With podium places in Milan San Remo and the Tour of Flanders on his palmares, Stuart O'Grady is Australia's best Classics rider. With two days to go to Paris-Roubaix, O'Grady told Gerard Knapp just how much he's looking forward to this year's 260km of cobbles and mud.
Despite the removal of what was considered the most dangerous section of cobbles on the Paris-Roubaix parcours - the dreaded Forêt d'Arenberg - the lead rider for French team Cofidis, Stuart O'Grady, believes Sunday's epic race could actually be harder without the famously-brutal section.
After checking out the new sections of the parcours that organizers have added to replace Arenberg, the Australian expects the race to have a different level of intensity. "Before you could feel the race would chill out a bit (after Arenberg), as the race would then enter good sections of asphalt, they would take in some food and drinks and then prepare for the next section. But now, they've replaced it with absolute goat-tracks, it's constantly twisting left and right; there just no place to recover," he said. "It's just going to be full-on."
