Former Soudal-QuickStep boss and cobbled Classics star director Patrick Lefevere has predicted that neither Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) nor defending champion Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech) will be able to drop the other en route to Roubaix velodrome in the Hell of the North on Sunday.
With six Paris-Roubaix wins and six podiums in his director’s palmares in the QuickStep squad between 2005 and 2019, not to mention overseeing multiple victories in the same race in the 1990s with predecessor GB-MG and its variants, as a manager, Lefevere had the biggest strike rate of victories in the toughest Classic of them all.
Writing his regular weekly column in Nieuwsblad, Lefevere said that he believed neither Pogačar nor Van der Poel would succeed in making it to Roubaix’s Vélodrome André Pétrieux alone. Instead, he said, “They will take to the track together.”
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“I’ll lean forward in my seat then, because I want to see that sprint. Two riders with no track experience against each other. The Vélodrome André Pétrieux isn’t the Kuipke” – Ghent’s notoriously technically challenging velodrome – “but there is still a bit of technique and, above all, a lot of tactics involved,” he wrote.
“That evening, I drove him and teammate Mario Cipollini to the airport, a ride I will never forget. Ballerini, crying in the back seat: ‘I am a ciclista di merda.’ [A shit cyclist] Cipollini, countering from the passenger seat: ‘Nooo Franco, sei il più grande di tutti. You are the greatest of them all.’ Drama and overacting as only…
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