Gravel Culture: Armchair Adventure – the Hell of the North-East
Posted By Gravel Union
On 6 August 2020
Olly looks back on the time when he thought he was a big shot cycling event organiser and wanted to emulate the king of the Spring Classics in the UK’s north-east. What could possibly go wrong?
It was at the moment that the 200th email arrived asking for a place on my freshly launched attempt to bring a bit of the Spring Classics to the north-east of the UK that I realised I might have bitten off more than I could chew. I’d moved up to Newcastle a year previously from the south of the UK where I’d been a frequent visitor to northern France and Belgium in the hunt for perfect cobble riding. When I moved north-east to Newcastle, I realised that my trips over to the continent weren’t going to be possible anymore, so I thought that as I couldn’t go and ride the cobbles over there, I’d bring cobble riding over here instead.
In 2014, gravel riding was already on the cycling radar but only to a few people and really only in the USA. In Europe however, cyclocross racing had been around since the early 1900s and the Spring Classics were of a similar vintage. These European events showed its younger gravel racing cousin how to do things properly - roughly 120 years of riding the wrong bikes on inappropriate terrain.
I bought my first CX bike back in 2007 and realised straight away that I loved riding it more than any other bike I owned. I’ve spent most of the intervening years riding off-road on what was essentially the wrong bike. So, when I moved up to Newcastle I started to look for inappropriate trails to ride my wrong bike on and luckily struck trail gold pretty quickly – former industrial railways now converted to mixed-use trails, bridleways linking old coal-mining villages, steep cobbled streets and, once you’re out of the city, narrow country lanes complete with potholes and grass-up-the-middle. It didn’t take me long to build up a mental map linking all the best bits together. As I sat at my desk one day, daydreaming about Belgian cobbles (as you do!), I realised that there might be other people as well as me who would be keen to ride inappropriate trails near Newcastle and I had a lightbulb moment – what about if I put on a homage to the Spring Classics and brought it to the North-East?
In that moment, the idea for the Hell of the North(east) was born – a mixed surface ride taking on all the classic components of the king of the Spring Classics, the Paris-Roubaix (otherwise known as the Hell of the North) – I had cobbles, rubbish road surfaces, tracks around the edge of farmers’ fields – I even managed to find my very own version of the Roubaix velodrome to finish the route on. So, the idea was fully formed – now how do I turn my madcap idea into an actual event?
At the time I was working for a local cycling holiday company and my job was to be in charge of operations and logistics for the holidays they run. I pitched my slightly crazy idea to the boss, who after a little persuasion said I could give it a go. But in order to keep it safe, I had to run it to the same quality standards of one of their cycling holidays – this meant everything from a super-detailed route reccie, full risk assessment, backups put in place for medical/mechanical emergencies, food&drink options organised and most importantly, the right feel – not too corporate, all the riders made to feel welcome and most importantly, I had to keep the numbers low.
In order to promote the event, I dragged myself out of bed at stupid o’clock one January morning and headed down to the Ouseburn, Newcastle’s former industrial heart and home to its finest cobbled streets, to shoot some promotional footage – the idea in my head was to mix super-quiet Ouseburn cobble shots with the manicness of cobble racing that I’d shot in Belgium the year before. I put a short promo together, wrote some speedy copy and pulled in a few favours with some cycling media friends. They were obviously having a quiet news day as they ran my promo video as a news story. Very rapidly entries started to drop into my in-box. I wasn’t really sure how much interest there would be – were people really mad enough to want to batter themselves on the cobbles and broken tarmac of the north-east? Obviously yes. I finished up with more than 200 wannabe-entrants. And a big dilemma – there was no way I could take anything close to that number out on the ride, so I had to decide a fair way of cutting the numbers down.
I ended up pulling names out of a hat to create a master list and reserve-list (and then put on a second event later in the spring for some of the riders who missed out on the HotNE). I contacted all the riders, gave them the good (or bad) news and then had to actually put the event together. I’d already got the route dialled, but did two full reccie rides with one of the guides who was going to help me run it and my wife as a pretend customer. None of us had gravel bikes, so used a mix of CX bikes and road bikes. I fitted super fat (for the time) 23mm tyres on my wife’s bike – I’d bought them in a shop located just off the route of the Tour of Flanders the year before, as you couldn’t find them for love nor money in the UK then, and I figured with a palmares like that, they would be perfect! I ran tubeless 33mm CX tyres which did feel a bit like cheating, but I figured I needed to avoid punctures at all costs if I was going to try and ride with the peloton. I spent many (un)happy hours filling in H&S paperwork, organising emergency backup, pre-booking food stops and thinking about logistics.
But then came the fun part. I knew I wanted to create a souvenir of the event – something which gave a little hint to the effort that I’d put in, but also which was fun and hopefully left the riders with a good memory. I scoured the route map for suitable names, broke out my finest set of pens and created a top tube/stem graphic with all the iconic sections of the route given “appropriate” names and distances. Everything was done in school boy French and distances were in Kms (of course) to give it that euro-feel. I can’t claim any credit for the idea as pro-riders have had these for years. Even the concept of turning fairly dull English place names into something more exotic was something I’d been inspired to come up with by a friend of mine. It worked though – the riders got them as they signed on (along with some tape to fix them to their bikes) and it generated just the right mix of the enthusiasm and nervous energy as the riders saw for the first time where the route went – I’d kept it secret until the morning of the event. The funny thing is that some of the names stuck – the awe-inspiring majesty of the Col du Dinnington, with its 700m total length and calf-shredding 12m vertical height gain, have lived on to this day.
So, how did it go? Well that would be telling wouldn’t it! Safe to say, everyone had a good time, it was appropriately cold and drizzly, Gareth single-handidly kept the local bike shop in business with the amount of punctured innertubes that he got through, we ate A LOT of cake at the teastop, the cobbles were exactly greasy and steep enough to be horrible and we all made it back to the start/finish café in one piece. I’d organised a big screen showing of the real Hell of the North the following day and lots of the riders made a weekend of it and stayed around to watch.
The whole experience was eye-opening as to the amount of work, both physical and mental, that organisers put into to running a safe and fun event. It was a great way for some out-of-town riders to experience the pleasures of the north-east and I had a great sense of satisfaction from everyone getting around safely and enjoying themselves. Sadly, the event was just destined to run once - I changed jobs the following year and no-one has been mad enough to take up the reins and put on their own version since.
Perhaps it’s something to add to my “To Do” list for the future…
If you would like to follow the 2014 route of the Hell of the North(East) you can check it out here