Here are 10 reasons why the 257.5km spring Classic, Paris-Roubaix, is our favourite one-day race of the year. – By Whit Yost

3. You’re a History Buff

Paris-Roubaix is known “affectionately” as “the Hell of the North”—and not, says Cossins, because of its cobblestones.

The race was forced to take a few years off during World War I. After the war, the race organisation sent a small team out to scout the race course, much of which went right through some of the bloodiest battlegrounds of the war. They were shocked with the devastation that was left in the Great War’s wake, a hellish landscape that hardly resembled the countryside that had hosted the race in prior years.

In addition to giving the race its nickname, the war took the lives of two of Roubaix’s earliest champions, Octave Lapize and Francois Faber, and the 1919 edition began with a minute of silence in honour of those who had lost their lives.

READ MORE ON: international Paris Roubaix report