Paris-Roubaix 2013

The road

At the start

Can anyone stop Cancellara?

Compiègne, and a start line that already feels like a formality. Fabian Cancellara has taken E3 Harelbeke and the Tour of Flanders inside a fortnight, and Tom Boonen — the one man with a record here to match his — is at home injured. There is no Hushovd in form to shepherd this time and no obvious second favourite. Twenty-seven sectors of pavé, and everybody else waiting to see whether luck can do what legs cannot.

How it was won

1. 1234 km to go

   A first hour at fifty

   Thirteen riders get a gap seventeen kilometres out of Compiègne and the peloton refuses to give it to them. The move comes back, and the next, and the next, and the first hour of the Hell of the North goes by at just under fifty kilometres an hour.

2. 2123 km to go

   Four get away in sector 22

   The pavé has already done damage — a crash on the second sector caught Devolder and Stannard — when four riders finally slip clear at Verchain-Maugré: Stuart O'Grady, Gert Steegmans, Mathew Hayman and Clément Koretzky. André Greipel throws himself at the gap and comes up short, and at the back Yoann Offredo rides into a traffic island he never sees.

3. 395 km to go

   Arenberg, and nobody falls

   Steegmans leads the four into the forest with a minute and a half. Behind, Taylor Phinney, John Degenkolb and Stijn Vandenbergh drive the peloton through the trench so hard that the gap is forty seconds by the far end — and for once, in the place that eats races, almost nobody hits the ground.

4. 449 km to go

   Mons-en-Pévèle cuts it to thirteen

   Cancellara moves to the front on sector 11 and the pace never drops again. The escape is caught at the foot of Mons-en-Pévèle, and three kilometres of the worst cobbles in France leave thirteen riders: Cancellara, Terpstra, Štybar, Vandenbergh, Turgot, Gaudin, Vanmarcke, Boom, Langeveld, Van Avermaet, Eisel, Flecha and Paolini. Vansummeren punctures out of it; Turgot follows him a little later.

5. 524 km to go

   The cobbles where he crashed in March

   Vandenbergh and Vanmarcke do not wait for Cancellara; they steal thirty seconds while the rest look at each other. He and Terpstra claw onto the chase group at sector 6, and then, on its second half — the stretch at Bourghelles where he went down on his reconnaissance ride — Fabian Cancellara puts everything he has into the pedals. Only Zdeněk Štybar can hold it. Out on the tarmac beyond the pavé he goes into time-trial position and hunts the two Belgians down as if the race were a prologue.

6. 617 km to go

   Two men lost to the crowd

   Four leaders onto the Carrefour de l'Arbre. Vandenbergh is already slipping when he clips a spectator and goes down in the first metres of the sector, leaving Štybar to mark two men on his own. The cyclo-cross rider looks the most comfortable of anyone on the stones — until he too rides into a fan, and there is no way back from that.

7. 7At the line

   Cancellara and Vanmarcke in the velodrome

   Two riders onto the concrete, and the Hell of the North comes down to a two-up sprint. Cancellara takes it from Vanmarcke — a third Paris-Roubaix, seven days after the Ronde, and a spring that belongs to one man.

The result