Confession: I Greased the Koppenberg.

It was me. I did it, and I'm not sorry.

Photo Credit: Pauline Ballet, ASO

What drama on Easter Sunday in the Flemish hills. One world champion running rampant, the other struggling to stay upright. A heads-up sprint for all the marbles between two perennial runners-up in the women’s race; podium places stolen from Dylan Teuns and Alberto Bettiol at the last moment in the men’s.

But in hundreds of kilometers of racing, most of the drama came on one tiny section of road. “Road” if you want to call it that. The Koppenberg, a cobbled hill just 600 meters long, gaining some 69 meters in elevation. This is a puncheur’s climb, more of a mur than a berg. But instead of a grippy asphalt with camber and modern drainage, it’s paved in cobblestones: The paving technology of the ancients. These rocks were probably laid down by people whose water supply was only potable after you turned it into beer. And this slick, undulating, unpredictable surface turns into an absolute Japanese game show when it rains. When the rocks are caked in mud and give way if you press a tire into them the wrong way.

The first shot of the Eurosport highlight reel is of Kimberly Pienaar losing her balance and steering directly into Chloe Dygert. Watching this live, I thought Pienaar had suffered some kind of episode that inspired her to put Dygert in the wall, Kurt Busch-style.

As sad as it makes me to see the stars and stripes put on the ground, this was clearly an accident. Piennar is plugging along as best she can, and you can see the specific pedal stroke that causes her back wheel to slip. Bikes stay upright only when they’re moving forward. No grip leads to no forward motion leads to fall-down-go-boom.

And everyone fell down and went boom.

The first man to hit the Koppenberg was Iván García Cortina, who was pictured off his bike halfway up the climb. At first, the commentators thought he’d crashed. Then, having seen him fiddle with his wheel, they thought he’d suffered a mechanical. García Cortina later explained that he realized quite quickly that pedaling up the climb was going to be useless, so he stopped to let air out of his tires in a vain attempt to create more traction.

Behind, Mathieu van der Poel zoomed up the hill, followed by Matteo Jorgenson, and eventually by a struggling Mads Pedersen, who’d attempted to animate the race earlier and was by this point running on fumes. Those three were able to pedal up the Koppenberg. Everyone else, the entire chasing peloton of dozens of riders, accordioned into each other as, in sequence, they hit the bottom of the hill, stopped moving forward, and dismounted to ascend the hill on foot.

Sixth-place finisher Magnus Sheffield compared it to a cyclocross race. García Cortina said it was “totally impossible to have grip on that climb.” Fred Wright said it was “humbling.”

I’ve never felt so powerful. You see, I did this. Not the rain, not the mud, me. Check my social media (or FanGraphs Dot Com) and you’ll see that I was in Philadelphia covering baseball games on Friday and Monday. But I had just enough time in between to fly to Belgium and grease the Koppenburg.

And by “grease” I don’t mean to limit the scope of the conversation. I smeared all kinds of substances over those stones. Knowing that the terrain would be muddy and the riders cautious, I sprinkled cat litter over the lower pitches of the climb, you know, to give them hope.

That’s where you really want to hit the accelerator on a berg like this. Sure, the hardest, steepest sections will separate the sheep form the goats.¹ But if you hit the climb at the front, you can keep your speed up and let your inertia carry you up the lower part of the hill. Everyone behind is at the mercy of the slowest person on the road ahead of them.

That’s why van der Poel and Jorgenson were able to stay upright, while everyone else started sliding all over the place as their wheels fought for purchase over this Eddie Harris’s torso of a hill. A little vegetable oil here, a little WD-40 there. Some of the cobbles I removed the mud, mixed it with that graphite powder Cub Scouts use to lubricate the wheels of their Pinewood Derby cars, and reapplied with a paint roller.

About one cobblestone in 50 I lathered with pine tar just to fuck with anyone who’d been counting on continuing to slip-slide all the way up over the crest of the climb. If you want to have some fun in your backyard, mix distilled water, glycerine and dish soap in a kiddie pool. Dip a hula hoop in and all of a sudden you’ve got the world’s largest bubble wand.

Or you can go to Flanders, dump the soap-and-glycerine mixture all over the Koppenberg, and set up shop with a camping chair and a six-pack of Leffe blonde.

It brought me no pleasure to do this. It basically handed the race to van der Poel with 40 kilometers to go, because everyone capable of chasing him down (which might not have been that many riders, now that I think about it) was either on the ground or hike-a-biking it. Jorgenson was the only one who had a prayer of making the junction, and when that gap started going out on the descent, it was all over.

I will say this, completely sincerely. Cycling has a lot of great visuals; it’s a sport defined by brightly colored kits and scenic mountain passes, and any big race will have plenty of pretty snapshots and soaring helicopter shots. In fact, this year’s Ronde van Vlaanderen featured some pretty thrilling low-altitude drone footage on the descents after the key climbs.

But my favorite shot in the sport is from a low camera angle just after the crest of a climb. The lead rider, forced to summit the climb deliberately after a steep incline, doesn’t appear so much as he or she emerges. It’s portentous. Nothing, nothing, nothing, then a helmet, then shoulders, then handlebars. It’s like watching Shadow come over the hill at the end of Homeward Bound after you thought he’d died in that mud pit.²

Speaking of dying in a mud pit.

The hill had dried out a little by the time the women hit it, so most of the first two groups were able to get up the Koppenberg on two wheels. Not Lotte Kopecky.

I thought Kopecky was going to crush this race like van der Poel did. She’s been so strong and so versatile all season, I just didn’t think anyone else would have the legs.

But she showed up in white bib shorts.

The world champion is obliged to wear the rainbow jersey, but there’s no regulation about the color of their shorts. The default is to wear black, like van der Poel did. Not only because it’s waaaay before Memorial Day³ but because wearing thin, skintight white pants during any form of serious exertion is a huge risk. Whenever the world champion shows up in all white, it’s a buzzworthy moment.

Wearing white shorts at Ronde van Vlaanderen, in the rain and the mud, is downright hubristic. And the cycling gods punished Kopecky, who had a nightmare of a race through the Koppenberg. She eventually recovered to finish fifth, coming in behind Marianne Vos to top the second group. But for most of the race, she didn’t look like SD Worx’s best shot at victory. Even after she caught the first chase group, I kept expecting her to come to the front and pull for either Lorena Wiebes or Demi Vollering, since her own race had clearly gone to shit.

And just in case you thought this was over, the long-range forecast for Sunday in Roubaix calls for rain as well. That would once again mean cobbles so slick they’ll pick you up at a bar, take you home, leave before you wake up in the morning and never call you again.

Choose your shorts carefully.

1. Though given the climbing component to cycling, I think “goats” is the preferred category here, even though the reverse was true in the Bible.

2. It’s okay, you can cry, I always do.

3. Though I guess they don’t have Memorial Day in Belgium, do they?