A year ago, Ian Stannard was lying on his sofa nursing a broken back. This week, as Team Sky prepare for Sunday’s Paris-Roubaix Classic, he is very much back in the saddle. With a key win to his name this season already in the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad one-dayer, he is expected to play a lead role in the weekend attempt to land the British team’s first win in a monument, one of the five most prestigious Classics on the calendar.
The 27-year-old could only watch last year’s Paris-Roubaix, having broken a vertebra the previous weekend when he tangled with another rider and went into a ditch. “I had a day in hospital then I was let out in a back brace to stop me turning round and paralysing myself,” he says laconically. “It was a gutter knowing the form I was in, and it’s been tough coming back. You get lazy sitting on the sofa when you can’t even get up and make yourself a cup of tea.”
The Milton Keynes rider took three months off his bike and having struggled to regain his racing form when he returned, he then broke a wrist in the Tour of Britain in September, largely, he explains, because of the fear in his mind after his earlier fracture. “As I went over the bars I thought I was going to break my back again, so I put my hands out, which you don’t normally do, so that was a bone in my wrist.”
Bearing in mind the risks cyclists are visibly running in this year’s Classics – gale-force winds blowing them off their bikes in this year’s Gent-Wevelgem, and rogue service cars knocking two men to the deck in the Tour of Flanders – and given Stannard’s recent medical history, you might question why he would want to throw himself on the mercy of some of cycling’s most dreaded roads, the 50km of bone-battering cobbles nicknamed the “Hell of the North” that give Paris-Roubaix its notoriety and prestige.
Partly, his injury has re-energised the Briton. “When you are racing 90 days a year, with all the flights, the training camps, you are almost going through the motions, so I sort of became a fan of racing again, watching Roubaix and Flanders on television.” But Stannard has been a Classics man since his early days, well before he joined the British Cycling under-23 academy back in 2006, and long before he became part of Sky at their inception in 2010.
“From Milton Keynes, Belgium isn’t the hardest place to get to, so I went out there most weekends as an under-16 and as a junior.” Like many aspiring professionals before him and since, he joined a small group who were taken out to race Belgian amateur events by one of the unsung heroes of British cycling, John Barclay. “I loved the style of racing, and the Classics suit my build. I’m never going to be a Tour rider, I’m realistic about that.”
Stannard has been flying the flag for several years, winning Het Nieuwsblad – the season opener, which includes most of the cobbled ascents that figure in the Tour of Flanders – in 2014, and repeating his win last month to cement his comeback from that broken back. That latter victory was a tactical masterpiece at the expense of three members of the Etixx-Quickstep team, Classics specialists to a man, who should have had the edge. It reflected the fact that Sky have – in Stannard, Thomas, Luke Rowe and Wiggins – built a group of riders who can all figure at the end of a major one-day race. “The first 20 in a Classic is where the race is, the peloton behind them is just scrapping. We were in that bunch but we’ve learnt together, trained together, Luke Rowe has stepped up which has helped, and we’ve become a force.”
Compared to the Tour de France, cycling’s one-day Classics are something of a well-kept secret, as Stannard acknowledges.
“Hardcore cycling fans know about them, but the public only knows the Tour and the tract from the Olympics.” This year, with Wiggins targeting Paris-Roubaix for his Sky swansong and Thomas very much in the mix in recent weeks at Milan-San Remo, Gent-Wevelgem and Flanders – not to mention the Welshman’s victory at E3 – this may change.
The great one-day events have a magic all of their own, as Stannard explains.
“They are brutally tough. And because it’s all over in one day, you can’t make a single mistake. In a Tour, you can save yourself a bit, but in a one-day race, it’s just hard, hard, racing. The atmosphere is brilliant. For Belgium, the Tour of Flanders is a national day out, it’s massive, but Roubaix is the harder race.
“You are riding hard all day. One day at the Classics kills your body in a way nothing else does. At the end of Roubaix, you feel like you do at the end of a three-week Grand Tour. I love it. It suits me down to the ground.”
