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If the Ronde felt rather a let-down then the ‘Hell of the North’ really lived up to its name after a particularly brutal 2013 Paris-Roubaix on Sunday.
While Fabian Cancellara entered Roubaix as overwhelming favourite despite two mid-week crashes, the actual race couldn’t have veered further from the script.
Cancellara’s usual path to glory – whether we’re talking the cobbled climbs of Flanders or Roubaix’s debilitating passages of pavé – involves an early attack before a long solo time trial-style race to the finish. That’s how he won both in 2006 and 2010.
In previous sprint showdowns in the Roubaix velodrome, Spartacus has come a cropper – in 2004, where he missed out on a podium finish as Magnus Backstedt took the crown, and in 2008 when beaten into second by his great rival Tom Boonen.
But on Sunday, Cancellara found a new string to his bow. When fortune picked off two of his big rivals in the dramatic Carrefour de l’Arbre cobbled section – Omega Pharma pair Zdenek Stybar and Stijn Vandenberg both colliding with spectators within a matter of minutes – Cancellara still had young buck Sep Vanmarcke to dispose of.
After the Dutchman weathered a big dig by his rival four kilometres from the finish, the pair entered the velodrome almost at a standstill.
It was Vanmarcke who led out the sprint with around 200 metres to go – but Cancellara did not pass his rival until the dying moments.
“It was everyone against me. I don’t know how I did it. It was pure fighting right to the line – to the last millimetre of the race,” an exhausted Cancellara told Eurosport after the race.
As it happens, an hour or so earlier Eurosport commentator David Harman had pretty much written off the favourite’s chances.
With the towering Vandenberg and his Omega Pharma team-mate Nicki Terpstra putting in a huge acceleration on the front of the race with 45km remaining, Cancellara had found himself distanced.
With 34km remaining, Cancellara dropped to the back of the chasing group and had a chat with his RadioShack team car – an act Harman believed was tantamount to Cancellara throwing in the towel.
Having crashed heavily in the Scheldeprijs semi-classic race on Wednesday and then again in training on Friday, Cancellara had suffered a hellish week between the Ronde and Roubaix.
Entering the business end of the race, Cancellara was devoid of team-mates, isolated, battered and outnumbered (Omega Pharma still had four riders playing an active role at this point).
Any normal rider would have keeled over and conceded defeat. But Spartacus is anything but normal.
He regrouped with the chasing group and the 35 second gap slowly came down until the leading groups merged with 30km remaining. But almost just as he regained touch with the leaders, Cancellara found himself chasing once again after the two Vans – Vanmarcke and Vandenberg – motored clear.
The leading duo had a 40-second lead with 24km remaining. Cancellara upped the tempo with the pursuers, breaking everyone but former cyclo-cross world champion Stybar. The four came together with 20km remaining just ahead of the Carrefour de l’Arbre cobbled section that was to prove to pivotal in the race.
First Vandenberg – riding perilously close to the spectators on the muddy verge of the road – collided with a fan, sending his rangy two-metre frame over the handlebars before landing spread-eagled and in a grimace on the ground.
Then, just half a kilometre later, Omega’s luck went from bad to worse when Stybar hit a fan with a camera, veered wildly across to the other side of the road and almost collided with a motorbike.
The Czech showed remarkable bike handling to avoid hitting the deck but the damage was done – Stybar had to stop to fiddle with his rear wheel and his race was technically over.
In a cruel twist of fate, Stybar was passed once more by Cancellara later in the day: just as the 27-year-old crossed the line ahead of his final lap in the velodrome, Cancellara had powered clear of Vanmarcke to take the second Ronde-Roubaix double of his career.
His arms aloft, the Swiss supremo’s momentum took him past Stybar, who would finish the race in sixth place one lap later.
Such a scene was just one of many that contributed to making the 2013 Paris-Roubaix such a monumental affair. If Milan-San Remo will go down in history for its horrific meteorological conditions, then this Roubaix will be remembered for its succession of game-changing crashes.
The worst of them, bizarrely enough, occurred before the cobbles even became a factor. Looking behind him to locate his FDJ team car, Frenchman Yoann Offredo smashed into a road sign at top speed and was forced out of the race in tears.
Just moments later, Blanco’s Rick Flens was seen in a crumpled heap on the pavement after an apparent collision with a traffic cone.
With 60km remaining, a mini pile-up involving around 10 riders looked particularly grim – and saw one Euskaltel rider landing on top of the stone wall of a flowerbed.
In the famous Arenberg forest cobbled section there was a collision between Yauheni Hutarovich and British rider Geraint Thomas, who has a knack of crashing on key moments of each monument this season: following spills on the Cipressa (Milan-San Remo) and the Kwaremont (Flanders), the Sky rider has now added the Arenberg. What odds for a Thomas crash in the Cauberg in next Sunday’s Amstel Gold?
Another pile up sent riders sprawling across the cobbles and some into a roadside ditch, ending the chances of Boruz Bozic (Astana), Mirko Selvaggi (Vacansoleil) and a whole host of others.
In terms of dramatics and impact on the race, the Omega double whammy of losing both Vandenberg and Stybar to the over-zealous fans was a hammer blow for the Belgian team.
Already deprived of defending champion Tom Boonen because of last week’s Flanders KO, Omega also saw Sylvain Chavanel’s unfortunate run of puncturing in key moments of Roubaix continue, the Frenchman needing a bike change with 39km remaining, effectively suffocating his chances in similar circumstances to last year.
There was a slight silver lining for Omega Pharma when Terpstra managed to beat Greg Van Avermaet (BMC) and Damien Gaudin (Europcar) for the final podium position – but it will be scant consolation after a near-perfect but ultimately fruitless race by so many of their men.
Talking of Gaudin – the 26-year-old Frenchman put in the kind of performance that such an iconic race as Roubaix can inspire in riders.
With his broad shoulders hunched over the bars and his head beating like a metronome, Gaudin was a relentless attacking force – first catching up with a leading trio of riders before putting in a series of digs with around 30km to ride.
Following team-mate Sebastien Turgot’s puncture, Gaudin became Europcar’s number one man – and he did not disappoint on his way to a fine fifth place.
But the race will be remembered for Cancellara and the final burst of pace he conjured up to beat Vanmarcke.
“I went over my limits like never before to cross the line first today,” Spartacus told the press room after the third Roubaix title of his career.
So shattered was the 32-year-old, as soon as he rode off the velodrome and onto the grass at the finish, he crawled off his bike and fell to the floor – landing heavily on the left-hand side he damaged twice last week. Anything was less painful than staying on the bike.
“I was probably just happy that the race was finished and that the fight was finished,” he said.
“I could just sit on the grass and breathe and come back to planet Earth. This last hour was just pure fighting and I damaged myself like never before.”
As he gingerly raised the cobbled trophy aloft on the podium, it looked as if the podium girl didn’t have to worry so much about having her bottom pinched as having her skull crushed by a falling stone.
Cancellara is now one Roubaix win behind trying Boonen and Roger De Vlaeminck’s record of four wins in the race. Asked whether or not he was a better rider over the cobbles than the absent Boonen, Cancellara gave a classy and frank reply.
“Personally, I don’t like to say he’s stronger or I’m stronger. I just think that we’re the greatest riders of the last few years in these races.”
There’s no doubting that Cancellara is one of the greatest – and his win on Sunday showed that sprinting Spartacus knows how to do it a different way than his signature dish, riding away from his rivals.
Images via Team Sky, Team BMC and Team Radioshack-Leopard-Trek
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