Paris-Roubaix: How a brutal race still thwarts Tadej Pogagcar

A dedicated group of volunteers spend the year leading up to the race maintaining the cobbles to try to keep the course safe, while ensuring the unique profile remains.

Preparation of the route has included the use of goats to chew away the vegetation which makes its way through the stones – especially on the fearsome sector through the Forest of Arenberg, a foreboding sprint over pave which is always treacherous, often slippery, and forever fraught.

The weather also never helps: if it rains it is a near-impossible quagmire, with countless abandonments; if it is dry, the dust will get you, kicked up by competitors and the cavalcade of team cars and motorbike outriders – it’s a challenge to breathe, let alone see.

On her day of glory, Deignan surprised the rest of the peloton and broke away in torrential conditions which saw her, at one point, riding the bike sideways as the rear wheel slid out on a corner.

“Everybody punctures and everybody crashes, it’s whoever has good legs and survives it really,” she says. “It’s unlike any other race.”

Paris-Roubaix falls into the same road cycling World Tour as that of the Tour de France, or Giro d’Italia. And so the same peloton will be hurtling along the cobbles a couple of months before gliding through the sunflowers of a French summer.

But success in those other races does not always translate to joy on the pave.

Four-time Tour winner Chris Froome: hated it, rode it once and didn’t finish. Three-time Tour champion Greg Lemond: managed fourth. Two-time Tour winner Jonas Vingegaard: more likely to do the Paris-Dakar rally.

There were those who straddled both, including Bernard Hinault and the often-acclaimed greatest Eddy Merckx, each with five Tours de France among their glittering palmares, but even they weren’t the best when it came to Hell.

Hell belongs to the powerhouses; the burly classics riders who cannot go over mountains day after day, but who can go for longer and harder across one epic day of racing.

“Every time I tried [to attack], my legs were not the greatest any more and [Van Aert was always] riding on my wheel,” Pogacar, who we have grown used to winning races by several minutes, said after Sunday’s edition.

For Van Aert – known to many as the ‘nicest man in cycling’ and who was roared into the velodrome – it was simply “a dream come true” that was “years in the making”.

And nothing tells you you’re part of something so difficult and profound more, than when the champion dedicates his win to a team-mate who lost his life on the cobbles eight years ago. Belgian Michael Goolearts died after a cardiac arrest during the 2018 race.