Almost one hour after Mathieu van der Poel won Paris-Roubaix yet again, Joey Pidcock entered the velodrome. He was the last man in, 21 minutes behind the previous rider, and already well out of the time cut, but the Brit was going to cross the line come what may. “People want to finish this more than most races,” the 23-year-old said. “I don’t think it was that hard mentally to finish – I just committed because I was going to do it. So many people don’t get the opportunity to ride here and to ride something like this. I might not get to ride it again so of course I have to finish. It didn’t matter how long it took – although I actually thought it would be dark before I got here.”
The brother and Q36.5 teammate of Tom, the younger Pidcock found himself alone in the Hell of the North for several hours, his day becoming complicated before the cobbles even began. “I almost got caught in three crashes in a row,” he said. “When Wout van Aert crashed, I think he touched me when he came down, and afterwards I said I wasn’t risking my life for this.”
So he didn’t – he embarked on a solo Roubaix, 30 sectors mostly alone, riding across cobblestones strewn with litter, bloodied by the cuts of countless riders, and alongside departing fans. “The Arenberg was still pretty cool, proper walls of noise,” he reflected. “There were still people [on other sectors] but everybody was already going home.”
“We’ve heard from him quite a bit and I’ve just spoken to him now,” his team manager Doug Ryder said, 10 minutes before he finally appeared in the velodrome. “He’s just saying that he wants to get through it but it’s hectic. He’s got the cobbled sectors all full of people walking so he’s going slower and slower because it’s just full of people. He just wants to experience every sector he’s so happy to be still riding.
Pidcock wasn’t even set to race Roubaix until a few days ago; he’s only started seven races all season, his first in the professional ranks. “He rode last year in the U23 race and he did really well and he enjoyed the race,” Ryder said. Pidcock finished 59th a year ago in the espoirs race, but was in the front group until a badly-timed mechanical. “He had a concussion in his last race [Trofeo Laigueglia in early March] so he wanted to come back and we said, ‘are you up for it?’” Ryder continued. “He was like ‘yeah, absolutely, I’d love to do it’…