For a short while, Laurence Pithie dared to dream. “It was all going perfectly,” he recalls. Too perfectly.
Paris-Roubaix is a race that can flip in an instant, and the New Zealander could barely believe the punishment he would go on to receive from the fates of the Hell of the North.
“I don’t really know what to say, to be honest,” he told Cyclingnews outside the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team bus in Roubaix, showered but still shell-shocked.
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Until it wasn’t. A puncture with 78km to go led to a scrappy bike change, and while he was able to work his way back with teammate Jordi Meeus and the eventual winner Wout Van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike), worse was yet to come.
“That’s where it all started going downhill,” he said. “Contact lens fell out, crashed on Mons-en-Pevele, crashed again… it was a bit of a mess.”
The contact lens was lost to the pavé with just over 50km to go on sector 12, and it led to his race being lost on the next sector, Mons-en-Pevele, where he crashed hard through a left-hander on the back of the group that was by this point chasing the tearaway Van Aert and Pogačar.
“Sometimes with the wind, when you look back, it just flies out,” Pithie said of the contact lens issue. “It’s only happened once before, but I mean, it’s just annoying because one side of the vision is clear and the other side is blurry.
“So, yeah, obviously I wasn’t taking the best lines. It would have played a part [in the crash].”
Pithie fell back into the next group on the road, and it wasn’t a bad one to be in, as three-time winner Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech), battling back from his own series of problems, went hell-for-leather and came close to stitching the race back together.
“I still felt pretty good at that point. I was just on the back of that group, hoping Van der Poel would do the work to bring us back. I still had hope to be in the mix, but yeah, it was soon game…
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