Race Across Paris 2024: 119 kilometres and a wild boar#
Some races end because the body gives up, because the mind stops following, because you misjudged your effort. And then there are the ones that end in four seconds, on a descent, for a reason entirely beyond your control. The 2024 Race Across Paris belongs to the second category.
The year of ambitions#
First, the state of mind I brought into that season. After my 2023 wins at the Race Across France and the BikingMan AURA, I had put a great deal of pressure on myself for 2024. I had sponsors, Nolio and Hydrascore, and the ambition to go further still. Cycling was no longer just my playground: it had become something I was supposed to succeed at.
The Race Across Paris opened that season, and it was meant to set its tone.
Chantilly, 9:19 pm#
The 1000-kilometre format of the Race Across Paris starts in the evening, and I may as well write it plainly: I do not like evening starts. You do not roll out fresh, you roll out carrying the accumulated fatigue of the day, sometimes of the week, and the first night has to be negotiated with that debt in your legs. Some riders handle it very well. Not me.
The park at Chantilly, the Race Across Series arch, a few dozen riders, orange hi-vis vests, and that late-April light fading while you adjust your bags one last time. I roll out at 9:19 pm on the BMC Teammachine, set up for ultra with aero bars. It is 12 °C, and I know it will drop.
Someone was there to see me off. It is not something you think about when you enter a race, and it matters a great deal more than you expect at the moment you ride out into the dark. Two short videos remain, shot on the line three minutes before my start:
The rain, and the head of the race#
The route leaves the Oise heading north-west, towards Normandy. It is fast, rolling terrain, barely 977 metres of climbing across the first 119 kilometres, exactly the kind of ground that turns the start of an ultra into a disguised road race.
The rain arrives fairly quickly. Nothing dramatic in itself, but on April country roads, at night, it changes everything: the descents turn slippery, the reference points disappear, and every curve demands a little more margin than the light reveals.
I work my way up to the head of the race fairly quickly. And the conclusion is simple: it is rolling very hard. Too hard. An average of 202 watts, 233 normalised, 28.5 km/h in the rain: at that level of effort, over a thousand kilometres, you are already past the point where the debt gets repaid. I let the two leaders go, without regret. Following would have meant burning a match I would need forty hours later. I settle into third place, at my own pace, in the dark and the wet.
The thermometer drops to 5 °C. Arm warmers and a windproof do the job, but on a rainy April night in Picardy, the cold settles into your hands and never quite leaves.
The boar#
Not long after letting the two leaders go, the road drops away, fast. I am past 50 km/h, down on the bars, on a soaked surface, on a stretch I do not know and that my light carves out two seconds ahead. And then the piglets cross.
I braked, as much as a wet road allows. I thought it would clear: that fraction of a second where you plot a line and tell yourself they will be gone before you arrive. They were. Their mother was not. The boar hit the drive side of the bike and the derailleur snapped clean off.
Not bent, not knocked out of adjustment: snapped. On a fully self-supported event, at one in the morning, 119 kilometres in and dozens of kilometres from the nearest open bike shop, there is no repair scenario. The race ends there, on the edge of Aumale, in Seine-Maritime.
The train home#
The hardest part of a scratch is not the decision. It is what comes afterwards. It took ten kilometres through the middle of the night, in the rain, with a bike that could no longer be pedalled, to reach a station and wait for the first train. Two hours of stillness show up in the watch data, in the gap between moving time and elapsed time: that is all that remains of the end of this race. 3,349 calories, 119.3 kilometres, and a seat on a train.
What reality reminded me#
In the moment, of course, there is frustration. There were ambitions, sponsors, a season built around big objectives, and everything stops at kilometre 119 because of an animal no training plan accounts for.
But with a little distance, that night did me a favour. Reality called me to order, and it is a good thing: sport must remain nothing more than a hobby. The pressure I had put on myself for 2024, the partners, the urge to prove something, all of it had quietly started taking up a place that was not its own. A derailleur snapped by a wild boar restores proportions better than any long speech. Cycling is what I do, not what I am, and it must never crowd out what makes my life.
A scratch caused by your own failure stays with you, because you keep looking for what you could have done differently. With a wild boar, there is nothing to look for. You put the bike away, you rebuild the drivetrain, and you look at the next date on the calendar.
It was two months out, and it was 2,500 kilometres long.