this Thursday the seventh rider to have a cobblestone sector in his name after the winners of the event Bernard Hinault, Marc Madiot, Gilbert Duclos-Lassalle, Frédéric Guesdon, John Degenkolb and the Northerner Adrien Petit, 6th last year.
It is the sector of Camphin-en-Pévèle which was chosen to bear the surname of the greatest cycling champion in history. Rated four stars, 1,800 meters long and located 20 km from the finish, just before the Carrefour de l’Arbre sector, it is a passage considered strategic in determining the name of the future winner. It was on the initiative of the association “Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix” that the Belgian was honored. The honorific term is the appropriate one because the race always retains the name of the villages for the paved sectors and not those of the champions who have a stele at their entrance.
« In 1973, Paris-Roubaix was really the hell of the North, recalled Eddy Merckx. I have never experienced such difficult conditions as that year. I am really happy to have, fifty years later, this stele here, very close to the Belgian border. I’m very proud. It is with great pleasure that I have come today. Paris-Roubaix is an unforgettable moment,” he concluded to applause.
Asked to deliver a prognosis, Eddy Merckx explained that as a Belgian he wanted “the success of Wout Van Aert but that other very serious candidates are there like Mathieu Van Der Poel, Filippo Ganna, Yves Lampaert or the Frenchman Christophe The door. It will be a great race I’m sure. »