PARIS-ROUBAIX’21 BREAKDOWN: Mud Bath Madness!

Ten Takeaways from the Roubaix cobbles: Sunday brought us rain, mud and a stunning Paris-Roubaix. It wasn’t much fun for the peloton, but the couch warriors were in their element. Spencer Martin gives us his ‘Ten Takeaways’ from an historic ‘Hell of the North’.– This article is an excerpt from the Beyond the Peloton newsletter. Sign up here for full access. –Paris-Roubaix made us wait for over two years, but, in the end, the historic race over the brutal pave of the austere of Northern France, served up potentially the best one-day race of the season. European champion Sonny Colbrelli announced his arrival as a force in the toughest one-day races by winning a reduced sprint over Florian Vermeersch and Mathieu van der Poel in the famed Roubaix Velodrome.The win for Colbrelli in the Roubaix velodromeThe race, which had a running time of over six hours and was marked by cold, rainy weather, and took riders over the most difficult terrain the sport has to offer and was a true test of mettle. The hard racing and slick conditions on the cobblestones reduced the peloton to an extremely select group by the time they hit the critical Forest of Arenberg with 100km remaining and set in motion what was essentially the longest finale in the history of modern cycling. Colbrelli slipped off the front unchallenged a few kilometers later and was chased down by a vicious attack by Van der Poel shortly after. While it appeared that Gianni Moscon, the...