Anthony Tan
The Belgian said he was “so many times unlucky” in arguably the hardest race on the calendar but “it also brought me experience” when it mattered.
The 123rd edition of Paris-Roubaix was, for the most part, billed as a battle between two giants of cycling, and, for the winner, the attainment of one of two firsts.
For Mathieu van der Poel, it was the opportunity to be the first man to win four straight editions of The Hell of the North.
If reigning world champion Tadej Pogačar was to prevail he would be the first to win five consecutive Monuments – and if he was to also win Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia, something he’d done the previous three years, he would be the first to claim all five Monuments in a single season.
Not even the supposed greatest, Eddy Merckx, had done that. The Sunday before last, after his third Ronde van Vlaanderen victory, Pogačar was already the first to win four consecutive Monuments.
But road cycling is never a battle between two riders. Especially Paris-Roubaix.
“I think everybody coming to the line has his own story and that’s why it’s so beautiful,” Wout van Aert, the Team Visma | Lease a Bike leader and eventual winner, said after 258.3 bone-shuddering kilometres last Sunday.
“Yeah, it can be hard, but on a day like this it is the best race there is.”
On a beautifully sunny morning in Compiègne, where Paris-Roubaix had begun 48 times before, 175 riders had a number pinned to their jersey backpockets.
175 riders intended to race.
“The race didn’t treat me well so far. But we still believe in it and we still dream about winning,” Mads Pedersen of Lidl-Trek, third place the last two editions, said at the start.
Pogačar, the undisputed leader of UAE Team Emirates-XRG for the Spring Classics and second to MVDP in his debut last year, said holding aloft his first cobblestone was also in his dreams. “But,” he added, “you never know in this race.”
“Tadej and Mathieu are adding another layer to these Classics,” said van Aert before the peloton rolled out of Compiègne at exactly 9am Central European Time.
“Like we saw in Flanders, it was very difficult to make a plan around that. I think in Roubaix, it should be possible to play a bit more with my team-mates. That’s definitely our goal.”
Normally, an early breakaway forms well before the first cobblestone sector, keen to get a head start rather than believing the first move is the winning one.
Last Sunday was different. Thanks to a roaring tailwind, the riders were simply going too fast for a break to stick, and so, after 95.8 kilometres, the peloton arrived in Troisvilles en masse.
Something else was different.
In contrast to the Sunday before at the Tour of Flanders, where teams were content – or, perhaps more accurately, resigned – to let UAE Team Emirates-XRG set the pace and thus the tone of the race, at this point, there were at least four other teams present in numbers at the front: Team Visma | Lease a Bike (for van Aert), Alpecin-Premier Tech (van der Poel), INEOS Grenadiers (Filippo Ganna), and Jayco Alula (Dries De Bondt).
At this point, with 30 secteurs pavés to be traversed and more than 160 kilometres still to race, other than other Jonathan Milan, I expected Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) to have more than one domestique alongside him; was this in part a consequence of spending 10M Euro to buy Juan Ayuso out of his contract with UAE Team Emirates-XRG then another €3M to give him a salary for 2026, I wondered?
Unsurprisingly, there was a scrap for prime position, though surprisingly, the riders got through the first three of 30 secteurs pavés mostly unscathed, including all pre-race favourites.
130km to go. Pogačar still had the company of four team-mates: Juan Sebastián Molano, António Morgado, Nils Politt and Florian Vermeersch.
Their strategy appeared the same as the Sunday before last: ride fast, ride hard, then let The Pog take over; ride faster, ride harder.
Death by a thousand cuts.
Baby-face Vermeersch, runner-up at the 2021 Paris-Roubaix (behind Sonny Colbrelli who won a three-man sprint against the Belgian and van der Poel), was recrcuited at the end of 2024 in an effort to bolster UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s squad for the Classics.
Even with the work he did for Pogačar last year, he still managed to finish fifth.
Yet, with 120km remaining, when Tadej flatted midway through Secteur 22, requiring the four-time Tour de France champion to hop aboard a Shimano neutral service bike, Vermeersch did not wait for him.
