Why can’t we have puncture-resistant bike tires?

Question: I haven’t paid much attention to bicycle races before, but at a friend’s suggestion, I recently watched the Paris-Roubaix men’s race, which included several sectors with cobblestone surfaces.I found it surprisingly exciting. But the race favorite, Mathieu van der Poel, who the commentators said had won the race the three previous years, was sunk by a flat tire on one of the cobbled stretches. Why can’t we have bike tires that are more puncture resistant? —Arnie F.

RBR’S STAN PURDUM REPLIES: Actually, van der Poel’s puncture wasn’t merely in “one of the cobbled stretches”; it was in the notorious Arenberg Trench, considered the most brutal sector of the Paris-Roubaix race due to a combination of uneven, ancient cobbles with irregular gaps between them, a high-speed, slightly downhill approach, and a treacherous, narrow, forest-bound environment that generally stays damp even when the rest of the race is dry. The dampness results in cobbles that are often muddy and/or mossy, which makes the stone surfaces incredibly slick throughout its approximately 1.5-mile length. This combination of factors causes massive, jarring vibration that makes handling the bike difficult.

Another factor that had a big impact on this race was that unlike in the other cobbled sectors, this year for the first time, no team personnel on foot were permitted to be present in the trench standing by with spare wheels in their hands. 

It was not altogether obvious from the video, but van der Poel had two tire punctures in that sector. The first was on his front wheel, and almost immediately one of his team members, Jasper Philipsen, surrendered his own bike so that the race favorite would lose as little time as possible. But Philipsen was using a clip-in pedal that didn’t match the clips on van der Poel’s shoes, who after attempting to use the bike, dismounted and gave it back to Philipsen (allowing its riders to use different pedals is a decision their team staff now regrets). At that point, another of his team members, Tibor Del Grosso, who had suffered a broken rear wheel, removed his front wheel and mounted it on van der Poel’s bike, which enabled the latter to resume his race.

But not for long, for before getting to the end of the sector, the tire on Del Grosso’s donated wheel also flatted, and van der Poel had no choice but to wait for his team car to work its way through other riders and supply him with his spare bike, on which he went on complete the race, achieving fourth place, just 15 seconds behind the winner, Wout van Aert, which was a testimony to van der Poel’s strength as a rider, as he had lost some two minutes in Arenberg.

But to get to your question, there are bicycle tires available that are puncture proof or nearly so. See, for example, Tannus Airless tires, armored tires from Tannus and Schwalbe, and foam inserts. These can be a reasonable choice for commuters and others who value the freedom from punctures over performance considerations, but the materials and construction methods needed to make them highly resistant to punctures add enough weight to negatively affect handling, comfort, traction and — critically for racers — speed.

In my early years as a recreational cyclist, I tried a set of armored tires (I no longer remember the brand name). They never flatted, but they made me labor significantly harder on the bike. It didn’t take me long to decide they weren’t for me. I don’t want to be fixing flats on the side of the road, but today’s pneumatic tires are a lot better and more puncture resistant than the ones available when I became hooked on cycling 40 years ago, and I’d rather risk having an occasional puncture than work harder all time when mounted on a bike with tires that won’t flat.

Back to watching bike races: If you do this often enough, you may find a lot of it boring — hours of watching a bunch of riders pedaling rapidly along with only the occasional battle up steep mountains and the last three minutes of the race offering much in the way of excitement (well, sad to say, but the crashes can also break up the monotony, but the riders pay high personal prices — in road rash, broken bones and occasionally in permanent, life-changing consequences — when these happen). 

But if you’d like to start watching professional bike races, you can hardly find a more exciting and entertaining race than Paris-Roubaix, held annually on the first Sunday of April. And unlike the 21-stage Tour de France, it all takes place in one day, and it offers both a men’s and a women’s race, either a day apart or, as this year did, on the same day.

The men’s race has been running every year since 1896, except during the two world wars and the Covid epidemic. The women’s version was started in 2021, and so far, it doesn’t use the Arenberg sector, though it does include several other cobbled sections. The race organizers say they don’t send the women into Arenberg because it’s too close to the city where the women’s route begins. As the logic goes, by the time the men hit Arenberg, they’ve already been run through several lower-grade cobbled sectors, which stretches the peloton and sorts the riders so that the whole mob doesn’t enter the trench at once, while doing speeds of 35 mph or more.

In the USA, the Paris-Roubaix race can be viewed on the Peacock streaming service, and it remains on the site for months for replay later. At least while you’re watching, you won’t be out having a puncture yourself.

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Stan Purdum has ridden several long-distance bike trips, including an across-America ride recounted in his book Roll Around Heaven All Day, and a trek on U.S. 62, from Niagara Falls, New York, to El Paso, Texas, the subject of his book Playing in Traffic. Stan, a freelance writer and editor, lives in Ohio. See more at www.StanPurdum.com.