Le Papillon et La Pierre
Paris-Roubaix is over. Good luck lifting the trophy.
There were two great images from the finish of Paris-Roubaix Femmes. One came right on the line, as Pauline Ferrand-Prévot posted up for her celebration. As the former world-everything-on-two-wheels champ stretched out her arms, a butterfly wobbled into the background of the camera shot.1
An image like this works on four levels I can think of: First, the Muhammad Ali reference that was too obvious for even a single broadcaster to pass up. Ferrand-Prévot rides for a team in yellow and black jerseys with a honeycomb motif. The Bees, in other words, though I can count on two hands the number of times I’d heard Visma-Lease a Bike referred to as such before the finish line at the Roubaix velodrome. Anyway, float like…you get the idea.
Hack shit. We can do better.
Second: The butterfly is delicate and light, qualities it shares with cyclists as they take on the horrifying bumpiness of the Hell of the North. It’s the juxtaposition of the colorful insect floating on lighter-than-paper wings, against the backdrop of dust and mud and stone. Third: Ferrand-Prévot is back on the road full-time for the first time since 2018. She has evolved, like the caterpillar, through the pupal phase, into the triumphant being you saw on Saturday morning.
Fourth: Oh, cool, it’s a butterfly! Everyone loves it when animals show up unexpectedly on TV. We don’t need to overthink things.
Some things could stand to be thought out more. For instance: Paris-Roubaix is the most prestigious and demanding one-day event in cycling. The winner will arrive at the finish line with the tank completely empty. Moreover, this is one of the few sports in the world where upper-body strength is actually a disadvantage. Nobody wants to drag their beach muscles up Mont Ventoux, so pro cyclists all have teeny little noodle arms.
OK, Paris-Roubaix race organizers. Knowing all that, what do you think is an appropriate trophy to give to the exhausted athlete who hasn’t touched a dumbbell since high school? Any suggestions?
What’s that? Did someone say, “Big-ass rock?”
Here’s Alison Jackson, giving it her best effort after winning in 2023. Ferrand-Prévot couldn’t get rid of her trophy fast enough.
I get why this is a good trophy; getting a cobblestone off the very road for podiuming Paris-Roubaix is the closest a real pro athlete can get to winning a piece of the Aggro Crag. I just feel like maybe they should have a cardboard replica or something to lift on the podium, and they can get the actual rock shipped.
Speaking of Alison Jackson, she had a hell of a ride to fifth place. Race favorite Lotte Kopecky and SD Worx backup plan Lorena Wiebes attacked a little too early and got isolated, and then the race came back together. It took an opportunistic attack from Ferrand-Prévot 19 kilometers from the end to put it to bed. Wiebes won the velodrome sprint in the third group on the road to fill out the podium and Kopecky ended up a full minute behind that.
It’s not exactly surprising that Visma-Lease a Bike got two riders in the top five; for EF to do so was a coup. Letizia Borghesi attacked out of group two after Ferrand-Prévot had made her winning move2 and Jackson held onto the Wiebes-Marianne Vos group even as big locomotive-like riders like Elisa Chabbey and Chloe Dygert got dropped.3
Ferrand-Prévot was apparently recovering from illness and wasn’t 100 percent to even start the race. Once at the line, she was supposed to be riding for Marianne Vos. To win the race under those conditions is impressive enough. To do so nine weeks into a comeback after a six-year layoff was damn near miraculous. If she can win this race, she can win anything, up to and including the Tour de France Femmes.
And yet, maybe we should’ve seen this coming. Ferrand-Prévot’s comeback has been overshadowed by Anna van der Breggen’s. It was van der Breggen, after all, who was completely unbeatable, and more recently.
Except Ferrand-Prévot has been riding this whole time. She won an Olympic gold medal in mountain bike last year, as well as the cross-country mountain bike World Cup. She won the world cross-country championship in four of the five years before that. She’s been operating at the highest level this whole time, and if she can do it off-road, she can apparently do it on the cobbles too.
Tadej Pogačar came closer than I thought he would to winning Paris-Roubaix. It ended up being a 78-second win for two-time defending champion Mathieu van der Poel, who went solo almost 40 kilometers out.
But van der Poel never dropped Pogačar. Pogačar crashed and got slowed down by repairs and a bike change. By the time van der Poel suffered his own mechanical within the final 10 kilometers, he was so far up the road Pogačar barely ate into his lead.
On Sunday, three riders were clearly head and shoulders above the rest: van der Poel, Pogačar and Mads Pedersen.4 Pedersen got taken out by a badly-timed flat tire. In road racing, particularly classics racing, mechanical failures and crashes are part of the game. They strike without warning and lay low the righteous and the wicked alike.
But avoiding them is a skill. Pedersen’s flat tire looked pretty stochastic. Could he have taken a different path over that particular stretch of road, chosen different tires, different air pressures, and won the race? Maybe. But it’s unfair to expect him to avoid all mishaps in a race that holds its place atop the classics ladder because the course is so horrendously demanding.
Not so Pogačar’s crash.
He was trying to ride van der Poel off his wheel, overcooked a corner, and went straight into the catch fencing. Everyone who’s ever ridden a bicycle has done this at some moment or other; watching Pogačar make such a basic error was like watching a baseball player boot a routine grounder. It happens, even to all-time greats. But there’s nothing random about it.
And unlike Tom Pidcock in Strade Bianche, van der Poel did not commit the sin of empathy. He rode off and won, which is what you have to do in this situation.
So now we’re at a weird spot with Pogačar. He’s ridden four major classics races in the past six weeks, and he’s been, at worst, on part with van der Poel and head and shoulders above everyone else. But he’s been beaten heads-up twice. On two occasions he’s made a major mistake that should’ve cost him the race, even though he got away with it once. It’s like he’s stronger than ever,5 but also more beatable than he’s been in years.
And I guess we’ll find out what’s what in the coming week: Ardennes Week. Or, with Brabantse Pijl kicking off in the morning, as you read this, Extended Ardennes Week. Four one-day races over 10 days in Belgium and the Netherlands, on an escalating scale from flat to hilly: Brabantse Pijl, Amstel Gold, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the last monument before grand tour season.
What I expect in the next week is for Pogačar to show that while he is one of the top cobbled classics riders in the world and one of the best climbers in the world, he is above all the best puncheur in the world.
What makes this interesting is the return of Remco Evenepoel, who’ll pin on a race number at Brabantse Pijl for the first time since an offseason training crash that forced him to rebuild himself from zero as he gave serious thought to giving up racing for good.
I don’t know if peak Remco6 can beat Pogačar on both riders’ most favored parcours. I do know that he’s the only rider other than Pogačar to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège in the past four years. He’s in the conversation—that’s more than most riders can say.
I’m sorry I don’t have a still handy; ASO updated their photo portal since my last newsletter, and I didn’t sign up for the new one until after everyone was already asleep in France. Click the link anyway; you need to see the wings flapping to get the full effect.
I didn’t see it because the cameras were tracking the leader; the first I knew about it was when Borghesi got onto the track about five seconds before the rest of the chasers, by which point she had the win wrapped up.
I thought Dygert had a good ride to eighth; she ended up chasing a bit more than she probably would’ve liked when Kopecky was trying to blow up the race with about 40 kilometers left.
Stray thought: Wout van Aert looked rough on Sunday. Is Wout cooked?
I came away from this absolutely convinced that Pogačar could win Paris-Roubaix in the future if he wanted to
If we’re even going to see that this early in his comeback
+1 for the AggroCrag reference.
I’ve had the same impression this spring - PFP and Van der Breggen are champions, through and through. Time away ain’t shit, they’re winners.