There were tears. There were mouths aghast with shock. There were riders on the podium who didn’t really know what to do with themselves. The favourites rolled into the finish line with looks of disappointed bemusement. This was not how many expected the race to go.
The post race interviews reflected it too. “During the race they said to me, you can make it, you can ride for the win in this breakaway. You are strong, keep going. If this morning at the start I thought about the race I can’t imagine that I came second,” Katia Ragusa of Liv Racing TeqFind said after the finish.
“I’m really happy, it’s weird because I’m only third but for me, third is like a victory, I’m really happy and a bit emotional. It’s a big dream of mine, I was hoping for a top-20 and now I’m third, it’s so good,” 23-year-old Marthe Truyen (Fenix-Deceuninck) explained with tears in her eyes.
None of the riders in the top-six, including the winner, have finished inside the top-10 in Paris-Roubaix Femmes before. Marion Borras of small French continental team St Michel-Mavic-Auber93, who sprinted to fifth place overall, has only raced once so far this season and didn’t compete outside of France in 2022.
There is no denying that these riders deserved their results and worked hard for them, but how did it happen that all of the pre-race favourites missed a shot at Paris-Roubaix victory? When all talk ahead of the race was about teams like Trek-Segafredo and Team SD Worx, how did neither manage to finish with a rider inside the top-five?
It started with a breakaway that, although missed by the TV cameras (come on ASO, we need line-to-line coverage of this race), was established after 30km of racing. The number of riders in front swelled to an impressive 18-rider strong group, and the time gap to the peloton simply got bigger and bigger. From two, to three, to four, to five, to a maximum of six minutes, these 18 opportunistic riders found themselves with a huge gap to the peloton after the first section of cobbles.
Behind, riders looked at each other hesitantly, with no one fully committing to the chase. The thing was that, apart from Movistar and Jumbo-Visma, every big team was represented by a rider in the breakaway. This meant that the chase from behind had very little impetus until late on in the race.
The key turning point came with 50km to go when Team SD Worx’s Lotte Kopecky launched a trademark attack on the Auchy-les-Orchies à Bersée…