The cycling world looked to northern France at the weekend, where Paris-Roubaix was held for the 121st time in the men's race on Sunday. Before that, it was the women's turn on Saturday with the fourth edition of Paris-Roubaix Femmes.
Paris-Roubaix Femmes: Lotte Kopecky wins the sprint
The defending champion was Alison Jackson (EF Education-Cannondale). However, the Canadian only started the race as an outsider and suffered her first setback early on when she had to repair a defect on her racing bike. Others made the music: First and foremost Lotte Kopecky (Team SD Worx - Protime). The world champion attacked several times, but the competition was always on her back.
The result was a sprint by a small group on the Roubaix race track. Kopecky had the fastest legs and beat Elisa Balsamo (Lidl-Trek), Pfeiffer Georgi (Team dsm-firmenich PostNL), Marianne Vos (Visma | Lease a Bike) and Amber Kraak (FDJ-Suez) to take the first victory for her team at Paris-Roubaix Femmes.
Men's Paris-Roubaix: Solo ride by Mathieu van der Poel - chicane before Arenberg
This meant that the women's race was much more exciting in terms of deciding the winner. In the men's race, it was Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) who put his rivals in the wind around 60 kilometres before the finish and celebrated a spectacular solo victory.
Unlike the women, van der Poel also had to ride through the notorious Arenberg forest with the rest of the men's peloton. For safety reasons, a chicane was set up before the pavé sector to slow down the peloton and prevent high-speed crashes in the Arenberg forest. This plan largely worked.
Mass crash in the early stages of Paris-Roubaix
On the other hand, there was a serious crash in the early stages of the race, in which Nils Politt (UAE Team Emirates) was also held up. The German rode an extremely strong race, which he finished in fourth place. John Degenkolb (Team dsm-firmenich PostNL) rode similarly well. The 35-year-old finished eleventh at the end of Paris-Roubaix.
Like most of the other riders, Degenkolb's exhaustion was written all over his face, but at the same time this provided exciting motifs for the photographers, as we show in our picture gallery.