After five kilometres on the garishly blue bike (which, incidentally, fitted him rather well), his UAE Team Emirates-XRG car squeezed through the chaos and before the first five-star sector, the infamous Forest of Arenberg, Secteur 19, Pogačar got back to the front group.
Van der Poel’s puncture in the Trouée d’Arenberg (Trench of Arenberg) then changed everything.
The defending champion attempted to change bikes with team-mate Jasper Philipsen but for some reason he couldn’t click into the pedals… Why does a team-mate who has finished Roubaix second twice before (2023, ‘24) and was a key part of MVDP’s hat-trick of wins have an incompatible pedal/cleat system?
A front group of six emerged. 92.3km remaining. MVDP was two minutes in arrears but hadn’t given up.
In Christophe Laporte, only van Aert had a team-mate in front.
With 71.4km remaining Pogačar punctured again. A third bike change… fourth if you included his time on the Shimano neutral service bike.
Roughly 10 clicks later in Orchies, Secteur 13, van Aert also flatted.
Like Vermeersch did for The Pog, Laporte does not wait, either. It was now a front group of five; mano-a-mano.
60km from the André-Pétrieux Vélodrome in Roubaix, Van der Poel had reduced what was a 2 minute deficit to 45 seconds. He still believed.
Less than 10 minutes later, however, van Aert, who made a quick return and sensing tired legs, attacked.
“I had planned to attack, and when I made my move only Pogačar could follow. It was a crazy race with so much happening,” he later said, “but I felt incredibly strong.”
Prior to last Sunday, WVA had raced Paris-Roubaix six times before. His last four results: seventh (2021), second (2022), third (2023), and fourth (2025).
“I was so many times unlucky in this race but it brought me also experience. So even today when when luck was not on my side, I kept believing it.”
Entering Mons-en-Pévèle, the second-last five-star sector, Secteur 11, the camera’s sideview shot of the front duo powering over the pavé showed just how different their bodies were, most notably their torsos – even if Pogačar had intentionally put on a few extra kilos to cope with the demands of the cobbled Classics.
We so often talk about the Slovenian’s versatility, but five years ago, in just one edition of the Tour de France, van Aert won a high mountain stage (that traversed Mont Ventoux, no less), an individual time trial, and, the following day, the unofficial sprinters’ world championship on the Champs-Élysées.
Try as hard he did, Pogačar was unable to shake WVA on the Carrefour de l’Arbre, the final five-star secteur of pavé.
The last time Pogačar won a two-up sprint?
Just three weeks prior at Milan-San Remo against Tom Pidcock, the Briton supposedly quicker in a reduced group.
Van Aert? Eleven months ago. Stage 9 of the 2025 Giro d’Italia, where he bested Isaac del Toro in Siena’s Piazza del Campo after 181km.
However that stage was significant because it contained five sections of sterrati, the white gravel roads made famous in the March semi-classic that precedes M-SR, Strade Bianche; a race Pogačar has won on four occasions including the last three.
“In my dreams and in my preparation, I did the sprint so many times already, so I knew exactly what to do,” said van Aert of the final sprint against Pogačar, from which he came from behind and won easily.
“Honestly, there is no more beautiful way than going to the line with the world champion. He’s a true champion and he gave me such a hard time (in the race). Beating him in in the sprint, mano-a-mano, is something really special for me.”
The 2026 Paris-Roubaix winner dedicated his win to Michael Goolaerts, his Vérandas Willems-Crelan team-mate from 2018, who died of a heart attack while racing the very event he won Sunday, as well the family of his fallen comrade.
“This one is for Michael Goolaerts, my former team-mate. Since his passing, I think about him every time Paris-Roubaix comes around. Losing Michael caused so much pain for everyone, and to be able to win here for him means so much.”
“Ever since (his death) it has been my goal to come here and point my finger to the sky.”
Anthony Tan
Anthony Tan - One of Bicycling Australia’s longest-serving columnists, ‘Tan Man’ has a deep passion for the sport and is a natural communicator.
